Brett Cooksey - Importance of Social Responsibility & Being More Intentional Communicating at Work

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Brett, the CIO at Sunrise Banks, and they discuss how Sunrise puts social responsibility at the forefront of their business practices, how Sunrise has aggressively applied technology to meet the challenges of the past year, and how we can be more intentional in our communications at work. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:28) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. So I'm curious. When I got to read about you in our prep meetings and all the fascinating stuff you've done, I was just—what was the spark? What was the initial thing that got you to fall in love with technology?

(Brett at 00:00:54) Oh, Commodore 64. My parents went—I was in South Africa. Obviously not from Iowa. Grew up in South Africa, and my parents—my father's British, so he went back to England on a journey and visited his family and brought back Commodore 64 and a bunch of books and some games. Won't lie. The gaming was part of it. And I picked up some Basic, and I really enjoyed the concept of actually creating something, not having to have all these materials and special skills and engineering and so forth. But it was really rudimentary. And then just gaming. I just loved the creativity and the problem-solving, especially the RPG games, the role-playing games, and just really understanding the nuances of it. So it really awakened something in me. And then I got to—my father bought a 286 for his company. He was a civil structural engineer, and so he had his own company and he bought one—bought a computer and put it on the desk and started to work on that. And I just absolutely loved it and decided, "Well, you know, I can't afford one. So what jobs can I do to buy all the components and actually build one much cheaper?" You know, maybe a 386 at that time, a good old AMD processor. And I started to build the hardware and just loved it. I mean, back then it was DOS and the autoexec.bat and config.sys, configuring that for gaming. It just caught fire. And then networking, good old NetWare, IPX, SPX—getting those protocols to work together so we could game and grew up really enjoying that. Then got through high school and went into teaching. I did a math and computer science combo, and I thought, "Okay, I'm going to probably be a comp sci teacher." So I finished that degree and taught high school, and I just didn't—it didn't resonate. I mean, it was teaching others how to use technology, but these kids at 16, 17 were just smoking me, building out code, good old Borland back then, and some of the Visual Basic, and it was just astounding. And it was a lot of hard work, not a lot of good pay. And I felt like, you know, it's hard when you want to grow and you're supposed to be the person that knows all the odds. And what do you know at 23 when you've graduated, right? So I decided, you know, I'd like to really reach out and get into technology. So I called IBM out of the blue—IBM South Africa—and said, "I'm a teacher. I love comp sci. Here's my grades. I got 110% on my final comp sci assignments." And that's because they had two options and I did them both. I loved it so much. I built a dBase database and something else. I can't remember what that was. But they recruited me, and they took myself and 12 other individuals and put us on a university campus. And this was, let's see, 1994. So we'd had the end of apartheid in 1990. So '93 is where I started teaching. By '94 I'm like, "I'm done." I went to IBM, and they had a hybrid white and black group of guys—12. There was one lady that joined us as well. And for three months, we were on a university campus, and they flew in all the latest and greatest technologists from the States, and we just soaked up all this information. It was incredible. We did all the tests back then. It was Windows NT 3.5, if I remember correctly, the NetWare tech, the OS/2 Warp technologies. And that was just such a big infusion of tech, and it caught fire. I absolutely loved it. So I spent three years, three to—when was that, '95?—three years at IBM and just worked my way up the ranks. Worked a lot with the team at Boca Raton. We were supporting national banks in South Africa, OS/2 Warp—believe 2.1—and all the networking and midframe, mainframe, SCO UNIX, Linux. Linux was still busy spinning up back then, but really just soaked it up and enjoyed it. And then kind of hit a ceiling. Like, I worked my way up to the top and I'm like, "Okay, where's the next adventure?" As you'll hear, I love near-death experiences and a lot of adventures. So I'm not the quintessential sit behind the desk and type code. So I decided, you know what? It got a little crazy in South Africa with the end of apartheid. It's about '98. And looking for another opportunity, saw an ad in the newspaper, local newspaper, looking for IT professionals. So it was Wells Fargo—Norwest here in Minneapolis had bought Wells Fargo and kept the name. So they kept the brand, but because of that acquisition, a lot of their OS/2 skills were leaving or exiting, and they really needed to shore that up. And so they were sourcing individuals out of South Africa, very strong banking practice and banking technology sector. So it's funny, my wife—I came home from work, you know, like, "Oh, I'm kind of bored." My wife's like, "Somebody called you from America about this application that you're interested in." And she said, "I considered not telling you, but you know, I can't keep any secrets." And I called them. They flew out. There was about 15, 20 folks interviewing for these positions—a handful of them. And three weeks later, they called me up and said, "Hey, would you like to come to the States, work at Wells?" And they said, "It's Minneapolis or North Carolina?" And I said, "Minneapolis." That's the decision-making in the moment. So we were away. Lots of paperwork, sold everything, moved in with my wife's parents, and then we waited for that—it wasn't the green card. Then it was just the visa, that work visa because you had to qualify for the H-1B, which is what the professionals used, right, to come in. So we were waiting for this H-1B to come through. Another hair-raising story. In the morning, I get a phone call, probably about 6 a.m., and it's the recruiter here saying, "I need you to go with your passport and your wife, go to the U.S. Embassy in Johannesburg. As soon as you can, they open at 8 a.m., and they're going to give you your visa, and tonight at 10 p.m., you're climbing on a plane." So went to the embassy, got the visas and the passport, came back, packed up, climbed on a plane, came to Minneapolis on 10/21/1998. And just got really embedded again with technology. It was the corporate LAN and desktop retail side of Wells Fargo, and just incredible. The scale, the access to technology that was so limited in South Africa. And really got into transitioning from OS/2 Warp to the Windows XP and Windows 2000 Server and was really instrumental in architecting the workstation image that would connect to the mainframe, download all the particular information for a branch, and then we could do a conversion overnight. And it was like a military operation. We had 1,200 branches, 35,000 workstations, and we worked with OEM vendors to image these boxes and get them to staging areas. And then we'd have a team pick them up and go to the branch at 8 p.m. They'd walk in, tear down the old OS/2 tech, put in the new Windows tech, turn the machines on. They'd download the config for that branch, and 8 a.m. the next morning, they open the doors and they're running a totally different operating system. It was incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:45) That was like the big transition?

