Raymond Heh knows the value of building strong contacts. As a regional president of Bank One, Heh spent 10 years in the Akron/Canton area from the mid-’80s to mid-’90s, building and nourishing his network.
It wasn’t until he was relocated to Cincinnati three years ago that he realized how important that network had been. “My phone didn’t ring,” he recalls.
Heh’s phone is ringing again. He returned to the Akron/Canton market this spring, and has spent the last six months re-establishing his contacts, making new connections and advocating the importance of “who you know.”
How important is networking to your position as a president of Bank One?
It’s really extremely important, because the way things get done in the community really centers around the people you know, and that’s the network you’ve developed.
It’s important in two senses: One, it’s very important to the community itself and community activities, boards and organizations, because they rely on the leaders in the community to help them accomplish what they need to get done, and the network of people you’ve developed are the people who help you get things done.
It’s equally important from a personal business aspect — in this case for Bank One—because we get a lot of our customers from the network of people we’ve developed and that we know — whether I know them personally, or whether the people that work for me know them.
If they are aware of a situation with a potential customer or prospect for us that needs banking services, because they know me or they know someone who works for me, they call us up. It’s also very important from a business development point of view.
How much of your time do you spend out in the communities you’re responsible for?
I’m probably in the office about 50 percent of the time and out 50 percent. If I were better organized, I’d probably be out of the office 80 percent, because that’s really when you’re getting something done.
Sitting here moving paper around doesn’t accomplish a whole lot for me. I’ve got three markets that I’m responsible for, so I need to spend time in each of those markets. Right now, I’m spending the bulk of that time in Akron, but over time, that will equal out.
Much of that time is spent getting reacquainted with customers of the bank — people that I had relationships with or knew prior to leaving for Cincinnati. Part of that time is getting involved with community activities. Since coming back, I’ve been asked to go back onto the ARDB Executive Committee.
I’m also on the College of Business Administration Advancement Council at the University of Akron and there will be a couple of other things that I will be involved in. About 10 to 15 percent of my time right now is spent in community-type functions and the rest with customers and prospects.
How do you get your employees to subscribe to this philosophy and become involved in their community?
You can’t just tell them they need to be involved. It won’t work. They may go through the motions, but it really won’t work. The people we have in management positions have had that as part of their personal makeup — they want to be involved in the community.
It’s one of the things that over time leads to becoming a manager in the company. What we try to do is help them get involved in things that they may be interested in that may be both beneficial to the community and to the bank.
What advice would you offer someone who was new to a community and wanted to get involved?
No. 1, they have to have a desire and an interest, because if they don’t, it just doesn’t work. But if they are interested in making an effort to get involved, one of the best things they can do is to get into the Leadership Akron program or the Leadership Canton program.
These programs are tremendous jump-starts because you have the opportunity to learn about organizations and to meet people that it might take you many years to meet without going through a program like this. What they will find if they make an effort and if they tell people they’re interested, is that communities are very open to their participation.
Community organizations need people who are willing to work for them, willing to contribute time and effort. If you express a willingness, you’ll find yourself inundated with offers and opportunities to get involved and you’ll probably end up having to pick and choose, because you can’t do everything.
How has the concept of networking changed over the last 20 years?
From a business point of view, I don’t think it’s changed dramatically. I’ve been in many different communities throughout my career and it’s the same virtually in every community: You need to develop a network of people that you can call on for assistance, and that’s basically the way business gets done.
From a community point of view, it’s changed a lot. In a community like Akron, it used to be you had a small group of people — power brokers in the community. It used to be if you needed something to get done in Akron, you could get the heads of the rubber companies together and they could get it done if they decided that it needed to be done.
It isn’t that way any more. It’s a much broader group. That’s resulted from several changes. One, people move around a lot more. You’ve got new faces and new people involved, so networking and building a network to get things done is a constant process.
It isn’t that you build a network and it stays in existence, because the faces are always changing. If you look at Akron, the rubber companies aren’t all here in the same sense that they used to be, so you can’t just go to them and expect to get things done. You have to attract a much broader group of people, whether they’re small business owners or heads of banks or heads of rubber companies or people in organizations like the ARDB.
They’re here. But you have to seek them out and put a network of people together to get things done.
How much of your business comes in through the contacts you’ve established?
Probably the bulk of it. We have a very active calling program on prospects — companies that aren’t doing business with us — and we do get business that way. But it’s much easier and probably a more frequent occurrence that somebody calls us up and says, ‘I have this friend or I have this client that needs banking services, are you interested?’
It becomes much easier for us to go out to that business with that kind of an introduction rather than calling them and saying, ‘Hey, I’m from Bank One, and you don’t know me, but can I come out and talk to you?’
Who’s in your network?
Probably everybody who is active either in a business sense or in a community sense in Akron and Canton. Obviously, because I’m in banking, it becomes very important to my organization and to me to have active contact with law firms and CPA firms.
But it’s also very important to have active contact with the business leaders in the community and people who are generally active in the community, because these are the people who know what other people are doing. These are the people who know what’s going on in the community.
And that’s the help — from a business point of view — that you need.
