Wanted: Noisy customers

Seven months after Carson River Community Bank opened its doors in Douglas County, Dan Dykes beats the bushes for noisy customers.

Noisy customers, he explains, are the folks who are likely to tell other people lots of other people, he hopes about their experience at the start-up bank.

So far, the effort to generate buzz about the new bank seems to be paying off.

Carson River Community Bank has collected $13.2 million in deposits since it opened its doors in mid-October in leased shopping center space along Highway 395 near the Douglas County-Carson City line. In the six weeks between mid-May and the end of June, deposits spiked by $1.75 million.

The bank also has made more than $13 million in loans, and its assets these days total about $22 million.

But Dykes, who spent years with big institutions such as Bank of America before launching the start-up, says it's been anything but easy getting the new institution rolling.

For starters, the basic business conditions for banks got more challenging just as Carson River Community Bank was ready to set sail.

Interest paid on deposits began rising as loan demand softened a bit with the cooling economy. The upshot: The spread between the interest paid by the bank on deposits and the interest it collected on loans began tightening.

"My expectations for interest margins aren't particularly high," Dykes says.

And the bank's marketing strategy depends heavily on face-to-face sales calls, many of them by the nine-member board of directors.

"You have to have a board of directors who are shoulder-to-the-wheel early in the bank's life," he says.

The bank's staff of 11 also reflects Dykes' belief that the new institution needs to focus heavily on development of personal relationships with its customers.

It's outsourced its back-office functions information technology, for instance and put its payroll budget into staffers who have direct contact with customers.

Like most banks that have been launched in northern Nevada in recent years, Carson River Community Bank initially has focused much of its marketing on business people.

'We're looking for meat-and-potatoes business customers," he says. The bank is doing some lending to small developers and providing operating loans and other capital to small businesses in the region.

But that, Dykes says, is not necessarily the bank's long-term strategy.

"We really want to execute on the whole community," he says. "That means we won't turn a deaf ear to consumer banking."

In fact, he envisions a mature Carson River Community Bank that's something of an old-fashioned institution, one that works closely with the entire community at the same time that it delivers high-technology services such as remote-deposit capture and a rich Internet-banking presence.

"I don't see anybody really doing both," Dykes says.

The double-barreled approach also means the bank needs to hustle to meet its strategic goals.

Its initial 4,100-square-foot location across the parking lot from a Target store was selected both for its high visibility from nearby Highway 395 and Jacks Valley Road and its proximity both to Carson City and the Minden-Gardnerville area, Dykes says.

But the institution's board and managers know that a community bank will need a physical presence maybe storefront bank locations sometime soon in the Carson Valley and Dayton.

Also on its radar for a possible location is the Smith Valley region of southern Lyon County.

The bank is also moving quickly to develop a portfolio of products such as remote deposit that allows it to woo customers away from much-larger financial competitors.