(Brett at 00:09:47) Yes. Yeah, big transition for Wells. And from there, I moved into Institutional Trust, which is more kind of the wholesale in banking language. You've got retail, which is consumers and business, and then you've got wholesale, which is corporations. And Institutional Trust and Custody were like glorified accounts. There's money movement and trades happening between big organizations, and that function was making sure there were positions, the accounting was up to par, the regulations, et cetera, et cetera. And so I went in there and really started their first .NET implementation. And working with the corporate LAN and desktop, there was a lot of interactions with developers. We had to get this workstation image compatible with the tech that the developers were working with. So I wasn't writing app code at that point, but I was making sure that that code was running on the machines. I'd also write DLLs for their new Windows tech to interface correctly with the OS/2, I'd say, heritage technology that still needed to exist. And so when I transitioned to ITS, the Institutional Trust Services, I took that experience in there and we did .NET development, supported the developers. I got into development and we created a first web page on Wells Fargo's corporate electronic office. And there was this big portal that Wells corporate was running, and Institutional Trust was just one small spoke in that big wheel. And we published our first technology into that ecosystem and just led the charge, had consultants, upskilled the local teams, and it was really fantastic. And I'd learned how to interact and find the particular individuals that knew how to get things done faster than anybody else. And we were able to put technology together faster than they'd ever done it before. And then the team was really surprised and felt like, "Wait a minute, we can do these things. We can actually build our own technology, and we can start to dabble in creating those digital assets, if you will."

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) I want to stop you right there because you've got me. You just sold me something I'm interested—I want to buy. All right, so you learned to navigate around and find these people. Tell me more about who are these people that can get things done better, and then how do you find them?

