Finding diamonds in the rough was an initiative I led while assigned to the most underperforming region in the USA. The foundation of the turnaround plan focused on three principles: procedural enhancements; 2) timeliness; and 3) personnel enhancements. I worked with the team to develop and launch a “best practices” contest. During the effort I was able to measure the creative / competitive expertise of the team, find the active participants and determine those individuals who possessed a sense of urgency.After making several co-travel trips with direct reports…skills lacked or excelled from a product knowledge, relationship and consultative perspective were determined.We ended up with two main groups. Those who were not engaged creatively and had lost the will to perform and those who had talent but had failed to flourish, because they had really never been trained, but were eager to learn and grow. Sixty day action plans were created and those who failed to perform resigned. Those who performed ended up being best performing associates that we ever had and one was even promoted to lead a team of his own.

During my tenure we were faced with the potential loss of our largest regional account. A request for proposal that was issues called for a return on equity and high level of risk that was unprecedented. Instead of following traditional methodologies and responding directly to the RFP criteria, I asked for a brainstorming meeting with the SVP of Credit Risk. During the meeting my strategy was to simply state the truth…other companies would do what they wanted...but at an unsustainable level due to the ROE burden. By demonstrating a mathematical analysis we were able to introduce a plan which was not only sustainable, long term, but could be sold internally on a number of quality driven fronts. We developed a “risk share” product that kept our ROE levels in tact and had incentives for customers to drive high quality, saleable product on Wall Street. The RFP was totally usurped and we increased market share 20%, due to the creativity displayed by the pricing team as well as my ability to communicate the solutions based merits of the proposal.Area Sales Manager (1994-1996); Account Executive (1987-1994)