Jeff MacLellan: The Man Behind the Numbers
No, he answered. He had prostate cancer, and he’d been in the hospital having his prostrate removed.
That’s Jeff MacLellan: straightforward, honest, not one to mince words.
MacLellan dealt with his health crisis the same way he’s always dealt with banking challenges: collecting lots of information and staying determined to succeed.
MacLellan stepped down as chairman and CEO Landmark Bank at the end of December, though he’ll work part-time for the next three years to help the company through the transition. The move came eight months after he orchestrated the consolidation of First National Bank & Trust in Columbia, First National Bank in Southern Missouri and Landmark Bank in Oklahoma and Texas into one bank with 36 locations in 25 communities and $1.5 billion in assets.
Outside of Columbia’s banking circles, many people know MacLellan from his annual analysis of the local economy. For 23 years, MacLellan has been collecting and analyzing vast amounts of economic data and giving, at no charge, presentations to scores of service organizations such as Rotary and Kiwanis as well as Chamber of Commerce events.
Why the devotion to economic indicators?
MacLellan started his banking career as a loan officer and was promoted to a management position in Texas’ biggest bank, Republic Bank Corp. In 1984, a quirk of fate pushed him up the ladder. The president of the North Dallas Bank was caught breaking the law, and MacLellan was offered his position, an opportunity he quickly seized.
“I wanted to run my own piece of the business,” said MacLellan, who became a bank president at age 36. “I had a blast doing so.” But then came the Great Texas Banking Crisis, which lasted until 1994 and left only one of the state’s 10 largest banks standing when it was all over. The price of oil, the lifeblood of Texas’ economy, plummeted, as did the housing market.
“There were problem loans, problem credit, problem people,” MacLellan said.
Then in 1987, his uncle who served on the board of First National told them that the Columbia bank was looking for a new president. By now he and Becky, his wife, had two children, Carrie and Jay, and MacLellan wasn’t interested in uprooting his family. Nor was he planning on leaving Texas, where he had ample opportunity to use the Spanish he’d learned growing up in Mexico City, Mexico, where his father worked as a commercial photographer at the U.S. Embassy with the Rockefeller Foundation.
His initial reaction to the opportunity: “No; hell no.”
Yet, he was familiar with mid-Missouri. He’d attended high school at the Missouri Military School in Mexico, Mo. Becky had attended the University of Missouri-Columbia. “We knew the area well,” he said.
So he warmed to the idea, and by midyear he’d taken the job. They built a home on five acres and have since moved twice and built each time on large lots. “I’ve lived in the big city; I wanted a little more space,” MacLellan said.
Although he was relieved to land in Missouri, which had avoided the widespread recession, MacLellan vowed he’d never be surprised by an economic downturn again. That’s why he began collecting the data.
Diagnosis, deliberate response
When MacLellan heard his diagnosis of prostate cancer in November, he characteristically responded by turning to the data.
MacLellan delayed his treatment until after Christmas so he could be with his family, which now includes five grandchildren, the lights of his life. His office is plastered with pages of coloring books inscribed to “Abi,” the kids’ name for their grandfather and a shortened version of “abuelo,” Spanish for grandfather.
But MacLellan wasn’t just waiting. He was researching, collecting information. At 62, he’s young for a diagnosis of prostate cancer, he said, and he found data that outlined his options and indicated the best procedure for a long-term cure was radical: Let doctors remove his prostate.
Then he went ahead.
The surgery was performed in January, and he was out of the office for 12 days, nine of them business days. Then he was back at work, back to walking four or more miles on the MKT Trail or at the Columbia Mall with Becky and back at being “Abi” to 3-year-old triplets Cole, Carly and Rory; Blake, 6 months; and Nolan.
“The path(ology) report said I was clean,” MacLellan said. “That made my day, my week, my month, my life.” He said he now has a 90-percent-plus possibility of being cancer-free for life. “I’ll take those odds.”
Focus and drive
Kevin Gibbens, who worked with MacLellan for about a dozen years before replacing him as CEO of Landmark Bank, said his predecessor displayed an admirable focus, drive and balance while overseeing the bank’s growth.
“Jeff’s an excellent manager of people,” Gibbens said. “He’s decisive, and he has a clear sense of what he wants to do.”
MacLellan has an uncanny knack for getting at underlying issues and reaching a decision, Gibbens added. But he also never loses sight of the effect of his decisions, whether it is on customers or employees.
That — keeping an eye on the consequences and, as always, on the numbers — is why Landmark Bank weathered the recent downturn so well, Gibbens said.
“We were profitable through the recession,” Gibbens pointed out.
“Ahead of the curve”
Sabrina McDonnell, executive vice president/chief administrative officer of Landmark, recalls the exact moment MacLellan took action to ensure the bank was ready to weather the storm. It was fall 2008, and stories of economic difficulties were already coming out of Wall Street and moving across the country.