(Brett at 00:12:31) I think the human connection is critical and really understanding that everybody is really looking to do their best. And as you work with individuals and people, sometimes you can ask them a question where they have to do all the work, or you can do as much of the work for the question—for the answer that you need. And then for them to connect and complete that sentence or that question, it's much easier than, "Oh, by asking me this question, you've just put a monkey on my back and now I've got to go and do all this research and work." And so just my thirst for knowledge and understanding, being a teacher, that thread still runs in me. I need to know how it works and how do we optimize it and how do we make it better. And so whenever I was working with individuals, I'd do as much of the work as possible so that it was easy for them. So never come to a conversation with a blank sheet of paper because then you're all scratching your heads, "Where do we start?" Always come to a conversation with everything that you know and with questions that are specific so that you can drive more and more knowledge and information. For me, knowledge is iterative. You don't know what you don't know, and you're learning all the time. So there's just too much information for us all to keep in our heads at the same time, right? How many Smithsonians are being added to the internet on a daily basis right now? Just the content. But if you can start to look for those principles and threads that when you encounter a situation, you can pull up your Rolodex or your reference capabilities and then find the right information, it much better helps you to move quickly. So I was broad and deep. I think my brain works in both ways. I'm a musician, but I'm a mathematician. But they're related. There's this concept of improvisation, but then you need structure to be able to improvise. You can't just be floating all over the place. And I think the principle is true even in technology and process. You need some structure. You need something that's going to hold the idea. But once you've got that in place, you can create that structure so rigid that you can't move quickly, or you can keep it light enough so that you can iterate and grow and learn and absorb more information and start to scale. And it's a fine balance because you have different skills. You have the pioneers or the explorers, you know—they don't want to build an entire town and find out where the sanitation works are going to run. They want to explore new things. And then the settlers come in, establish the farming community and start to feed the local town, and then those explorers are moving on to the next and the next. I'm an explorer, but I know that when we find a new discovery, if you can't create it sustainable enough, it's just going to die on the vine. It's not going to have a heritage or a lineage that can grow over time. And sometimes it works. Sometimes I pioneer and I hand it off and then it just crashes and burns. And other times it seems to catch fire and it seems to grow even more. And I've had those experiences throughout my career. I haven't figured out what the secret sauce is, what the magic handshake is, but that's part of the journey. How do we really create a vision for people to pick up and run with and do something greater than they believe is impossible?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:23) I struggle with that a lot too, when it's like, "What's the one piece of advice?" type deal, right? Or like, "What's the magic sauce?" And I've actually taken some time to try to figure out a good answer to that question. And the best that I've come up with so far is along the lines of persistence. Because as long as you keep going and keep trying, you will figure it out. And that's all you can do. You just got to keep going and keep trying. Because there's too many different lessons you learn along the way, and they're so specific to the situation. And it's like my experience on a particular situation—I don't know if you're going to encounter that exact situation with those variables. But that's when I started to learn about, like, the importance of principles, right? And that's what you were talking about.

(Brett at 00:17:10) One hundred percent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:12) And culture. And I want to know what type of culture you guys have at Sunrise.

(Brett at 00:17:17) So, yeah, fast-forwarding—Sunrise is a big leap there. The culture at Sunrise is very interesting. Why don't I back up and tell you about the story about getting to Sunrise? Because it'll give you the context. So at Wells Fargo, 2008, the financial system really melted down. It was pretty brutal. A lot of pressure on our business partners, on our staff, vacations canceled. It was really, really, really onerous. I was working a lot, and I hit a wall and I quit my job. And we sold everything and we moved to Kenya. And we drilled wells and built schools for a remote tribe called the Pokot. So I went from one extreme—financial services and, you know, the most advanced, I'd say, civilization on earth—to, "I need this human touch," because it became, in that meltdown, it became all about credit default swaps and everything that was—it wasn't real. You couldn't put your hand on it. It wasn't something that was substantive and real, but people were suffering. People were losing their 401(k)s. They were losing so much. And I felt like, "This is all about greed. I've got to get out of financial services. I'm done." So sold everything, moved to Kenya, ran for two years, built schools, drilled wells, took my kids—three kids with me. Pretty brutal for them because they'd grown up in America.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:47) Oh, man. You're not popular.

(Brett at 00:18:50) Yeah. Yeah. And they still thank me for restaurant food now because for two years they didn't have it. So if you ever need your children to thank you... So went to Kenya and, you know, all these benevolent humanitarian funds—their funds dried up because of the 2008 downturn.

(Brett at 00:19:08) Right? So after two years, ran out of money, came back stateside and started at CH Robinson, went into freight tech because I don't want to go near financial services. It's all about greed, which is kind of funny because in Kenya, I was the administrator and we were trying to do microfinance and biointensive organic farming and running little businesses, and it just failed miserably for a number of reasons. So finances are still involved. Sustainability requires that.

(Brett at 00:19:36) But anyway, so I go to CH Robinson. I come back as an enterprise architect. I build up their architecture practice, and then I decide I don't want to be an enterprise architect. I'll be there in my sleep. I want to understand what makes business work. So I got into product management. We built three really progressive products. You'll see them out on the web. One is called Navisphere Vision, which is the global visibility tool. You can see every shipment down to the SKU level for Microsoft real time. And we built AI in there. We built the most modern technologies and really took that to market. And it was kind of an achievement, I would say, because there was a lot of learning along the way. How do we do SaaS? How do we understand pricing models? What's the market bear? And I was absorbing all of that, and I got to the place where I'm like, okay, I feel like I've got my tool belt full now. Now I would like to try and lead an organization, be a CTO or CIO. And Sunrise opportunity came up, and I was like, oh, no. Financial services? No. And then started to do more research and then started to understand, wait a minute. It's a CDFI, a community development financial institution. They're targeting the unbanked. They're targeting the people that in Kenya I was trying to help become self-sustainable versus just receiving handouts and getting access to financial services when their credit is so bad. And so those themes and flavors came back, and it kind of scratched the itch. Like, I've melded the two together.

