Founder, Cascade Cold Chain (1 truck → 340, sold 2020) · Director & Technology Chair, Meridian Trust Bank
Bend · Meridian Trust Bank · 911+ connections
In 1998 I started Cascade Cold Chain in Bend with one used refrigerated truck and a loan from Meridian Trust that no larger bank would make. By 2020 we had 340 trucks and 900 people, and I sold the company on the condition that the Bend headquarters stay open. It did.
I joined Meridian's board in 2021 and chair the technology committee. In 2011 a failed software rollout at my own company cost me the worst eight weeks of my working life, so in every technology discussion I ask the same question: what happens to the customer at 9 a.m. on Monday if this goes wrong?
Logistics is applied kindness: getting things to people who need them, on time, intact. So is banking.
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.
Twenty-eight years ago this month Meridian Trust lent me $41,000 for a used Freightliner reefer that two larger banks had declined. The loan officer drove to Bend to look at the truck. He is retired now; I still send him a Christmas card. That loan became 340 trucks. Community banking is not a slogan to me. It's a Freightliner.
That loan officer was Hank Oyama. He kept the photo of the truck on his desk until 2015.
What a failed software rollout taught me, 2011 edition: we switched dispatch systems on a Friday. By Monday, 61 trucks were in the wrong state. The eight weeks that followed are why I chair a bank's technology committee. The scar is the qualification.
Oversaw the 2022 core-banking migration from the board side; author of the 'Monday 9 a.m.' test now written into the bank's change-approval process.
Refrigerated trucking for produce and pharmaceuticals across the Northwest. 1 truck to 340; 900 employees; sold to a national carrier in 2020 with the Bend HQ retained.
M.S. Supply Chain Management, Portland State University, 1996
B.Comm., Université Laval, 1992
Field 7 on the form. We have rejected two changes on that line alone this year. Both would have been fine. Probably.
'Probably' is a page-two word.