Heeee's baaaack: Wiens buying banks he once owned

Northwestern Financial Review, Jun 15-Jun 30, 2003 by Regan, Shawn

Joel Wiens' retirement from banking didn't stick.

He sold his Colorado and Nebraska banks to Compass Bancshares Inc. of Birmingham, Ala., in January 2001. It was a stock-merger deal in which Wiens exchanged all the outstanding stock in his company - FirsTier Corporation, with assets of $900 million for 6.8 million shares of Compass stock, valued at $127 million when the deal was announced in September 2000.

But being out of the banking business for two years was enough for Wiens. Earlier this year he bought back all three of the Nebraska banks that he had owned in the distant and recent past, and he acquired a Colorado bank.

Wiens has never been at a loss for something to do. His custom combining company, which would eventually bring in the harvest for farmers from Oklahoma to Montana, was already two years old when he graduated from Drummond High School in Oklahoma. After graduating from Phillips University in Enid, Okla., he worked as a commercial teacher and basketball coach at Alma High School in Nebraska. He next launched an anhydrous ammonia business, and its eventual sale provided the capital to buy a bank or two.

Wiens, then in his mid-30s, bought his first bank in Kimball, Neb., in 1963 from local shareholders with an option to buy the bank in Bushnell, Neb., which he exercised in 1964. In 1981 he sold the Bushnell bank to a long-term employee, Nick Wackel.

In 1990, Wiens bought - abruptly - the bank in Elm Creek, Neb. "I had just bought a motel there [part of what is now a 21-motel chain, Interstate Inn, where Wiens is CEO], and I walked into the bank to open an account," he says. "Three hours later I walked out with an agreement to buy the bank."

In the early 1990s, Wiens bought his first Colorado bank in North Glen and over the years grew it to 17 offices in the greater Denver area.

When Compass acquired them, the Colorado banks had $815 million in assets at the end of 2000, and the two Nebraska banks - in Kimball and Elm Creek - had assets of $85 million.

"We were having a struggle to keep capital, so we decided to take our company public," Wiens says. "We were in the process of doing that when we did our merger with Compass, but we kept [ownership of] the name [FirsTier Bank]."

And two years later, Wiens bought back into banking. In February 2003, Wiens bought the bank in Bushnell, Neb., from the very same employee - Nick Wackel - to whom he had sold it in 1981. With assets of $4.7 million at year-end 2002, it was one of the smallest banks in the state.

"I never worked a day at a bank 'til the day I owned it," Wiens says. "But we had all kinds of problems in it that we didn't realize. Nick Wackel began working for me in 1964. He was very good for me, a good cashier and an excellent banker. When I sold it to him in 1981, it was with an option to buy it back. He's now 81 and wanted to sell, so I bought it back from him."

Wiens changed the name of the Bushnell bank to FirsTier. This spring, that bank served as the vehicle to buy back the two Nebraska banks from Compass, terms undisclosed. They will be branches of the FirsTier Bank in Bushnell. After two years with Compass, the assets of the Kimball and Elm Creek banks had shrunk to about $60 million at the end of 2002.

"We did not want to sell the Nebraska banks [to Compass], and they didn't want to buy them," Wiens says. "All those big banks don't like agriculture. But they [the Colorado and the Nebraska banks] all had to go together because of a Financial Accounting Standards Board rule for 'push-down' accounting purposes. Since we owned them all, they couldn't do it piecemeal."

Wiens recently turned over the chairmanship of FirsTier to Mike Nelson, who has been with him for 25 years. But Wiens remains a director and the company's largest shareholder. He projects record-setting growth for FirsTier's three banks, which, at the end of 2002, had combined assets of about $65 million. Nelson is the immediate-past chairman of the Nebraska Bankers Association.

"It [FirsTier] will be the fastest growing bank in the United States this year," Wiens says. "We'll have it at $100 million before the end of the year, at least. We have lots of customers that went away who are coming back. Plus, we have a capital company [FirsTier Capital] in Cheyenne, Wyo., and we'll feed the banks from loan production offices here and in Colorado."

Speaking of Colorado, Wiens says he just acquired a bank there, but is not at liberty to identify it because the applications have yet to be filed with regulators. "We've got a contract," he says. "We'll be going for a de novo charter in Colorado because we can't put them together just yet."

In the meantime, Wiens will be working through the five-step plan he has for FirsTier. "We're going to highly capitalize the bank," he says. "We're going to do a Subchapter S taxation. My sons and I are going to own 80 percent, and the employees will own 20 percent. We also intend to push on assets, and pay ourselves dividends. My exit strategy is to sell it to the employees as they can afford to buy it."