(Brett at 00:21:09) And it's financial services. You know, the regulators, I love you. You know? There's so many things I do wrong, but it's regulation. It makes sure that we're doing the right things. And so it just felt like another hand in the glove, but not with so much big business and really connected to the local community. And that started another journey for me. So coming into Sunrise, it really is community focused, B Corporation certified, the Global Alliance of Banking on Values membership. Banking on values? What does that mean? Values-based business. It was a mind fry because when you're in a Fortune 500 company, it's all about shareholders and how do you maximize shareholder value. And then you come to Sunrise or B Corp or this community corporation, and it's not about maximum profit. It's about, how do we make housing affordable? Why don't we buy or actually construct a set of housing where we can control the rent at 4% increase per year versus 13% with all the other properties around? And nobody can afford that. Nobody at minimum wage or even greater than that can afford it. Nobody gets a 13% raise. Not in America. So that really got me excited and interested in it. And coming to Sunrise, it's a community bank. And the challenge that we have with that is, well, what's the technology brand? Because you're a community bank and you have four branches in the Twin Cities, and it's all about serving the local community. But we're using our charter as a force multiplier because we've got a national charter, and we've got this really progressive fintech business that's starting to come of age and starting to hit a tipping point that's going to scale. And that is giving the unbanked, mission-aligned is what we call the people, fintechs that are targeting these low to moderate income individuals. We're giving them our services. We're regulated for it. So it's our services, our bank accounts, our loans, our compliance capabilities. We're packaging it so we can get to those unbanked nationally. So that is where we're starting to see that technology now flywheel is starting to really tick up, and it's becoming a scale point for others. It's now looking at a community bank, you're like, wait a minute, you have a local presence and then you're making loans to small businesses, but Sunrise is much, much larger than that. And we punch way above our weight.

(Brett at 00:24:00) For PPP, for instance, we came in the top 10. And what we did, we came in the top 10 in the state, up against Wells Fargo and US Bank and all the big players. And all we did was, for the first round, there were two tranches of loans. And the first one, we wanted to build technology to support this because we wanted to scale as quickly as we could and issue as many loans because people were hurting. I mean, after the corona impact, I mean, that's what the PPP program was about. And the emails we were getting of people that were so desperate for these loans was just, I mean, my hair is standing up right now. It's just gut-wrenching. And knowing that helping to serve those people and keeping their business alive after four years, they're not big multinationals. They're living almost hand to mouth, a very small margin, and they're trying to put their kids through school. And just this pandemic really impacted them. So the first part of round one, the money ran out in two weeks. And we took that time to learn what the program was asking for because we already had intel that another round's coming. It's just not enough. And so we shopped around, looked at all these different providers, technology providers that were touting, we've got a PPP loan capability.

(Brett at 00:25:26) And the problem with that was, A, the program was evolving real time. So can you imagine a Microsoft or an Oracle building technology for everybody being able to nimbly change their requirements or their capabilities real time to align with the government program? It's like nothing I've ever built. No technology I have ever built where the requirements are migrating and evolving real time, and there's punitive outcomes if you don't get it right. So what we had to do was take that first learning, optimize the actual process, and then we used Microsoft's Power Platform and built a Power App that basically took these loans through the different steps that we would take to do the customer due diligence, make sure all their documentation was legit, make sure they're a legitimate party, submit it to the SBA, get that authorization back, and then we disperse the funds to them and then apply to the SBA to get those funding. So the first round, we maxed out at 80 loans a day, and we had 70 people working on this. So when I said, hey, why don't we use technology and try and get to 200? Oh my God. Everybody's like, oh, you're crazy. That's double what we're doing today.

(Brett at 00:26:50) We built that Power App in about eight days, and the way we built this was step one, get the information in from the borrowers. Step two, review that information. Step three, make sure that the information is real, that you have a driver's license and you have the respective information. The next step is, what do they qualify for based on this information? And then, oh, submit it to the SBA. So we built the first step in eight days. From time we picked up tools till the time that second tranche of the first round went live, eight days. And we hit that. When they went live, we turned on our tech, and we worked with a startup to ingest the information and take these crazy PDFs that were, I mean, it's like Greek. If you get it wrong, you invalidate your whole application. So we worked with the startup called Anvil. And basically, they have a workflow. You make it pretty. You describe the information you need. The borrower just goes click, click, click, write the information in, upload their docs, hit send, and we get all that information digitally. We also get the PDFs completed per the SBA spec. So our data quality, round one, everybody was writing stuff on paper and then taking pictures with the cell phone and sending to us. How do you move fast on that when you've got, I don't know, 800 apps coming through the door?

