Main Street's Mr. Fix-It: Rheo Brouillard Knows How to Roll Up His Sleeves, Whether to Rehab a Troubled Bank or Send a Message to Washington
2014; American Bankers Association; Volume: 106; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0194-5947
Autores Tópico(s)Finance, Markets, and Regulation
Resumo[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Don't let Rheo Brouillard fool you. He can seem so laid back that he can make a job look easy. You would never label him a Type A personality. He speaks in a New England drawl, reminiscent of NBC newscaster Edwin Newman. Even on a rough day, when one of his tasks is to let a long-time employee go, he manages to spend the morning under a cloud. I've never yelled at anybody, says Brouillard, 60, president and CEO at Savings Institute Bank and Trust Co. and its parent, SI Financial Group, Inc., Willimantic, Conn. I'm pretty easygoing. don't let things bother me. He likes to keep things loose, he says, when he's out among the employees of his $1.35 billion-assets bank. When meet everybody, answer questions straight, and will tell folks what can tell them. We're a team, he says. We work together. Work gets it done Pretty much from the cradle, Brouillard--current chairman of ABA's Community Bankers Council--learned what a day of work was. He tends to be a hands-off manager, but he's always been a hands-on guy. His mother ran a nursing home in Massachusetts, his native state, when he was young. One of his chores was buffing the home's floors. Another was helping his father, who had turned the home's property into a farm for vegetables that residents helped raise and harvest. Other hands-on jobs followed. was a summer in a cardboard box factory, and there was a job during college at Savage Arms, a gunmaker. There was a lot of milling and drilling there, says Brouillard. And he made a conscious decision about work while watching some of the union workers around him. Quitting time was 3:00 p.m. for Brouillard's shift. Daily, one of his coworkers would stand by the time clock at 2:50 p.m., hands in his pockets, waiting to punch out. Finally, a supervisor said, Can you go stand around somewhere else? It looks too obvious. The worker shrugged. That really turned me off, says Brouillard. Pulling one's weight is part of his approach to life, and it's a principle he applies to his ABA role. Brouillard believes it's critical for banking's future that more bankers become activists for the industry's causes and needs. Traditionally, many became bankers because they felt it fit their personalities, he says. Bankers tend to be conservative types, who quietly go about the affairs of their banks and communities. At a fork in his early career, Brouillard had a shot at an insurance sales job, and he chose banking--even though the pay was much lower-because he didn't see himself as a But over time, he realized that part of the job has to be activism. I've always had the inclination to let my voice be heard, says Brouillard. But now he sees it as a duty. Now is a prime time to be an activist. I guess you could say that it took me a long time to realize that that's what am, says Brouillard, who is intensely interested in politics. I'm a salesman. Fixing up troubled banks But before that, he learned to be a bank mechanic. In 1995, Brouillard came aboard when regulators had, after many travails, told Savings Institute's board that the old CEO had to go. Brouillard stepped into a situation that no one could envy. Significant financial trouble was only part of the challenge. The bank had grown dysfunctional, in part in ways that, in more innocent times, used to be described as not appropriate for a family publication. Yet the scandals had started to make the local press anyway. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Extreme as the challenges were, Brouillard was no stranger to the labors of bringing back a troubled bank. He'd been through it before and arrived in Willimantic on the strength of his first such bout. Brouillard began his banking career in 1976 in the management training program at Massachusetts' BayBanks Corp. …
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