Harvest starts Monday. Sixty days until the one payday of the year. If you lend to farms and you don't know what that sentence means, you shouldn't lend to farms. Meridian Trust has 214 agricultural loans with a single November payment date. Ten years ago it had none. That's what a board seat is for.
Founders: your contractor agreement either assigns the IP to your company or it doesn't. 'Work for hire' does not automatically cover software in most situations. If the word 'assign' isn't in there, the contractor owns your product. I check this first on every deal. Half the time it's missing.
And the investors will check it in diligence, so better you find it now.
Q4 Red Folder went to the board this morning. Twelve pages, five risks, as always. This quarter's top item is not credit and it is not rates — it is a vendor. If you are a community bank and your core vendor's parent company just changed hands, that belongs on page one.
Read all twelve pages on the train. Page one has my full attention.
We have a 340-page runbook for exactly this scenario. Page 2 of the Folder references it, as it should.
A founder asked me yesterday what the single most expensive sentence in a shareholder agreement is. It is the one that isn't there. Write down what happens when a co-founder leaves. Write it down while you still like each other.
The second most expensive is 'to be agreed by the parties acting reasonably.'
Thirty-five years ago this week I counted my first cash drawer at the Salem branch. It was $11 short. My manager, Dolores, made me count it four more times until it wasn't. I think about that most days: the number is the number, and the only way out is through. Happy anniversary to the twelve people who were hired that same autumn and are still here.
Dolores trained me too. She also made me re-count. I now understand why.
The number is the number. Framing this for the finance team.
Forty-one years ago today Margaret Hale and David Mercer left a big firm with one rule: a client should always be able to reach the person handling their matter. We are bigger now. The rule has not changed, and the day it does I will have failed at this job.
Same-day callback rate for September: 99.4%. The 0.6% was a snowstorm in Duluth, so I'm counting it.
The rule is also the reason our conflicts process works. People tell you things when they trust you'll pick up.
Three years since we redesigned the invoice: every entry in plain language, the name of the person who did the work, no codes. Billing disputes are down 67%. Collections are faster. The lesson is not about invoices. It's that people pay for what they understand.
It also made our lawyers write better time entries, which made them better lawyers. Side effect, not an accident.
I send our invoice to clients as an example of what to demand from every professional. Including me.
Walked a 14-acre industrial parcel on the southwest side this morning before reading the survey. Found a drainage easement the survey shows and a neighbour's fence the survey does not. Both matter. Only one was on paper.
Every new matter at this firm goes through a conflicts check before anyone opens a file. This week the check flagged a party name that matched a matter from 2019. It took four hours to resolve, and we declined the engagement. Four hours against a reputation. Cheap.
And the client thanked us for telling them straight. They'll be back with something we can take.
Our eighth annual 'How to read your financial documents' workshop for seniors is November 12 at the Portland branch. Free, no sales, no sign-up sheet that becomes a lead list. Bring the annuity contract you never understood. Last year we found two people paying 3.1% a year for a product that paid 2.4%.
I attended as a civilian in 2022 and learned something about my own pension statement. Recommending it to my bridge club.
To every parent starting a custody case this autumn: the judge is not deciding who is the better person. The judge is deciding what is best for your child. Argue that, only that, and you will be heard.
And bring the school calendar. Judges love a parent who knows the school calendar.
Second Chance Checking passed 900 accounts this week. Eight years ago people told me a product for customers other banks had rejected would be a charity. Default rate: lower than our standard checking. Charity would have been fine too. It turned out to be good banking.
The Fed data has said this for a decade: access is not the same as risk. You proved it with a product. Sending the numbers to a colleague at the SF Fed.
A founder sent me a term sheet with a 2x participating preferred and asked if it was 'standard.' I sent back a one-page spreadsheet showing what it does at a $20M exit. They understood in thirty seconds. Numbers explain terms better than lawyers do.
And check who owns the code before you worry about the preference.
Q3 balance-sheet one-pager is up. Loans-to-deposits 81%, uninsured deposits 19%, cash and securities covering 2.3× anything that could leave in a week. It is one page because a customer should be able to read it standing at the counter. If you can't explain your balance sheet in a page, the problem is the balance sheet.
Still one page. Still the most honest thing a bank can publish.
Red Folder cross-references it. Two documents, twelve pages between them, whole bank covered.
Hearth broke ground on 24 units in Sisters today. Meridian Trust is the construction lender, and I recused myself from the vote, which Helen made sure of before I could. By next fire season, 24 more wildland firefighters will be able to live in the county they protect. Kyle and Marisol would have been 34 and 29 this year.