(Brett at 00:28:31) When we introduced Anvil, that was immediately digital. We got the PDFs ready to go. The information came in, we tossed it into SharePoint, and then this little Power App kept on accessing the same database with the information. And as it moved through each of the steps, it just continued to embellish or add to the data until we got it to the point where we can send it to the SBA. And that little process, we had 450 apps in one day. And everybody's brains exploded. Now at the end of that round one, we had 1,800. So that 450 was a massive spike. But we ramped up to it, primed the whole engine because we were building one day at a time, one step at a time. And by the time we hit the two-week mark, we had enough built up that we could just slam through 450 in one day, and everybody was just, we didn't think this was possible. So that now has ushered in a new renaissance on how technology can be used inside the four walls inside of Sunrise. So round one, 48 days to light it up. Round two, which was announced on December 26th, thank you very much, Happy New Year, 48 hours, we stood that tech up because we built all these capabilities and we kept flexibility in mind. And that allowed us to quickly tweak it, set it up, and in 48 hours, we're good to go. And the reason it took that long is it was an API platform that we used with the latest round.

(Brett at 00:30:00) And again, really helpful. The first round, 26,000 FTEs. That's the total sum of the FTEs that were accounted for in that program that we were able to fund. And we're wrapping up the round two right now. We ended up with 4,500, somewhere around 4,400 apps for round two, and average loan was $50K, and it was 75% of them were $50K and lower loans. Round one was 1,800. So we went from round one, 1,800, to 4,400 loans, same timeline and hitting that amount of people. So we're wrapping up the final numbers on the FTEs. I can get that to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) That's pretty exciting. And so that's full-time employees, the number of people you impacted. You're measuring impact.

(Brett at 00:30:50) Yeah. Yeah. So these businesses have FTEs. Total FTE count that were impacted by these PPP loans. And it's just amazing how everybody banded together, people working long, long hours through the night. And you're in the Teams world. You're in the online remote world. There are no boundaries. You just work around the clock, and then the next thing you know, it's the next morning. And we're just driven by this mission of helping these small mom and pop shops and businesses to stay afloat, to get access to those funds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) Can you help me understand, I was reading the mission and hearing you talk here, mentioned a couple times this unbanked concept. And I've heard other fintechs talk about it too that aren't necessarily banks.

(Brett at 00:31:41) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) I still don't understand because it's like you look outside and there's banks on every corner, and I could go into any bank and open a bank account. I don't get this. Why is this unbanked thing such a mission? Why don't people that want a bank account just go get the bank account?

(Brett at 00:32:01) Yeah. I think it's a combination. I don't know the full extent of every scenario, but I think there's the credit score understanding that every action has a consequence. So people that have left the financial services just because they haven't been trained on financial wellness. How do I use a credit card? Like, you better pay it in 24 days or you're going to have up to 33% interest. That is compounded on a daily basis. I mean, that financial literacy is something that we're really targeting because folks invariably don't understand that. You're 16 and you're getting credit cards in the mail. If you don't understand the principle of what a credit card is, it's like, oh, free money. Swipe, swipe, swipe. And the next thing you know, you've built up this debt that you can't service, and then it gets counted against you and everything. Then your car loans are 15%. And it just starts to eliminate your access to financial services. So one of our products really helps people with bad credit get better credit by taking out a $1,000 loan and paying $90 a month and then reporting that to all the credit agencies. And within a year, you could see your credit score pop. So that's one of the fintechs outside of the Twin Cities area. They have that service nationally, and we give people access to that credit builder as one of the products that we use. So, I mean, if you think of things that you don't even consider, like, don't just use your credit card for everything, because of financial literacy that really is not just the case across the board.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:48) Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense because, yeah, you get credit cards early when you're young. You don't know how they work. You can make mistakes, and then that mistake can compound, and then you can just pick up bad habits, right? And then if you don't have parents or a network of people that can pull you out of that, right, you're just going to repeat. That's how habits work, my friend. You're just going to repeat your same mistakes over and over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) So I see the literacy thing being super important. And I can understand too, if I was irresponsible as a young adult, right, which most of them are, right, because I can say that because I was a young adult at one point. So,

(Brett at 00:34:27) You're a young adult. Come on. Me too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:30) Yeah. We're both young adults. You can overdraw your bank account, right? And you can make a mistake, and then I'm sure they somehow share data which will make it harder for you to get bank accounts at other places, right? And so then you can create an economy where there's a bunch of people that don't have banks. Yeah.