“Jeff switched into high gear,” McDonnell said. At an executive council meeting, he brought a list of actions the company was going to take immediately. She recalls MacLellan saying, “Here are four things we’re going to do today.” McDonnell, however, thought, “Are we sure?” They were already planning for the company consolidation, and she felt there were many other urgent matters to deal with.
But as it turned out, MacLellan was right. “He was ahead of the curve,” McDonnell said. Bank officers began calling customers, terming them “listening calls” and making suggestions to their customers to help them prepare for lean times.
MacLellan credits Landmark’s continued focus on conservative community banking. Making high-risk loans wasn’t in the best interest of the bank — or for the community.
Yet, MacDonnell credits MacLellan’s vision for the company’s success. “People who learn from their experience (such as MacLellan’s in Texas) are the people you want to work with.”
Maintaining balance and support
Gibbens said MacLellan is always telling his employees about balance. Known for his fast driving and even for putting his watch on the table during meetings — a visual reminder for everyone to stay on their toes and on topic — MacLellan is also known for supporting his people.
McDonnell remembers when her father died, MacLellan was at the funeral. She said he’s always interested when someone is facing problems — and when they’re doing well.
When MacLellan came on board, McDonnell was in charge of the tellers. Today she’s an executive vice president. McDonnell said she was discussing his style of mentoring with another member of the executive management team recently, and they agreed that MacLellan sees beyond what people think they can do to what they can do. She also noted that many times MacLellan has given her or others tasks they thought were impossible but then completed as the boss expected.
Although MacLellan had a habit of coming into work early and staying late on weekdays, when Friday afternoon came around, he was ready to go home and told his fellow workers to do the same, Gibbens said. Many times, he said, MacLellan tried to scoot him out of the office.
MacLellan also has a long record of community service. He’s been involved in United Way and the Rotary Club and serves on the University of Missouri Flagship Council, a nonprofit devoted to boosting MU’s interests, and on the board of Regional Economic Development Inc. Earlier this month, MacLellan was reappointed to the board of Columbia Area Jobs Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to developing shovel-ready development sites.
Driving to the Lake
Colleagues joke that on retirement MacLellan might consider a NASCAR career. They speculate that his penchant for road racing might have been honed by frequent drives to his second home at the Lake of the Ozarks. It’s a refuge where he and his family spend so much time and to which he’s so devoted that they added a third story to accommodate his two children, their spouses and the five grandchildren along with other visiting relatives.
Or it might be that he developed his hard-driving habits during his frequent visits to the banking company’s 36 locations, his wife often in the passenger seat.
Becky, however, said she first noticed that he liked to drive fast in Mexico City, where they met in 1970. Jeff was still attending Southern Methodist University in Texas and was three years younger than Becky. She said it wasn’t love at first sight, but she was attracted to his maturity and his foreign patina from his years of living in Mexico.
After they married, MacLellan joined the military, which was a great training ground, he said, because it taught him to work hard and to accept whatever task he was given and do it well without complaining.
He served in the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War, though he was not in Vietnam. He was assigned to the Strategic Air Command in Nebraska and Guam, where his job was to analyze the data, intelligence and photographs collected overnight to brief his commanding officer each morning.
The beauty of the numbers
Don Laird, president of the Chamber of Commerce, said what makes MacLellan’s analysis of Columbia’s economic data stand out is that he makes the numbers and his conclusions clear. There are no difficult, weird ratios, he said. “He tells it like it is, and he has a good finger on the pulse of Columbia.”
Richard Mendenhall, owner of RE/MAX Boone Realty, was a member of the bank’s board when they hired MacLellan, and the two became friends during the past two decades. Calling MacLellan one of the hardest working and best bankers he’s ever known — and in several decades of the real estate business, he’s known many — Mendenhall said he’s relied on MacLellan’s analyses when making decisions affecting RE/MAX as well as his personal investments.
His reports and presentations include multiple indicators including housing starts, employment figures, population growth and other information available at a multitude of venues, but MacLellan brings it all together.
“It isn’t just part of the story; it’s the whole story,” Mendenhall said.
Mendenhall said the best thing about MacLellan’s information is that his presentations and reports are based on facts, not perceptions or rumors.
Yet, MacLellan isn’t just a numbers person. As a member of the board, Mendenhall has watched MacLellan move employees up the corporate ladder and guide the banking company as it grew from fewer than 90 employees in the Columbia location to 620 employees in three states when he retired in 2009.
“He has an uncanny sense of numbers,” Mendenhall said, but just as important, he noted, “Jeff’s a people person.”
MacLellan rarely wears a collared shirt and tie and typically is dressed in a short-sleeved polo shirt — including the day when he appeared in the bank’s video rap, “Man, It Is Good To Be A Banker.” Not a lot of CEOs would be willing to try bobbing their heads to rap music for a promotional video.
And now, with his cancer bout behind him, working fewer hours and spending more time as granddad, “Jeff Mack” is finding it is, indeed, good to be a banker.