A: One of the biggest challenges is continuing to find qualified personnel to help grow our bank. We have a little different philosophy than other banks. We build our banks around bankers. Rather than build a branch and finding a banker, we find a banker and then build a branch. It's a little harder to find capable people, so the way we're going to try to provide a line of succession is do it internally through management training programs ... rather than always trying to hire them externally.

Most of my bankers are my age, which is around 50. The generation of bankers that we tend to employ were more generalist bankers. They learned everything from being teller to customer service to doing it all. Today, the bankers that you find tend to be more specialists -- good in one area but not necessarily a world of knowledge in all the other areas. The type of training the bankers today are getting is a lot different than what we got 20 to 30 years ago. [With the internal program] we're training them the way we were trained.

Q: What has taken you by surprise?

A: I probably didn't anticipate how fast time would fly. The last seven years have flown by a lot quicker than I anticipated, and our business plan continually has to be updated a lot quicker than I would have anticipated because the markets have been so dynamic. There are so many things changing externally, that we're being required to update our strategic business plan. ... Typically you might do a 3- or 5-year plan and revisit it in 3 to 5 years. I find we almost have to revisit ours on annual basis.

I think the barriers to entry for banks to enter into market seem to be as few as there's ever been. Access to capital was always one of the biggest barriers to starting a new bank. Today that's not really a barrier. There's less barriers of entry into the market, more regulatory burden and the competition is not really just the bank across the street, it's other financial industries from Wal-Mart to Sears to Merrill Lynch to the brokerage houses. It's just not always the bank across the street you're competing with. It's other people offering financial services that are not under the name of a bank.

Q: What's the most innovative thing your company is doing?

A: We're still employing a local board of advisors in our markets. When we go to a new market, we'll find anywhere from eight to 10 people that work and live in the community and we'll make a board of advisors. We'll try to meet with them quarterly and ask them to find opportunities for us within the community and give us feedback as to how we're doing.... That was very popular 30, 40 years ago, and banks over the years have kind of done away with it. We're one of the few banks that still see a lot of value in that.

Q: Who's your biggest competition?

A: I would say that other community banks are our biggest competition just because they're still going after the same type of customer that we're going after -- the ones that the big banks wouldn't want. That would be the small business owner, the entrepreneurs, the small retail companies, the small local custom homebuilder, those small companies probably with sales of less than $20 million. That's the niche that most community banks go after. They're too small for the big regional banks.

Q: What is the biggest issue facing the state?

A: I would think that's the immigration situation. It's certainly got a lot of advantages to having a lot of workers, but it also is putting other strains on North Carolina, from housing to education to social programs to crime. You get a great supply of work force, but you get all the other social issues that come with it.

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