(Brett at 00:34:46) Yeah. It is different to the unbanked in Africa than I experienced because they just don't even have access at all, just physically the infrastructure and what have you. Here is the infrastructure available, but what you don't know is going to hurt you and preclude you from access to these services because it just complicates at the time, right? And then people, they either can't get a bank account or, well, we don't want to even engage in that, and so we're in the informal economy where we're trying to trade cash. And that obviously doesn't work over time because even that process has started to work its way out of the machine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:24) Yeah. I mean, some countries have gone completely cashless. I think, what is it? I can't remember which one. I watched the documentary and I was surprised that there are countries that I did not consider, like, you know, we're in America, right? And so I thought we were one of the most advanced countries. And then I see that there's countries that have way more advanced cities and they have more advanced financial systems than us, and I was just blown away by it.

(Brett at 00:35:53) The Sunrise Bank, to your comment, what's the culture like at Sunrise Bank? The values-based is so important. I'm still, I'm 18 months in, and I'm still rewiring my brain to this values-based banking because it really is a shift. And even the values of our employees, their attitudes, their behaviors, like, woohoo, step up big time, bigger than us, and identify our blind spots.

(Brett at 00:36:23) And we have these values that we're commonly rallying around, and actually incentivizing and really performance managing to a certain extent to say, you know, here's good feedback for you. And every hire that we make, we make sure that our HR team actually screens to make sure that from a community and from a culture perspective, that's really going to be a good fit because Sunrise is great. It's entrepreneurial. There's a lot of, say, fluidity is a good word. It's not a big established Wells Fargo with tons of process that you all have to follow.

(Brett at 00:37:03) Now you still need process. You still need due diligence. So that's there, but priorities are shifting a lot. There's a lot of ambiguity, so you've got to be a self-starter. If you're looking for a well-paved highway with checkmarks and, you know, toll roads, that's not Sunrise.

(Brett at 00:37:21) But we're moving quickly, moving light, and we're making a real big difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:26) And so you have products for both. Do you do products for, like, in Africa they're underbanked or other countries they're underbanked, or is it just the United States?

(Brett at 00:37:34) It's all US based, but we have in our vision, we call it a VTO, Vision Traction Organizer. It's a component of the EOS framework. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but it's the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And it's a management framework, phenomenal, actually authored out of Minneapolis. And that's something we subscribe to.

(Brett at 00:37:59) So VTO, Vision Traction Organizer, is where you put your goals. And you have a three-year goal, and you have a one-year goal, and then you have your company mission. And our company mission is by 2028 to impact 250 million people. So we're on track. We're on, like, 50 million right now considering all of the loans, these PPP products, everything we're trying to track and make sure that we're having that impact.

(Brett at 00:38:26) And to hit 250, it's got to be international. So the Global Alliance for Banking on Values is that gateway to the rest of the world because it's a conglomeration or an association of like-minded banks that are offering services to their low- or moderate-income communities. And so we envision services that eventually would cross borders. Right now, we're US based, but we're building the infrastructure to support that international, multinational capabilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) That is pretty neat. Is that what's driving you guys right now? That's what you're really excited about?

(Brett at 00:39:03) I think we're excited about the—I mean, the international's there. Don't get me wrong. But just creating our own capability that can scale to support the local fintech marketplace, it's on fire. And there's so much opportunity there that I think it's untapped potential. And especially in the wake of this pandemic, I mean, you hear all the massive economic recovery, but then you hear lots of inflation.

(Brett at 00:39:31) And in the midst of that, you know, the lower- to moderate-income families are really impacted the most. And so I think more than ever, that targeted financial services to them is going to be critical. And I think that the fintech revolution is understanding that too and trying to get those financial services out in the marketplace. So for us, that business coming of age and starting to hit a scale point, the way we built it over the last, say, six, seven years was on top of the community bank's. So you've got three systems, you've got people doing community bank work.

(Brett at 00:40:06) Let's just leverage them so we can get this fintech business off the ground. But now we've got to—whoa, wait a minute. This is about to take off, and we need to invest in infrastructure to support that. And that puts us in a good place to scale it even further to go international.

(Brett at 00:40:23) So we want to put a robust system in place that's configurable for our business needs, makes it easy for fintechs and processors and program managers and a whole bunch of other entities that don't even make sense, but they're all part of the ecosystem to support that at scale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:41) Is this the tech renaissance my team mentioned to me?

