Profiles in Business: George Haynes banks on Brattleboro

Vermont Business Magazine, Jan 01, 2003 by Marcel, Joyce

It's lucky for the two distinguished men in dark, expensive wool suits that the supermarket isn't too crowded this morning. They fly up and down the aisles with their shopping carts, their long tailored overcoats and winter scarves flapping out behind them, shouting to each other as they pass; clearly, they are having a great time.

"This is a soup and tuna fish run," calls out dark-haired, stocky George S Haynes. "I've cleaned out every can at 50 cents a can. It's not the albacore white, it's the chunky light, but it's 50 cents a can."

As Haynes races off to a raimen noodle sale, the store clerk smiles and asks a passerby, "Did you ever expect to get a shopping lesson from a banker?"

Haynes, 59, is president and CEO of the Brattleboro Savings and Loan Association FA. This particular morning, a few weeks before Christmas, Haynes and Larry Smith, community relations director for Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee, are trying as hard as they can to spend $1,000 in an hour; ultimately, they will succeed in spending $998.

This is the first shopping spree of many for the pair, who run Project Feed the Thousands, Brattleboro's Christmas food drive. More important, the morning is a typical example of how Haynes defines his role as small-town banker: to have fun while doing good.

Shortly after he came to BSL in 1992, Haynes told Smith he wanted to do something for the community.

"Then in June of 1993, I got a call from the Drop In Center," Smith said. "I didn't know what it was. I thought it was a place where people who live under the bridges get food. But the center invited me down, and I saw a line all the way out the door. And they were people I knew! They were moms, elderly people, teenagers. 'Oh my God,' I thought. 'People I know are hungry!' I put George in the car and drove him down there. He couldn't believe his eyes. There was nothing on the shelves." Project Feed the Thousands was born.

"For me, that was showing the very human side of George, a guy who is always bubbly and a prankster," Smith said. "For both of us, it's very serious that there's hunger. We're driven to do this project. We run our tails off There's no woman in the state that can out-shop George and I."

The goal was to fill 10 tractor trailer trucks with non-perishable food and feed 4,000 hungry people in Brattleboro and 38 surrounding communities. To accomplish it, Smith and Haynes had to get the entire community involved.

C&S Wholesale Grocers, Inc donated three tractor-trailer loads of food. Boy Scouts and school children collected money Drop-off bins strategically placed in supermarkets collected additional food. In the supermarket, a woman handed Haynes a $100 check, "Because I know what you're doing here."

"Community do-gooder" is not usually part of the job description for a bank president, but you can hardly open the Brattleboro Reformer these days without seeing Hayne's smiling face.

He is everywhere. He is shopping for food for Project Feed the Thousands; he is handing out monthly Community People Awards; he is feeding hamburgers, hot dogs and sodas to 2,000 passersby on Main Street on the bank's annual Community Appreciation Day ("Most banks have a customer appreciation day; we have a community appreciation day"); he is the campaign chairman of this year's United Way Fund Drive; he is promising to tithe 10 percent of the bank's yearly earnings to charity; he is working on the hospital fund drive; he is talking to school groups about what it is like being president of a bank; he built a room in the new BSL building specifically so nonprofit organizations will have a place to meet; he is partnering with the Brattleboro Union High School Career Center, where BSL has a student-staffed branch office.

Haynes is so committed to community relations that he deliberately placed his ground-floor office at the front of BSL's Main Street building. He can sit in his maroon leather chair and watch people reading in the library across the street; he can watch the cars and pedestrians; he can see and greet everyone who comes into the bank.

Haynes may be genuinely gregarious, but he is also, as Smith describes him, very aggressive, very focused and very driven." The first word everyone who talks about him uses is "competitive."

Community involvement, it turns out, is part of a long-term marketing strategy to convince everyone in Windham County that banking at BSL is the right thing to do. In fact, the bank's motto, taken from a Quaker Oats commercial, is "For all the right reasons."

"George has no tolerance for people banking elsewhere," said Mary Boulay, BSL's senior vice president and its senior retail banking officer. "His goal is a 50 percent market share. No excuse is good enough for why you don't bank with Brattleboro Savings & Loan."

Haynes' strategy seems to be working. Since he came to BSL 10 years ago, the bank has almost quadrupled in size.

"When I came, the size of the bank was almost $35 million," Haynes said. "And we also had about $13 million in sold fixed-rate mortgages, which is what most banks do with their fixed rate mortgages - they sell them. Today, we're about $130 million in assets and we have about S85 million-to-$90 million in sold loans."