Recusal noted in the minutes, as it should be. The loan was approved 8–0. You'd have made it 9.
Bend branch staff asked to volunteer on the build days. I said yes before asking anyone.
Deposition prep for a nervous witness, in one sentence: your only job is to answer the question that was actually asked, truthfully, and then stop talking. Everything else is my job.
Four years since the core cutover. A reporter asked me this week what the secret was. Running both systems in parallel for four months and reconciling every account every night was the secret. It was expensive and boring and it is why nobody noticed. Boring is the goal.
The board heard 'parallel for four months' and asked about the cost. I asked about the alternative. We approved it in one meeting.
Six years of customer-linked executive pay at Meridian Trust: half of leadership bonuses tied to satisfaction scores and complaint-resolution time. Complaint-resolution median went from 9 days to 2. Profit went up anyway. If you want a bank to treat customers well, pay its leaders for treating customers well. It isn't complicated. It's just rare.
Half my bonus depends on whether a customer in Bend was called back the same day. I check. Daily.
The complaint summary in the board packet and this pay model are the same idea from two directions. Good.
Won a motion in the Northern District this week on the papers, no argument. Three months of work compressed into 14 pages. The judge cited page 9. That's the one I rewrote six times.
The one you rewrote six times is always the one they cite. Congratulations.
Fourteen pages. The other side filed 38. Length is not an argument.
September same-day callback rate: 99.4%. Every client who called the firm heard back from their lawyer the same day, except during one snowstorm in Duluth, which I am counting as an act of God and Elena is counting as an excuse.
Our annual independence vote was Tuesday. Nine directors, nine votes to remain an independent Oregon bank. We hold the vote every year, whether or not anyone is offering to buy us, because independence is a decision and decisions should be made on purpose, in minutes, with names attached.
Nine to nothing. Five years running. Thank you, all of you.
I voted the way the customers in the complaint summary would have. Easy vote.
Five years of 'Same Day' account opening this week. 2021: four days, forty-one hand-offs. Today: median 38 minutes, nine steps. The diagram outside my office still has all forty-one boxes on it. I want every new hire to see where we started.
The forty-one-box diagram is the most-photographed object in the building. Including the vault.
Nine steps. At Cascade we got container intake from 23 to 7 and I thought that was good. You win.
At the audit committee this week we reviewed a wire that was sent to the wrong account in August. $18,400, recovered in 48 hours. The review lasted forty minutes and the word 'who' was not used once. Three controls changed. This is what hospitals taught me: people report what they will not be blamed for.
The same review in 2017 would have taken a week and found a scapegoat. The three controls are already in the Folder.
Control no. 2 is a 140-foot-walk-to-the-printer type fix. Costs nothing. Already live.
Closed an estate today that had been open since 2019 because one deed from 1987 had the wrong legal description. Six years. One sentence. If you own property, read your deed once. Just once.
A reminder of what a community bank is for: this morning we closed a $280,000 equipment loan for a Woodburn hazelnut dryer. Robert Tanaka explained to our board in 2016 why orchards need seven-year loans with one payment a year. We built the product. Today the product bought a dryer. That is the whole business model in one sentence.
The grower called me after signing. First new dryer on that farm since 1988.
A client asked me this week whether to settle. I told her what I tell everyone: I'll give you my honest read of the odds, the cost, and what a trial will take out of you. Then it's your decision, not mine. Lawyers who make that choice for clients are usually choosing for themselves.
And the honest read includes 'I don't know yet' when that's the truth.
The 'Monday 9 a.m.' question is now a required line on every change-approval form at the bank: 'If this fails, what does the customer experience at 9 a.m. Monday, and who fixes it?' I asked it out loud for three years. Now it's a form field. That is how board influence actually works — slowly, then as a checkbox.
Field 7 on the form. We have rejected two changes on that line alone this year. Both would have been fine. Probably.
Closed the sale of a family-owned HVAC business today. Three generations in the room, 46 employees staying, the name staying on the vans. The 1941 Vacumatic made it through another one.
Opening a bank branch with four employees and a folding table, 2009 edition: the table was $34 at the hardware store on Greenwood Avenue. It is now in the break room with a brass plaque. Every new Bend hire sits at it on their first day. The lesson is not about furniture.
The table has a lower cost-per-transaction than any teller station we've bought since.
A title problem is a story somebody stopped writing down. The 1962 house with no deed after a 1991 death, the alley nobody vacated, the easement in a 1948 letter. The fix is almost always the same: find the person, find the paper, finish the sentence.
214. And the Woodburn dryer loan makes 215 next week.
The hazelnut price, the November weather and the export market are page three of the Red Folder every quarter because of you.