(Brett at 00:40:45) 100%, yes. It is a renaissance. If you think of the Renaissance, there's no kings and queens. But it's a renaissance in the sense that the thought of what is possible, what can we do with technology? There is so much manual in our environment today, in our community bank, that people are so affinitized to doing things a certain way that you almost need a third person to stand and look and go, wait a minute.

(Brett at 00:41:17) Why are you doing that? We could digitize that. We could use technology to make that more sustainable and scalable. So we don't have pockets of knowledge where only certain people know the secret handshake to get something done, but more people—we're democratizing data, we're democratizing process because that's how you scale. Otherwise, you're throwing bodies and just doubling your headcount just so that you can handle more throughput.

(Brett at 00:41:46) And we want to flip that, get technology in place, that the processes and procedures are repeatable, ups the data quality, frees our workers to be knowledge workers versus just the repetitive type into a spreadsheet, type into a spreadsheet, log into this vendor, log into this vendor, log in here. Can we optimize that experience into a single unified view that in the back is connecting to those different systems, but it's easy to train, easy to be operational very quickly or functional very quickly versus three to six months to learn all these disparate systems and become super productive?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:26) I like it. You've got me—you've got a lot of passion, Brett. You got me excited about banking, which is strange. So I love it.

(Brett at 00:42:34) Oh, yeah. And you're living the dream. I'm living the dream. Yeah. It's not easy.

(Brett at 00:42:39) You know, it's painful, but it's worth it. You know, it has an upside. You can see the transformation. You can see people believing that they can do greater than what they've done before. And they're moving past their limits and then starting to take themselves further.

(Brett at 00:42:56) Just the folks that we have in our organization today are growing in leaps and bounds, and we're adding additional with that experience so we can—I tell everybody, you've got to be a vampire. You've got to suck knowledge. You've got to become a learning organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:13) I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:14) Got to be—

(Brett at 00:43:14) A knowledge vampire. So when we—if we have to get consultants in or somebody with knowledge in the door, that's not going to be living here long term, you want to draw all that information out, suck that information out of them so we can really start to level up and systematize that. Because if one person learns it all and then they win the lottery, then we lose that again. So if we can get that level up, the organizational understanding and knowledge seeking, it's exciting.

(Brett at 00:43:46) I mean, I just love learning. I love information, but it's got to be meaningful. It's not, hey, let's draw a nice big picture out there, but can we turn that into something of value that touches and impacts somebody's life?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:59) I love it. I love it. I want to do an off-topic question here for you. So I've been doing some research. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:07) And I like you as a leader, so that's why I'm asking this. The origin of it is I was talking with Ismail from Toptal. He's the CTO over at Toptal. They, you know, like the top 3% of engineers in the world and you go get engineers from them. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:21) I don't know if you've ever heard of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:23) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:23) It's really hard to become a Toptal engineer and they collect these engineers and then you can hire them. Okay. But we were talking about, like, rapid growth, finding really great people because I figured who better to talk to about finding great people than this company that is notorious, like, known for being selective. And so then that gave me this idea to ask this the same question to several different leaders I respect so I could, you know, learn, gather from the different answers. And so the question is this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:53) And so the question is this. How do you recruit top engineers at Sunrise?

(Brett at 00:45:01) That's the challenge. I think it's this brand awareness. Firstly, community bank being tech progressive and tech forward, that's a foreign concept. And secondly, you know, what is the impact of that technology to the actual local community? I think that social awareness is just so ripe right now for people looking for opportunities that can make a difference.

(Brett at 00:45:27) The why, you know, the Simon Sineks of the world. And so I think it's exposure. We're struggling to hire top talent because Sunrise Banks. Okay. Community bank.

(Brett at 00:45:37) Next. But we're saying, here is an opportunity that you can take your knowledge and experience and impact low- to moderate-income individuals at scale, and we want to build it using the latest. Because the good news is we don't have this big boatload of tech debt that we have to figure out a way to cut off. There is a mainframe. Don't get me wrong.

(Brett at 00:46:02) There are other technologies in play, but there's not this big development asset, digital asset that's aging that you're going, oh my goodness. How am I going to get rid of Silverlight? How am I going to get rid of VB.NET? How am I going to get rid of WCF and SOAP and old web services? So we're at a point where we can leap straight into Azure and start with Azure DevOps pipelining and start with that development from the get-go.

(Brett at 00:46:34) So trying to get people to understand that's where we are, that's the hard part of hiring and attracting talent to Sunrise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:43) Yeah. So you have your greenfield-style, you know, development world. Right? So that's attractive to me as a developer. I'm like, that's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:53) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:53) But you also have a mission. And I like it because it's like, it's like a two-part mission. You've got the—you get pulled in with, okay, we're a socially responsible community bank. That's cool. With world domination on top of it. It's like, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:08) All right. I'm listening now. That's, like, that's how I took it. I love it.

(Brett at 00:47:13) Yeah. Yeah. How do you take it international? How do you put the pieces in place that you can scale indefinitely or infinitely and work with incredible—I mean, the GABV, the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, I mean, their Leadership Institute, and oh my goodness, the colleagues, the people you come across, the problems that they're trying to solve in third world countries. It's just phenomenal.

(Brett at 00:47:38) Just the idea sharing alone. Forget technology and putting it in the hands of somebody, but just the experience. Have you thought about this? Have you considered this? That information exchange is priceless.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) I'm curious for you, like, what's the best leadership advice you've gotten throughout your career?

(Brett at 00:47:59) Best leadership? Wow. Something I don't do all the time, but think before you speak. Because it's all about information sharing. It's about perception.

(Brett at 00:48:13) Whether you like it or not, perception is reality. And so really being intentional in communication. And as you move up in leadership, people pay more attention to words and intention, and then they're interpreting it through their lens. So you really have to be conscious of what your intention is when you're positioning any information. And that could be to a business, oversetting expectations, getting too excited and getting them excited and they're going, great.

(Brett at 00:48:48) What are you going to build for me next month? And then it turns into, well, what have you done for me lately? So even in that example, like transparency, communication, but think before you speak. Have a game plan. And not that you're diabolically trying to control the outcome, but every person you're engaging with is a consumer or a customer of information, of intention, of vision. And depending on how you come across, that could have unintended consequences. Have you ever spoken to somebody that has a lot of power and you vent and then they release the bazooka and you go, oh, crap.

(Brett at 00:49:33) I shouldn't have said that. Right? I've done that a couple of times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:37) I've definitely had to learn this. I guess the best way to explain this—you're a musician as well—is when we're freestyling and playing music with people, we know the key, we can feel the beat, and the goal is to not think. It's to bypass that and flow.

(Brett at 00:49:53) Oh, flow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) Yeah. You've got to flow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:55) Oh, my goodness. That's why we do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:56) Or at least that's why I do it. Yes. Right?

(Brett at 00:49:59) Oh, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:00) But you can't do that. You can't do that in the corporate world. Like, you could—you definitely can do it. Like, you can—

(Brett at 00:50:06) I think you can. And I think that's okay. Now you're starting to touch the deeper things because I think that's what jazzes me. Because in Wells Fargo, in the big construct that they had with rough and, like, big-ass constraints, we were able to be creative in a short amount of time. C.H. Robinson, same thing. They construct 1,500 people in IT, a lot of transition to cloud services. You've got infrastructure team, different teams standing up a delivery team and taking a powerful, really progressive product to market in spite of the marketplace and the actual internal culture and thought around what technology should be. That's being creative.

(Brett at 00:50:56) And I think for me, the principle is you need the construct so that you can solve. You need to understand all the scale theory. But not when you're flowing, you're not thinking, okay. Am I following a Phrygian scale right now?

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:13) Or Lydian. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:14) You—

(Brett at 00:51:14) Just—you transcend the structure, but you needed to have a point of reference before you could fly, before you could be creative. And I think that's what's so exciting about all organizations. There's room for creativity, and I guess that's a very sweeping statement. I think it's possible, and that's what gets me jazzed about it. And I think within Sunrise, there's ample opportunity for creativity.

(Brett at 00:51:43) Here's how do you best set expectations to say, here's where we're going, here's how we're going to get there, and we're going to need to be creative to get there. Not, hey. We're going to pull the greatest machine on Earth. Who's with me? No.

(Brett at 00:51:58) Here's the step-by-step way we're going to get there. Oh, and by the way, it is 100% informed by business, market needs, how much money we can spend. Right? And then success. And get that feedback loop rolling and the flywheel starts to spin, and then you can do great things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:19) How about we tell people to visit the career page if they want to look into working for Sunrise? So how would people find more information about working at Sunrise?

(Brett at 00:52:30) Yeah. On LinkedIn, we're very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, our sunrisebanks.com. A lot of information about all our programs, practices, and in careers. Please visit the careers page. There's more opportunities popping up there all the time.

(Brett at 00:52:49) Right now, we're building the infrastructure, so very quickly once we understand what those needs are, we'll start putting those positions out. But we have a handful right now, and we've just got some additional that were granted to us. And so I'm very excited. Please visit the careers page, and it's changing all the time. So don't look at it once.

(Brett at 00:53:10) Just keep looking at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:13) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.