Roger Mann has a road map of Ohio spread out on a mahogany conference table.
It’s nothing fancy, the kind of map you’d buy at a gas station or get from your auto club — big yellow Ohio, pink and red veins for the major interstates, tiny gray lines for the state routes.
Mann, president and CEO of Unizan Financial Corp., leans over the map like a military commander. The fingertips of his right hand touch the paper and circle over the words in big black capital letters, "CANTON" before they slide down I-77 then take a sharp left on I-70 to "ZANESVILLE."
Mann, sans suit jacket, continues to trace the footprint of Unizan, the result of a merger between United Bank Corp. of Canton and BancFirst Ohio Corp. of Zanesville, which in March 2001 formed a $2.7 billion financial services company.
Mann’s fingers, still following I-70, slide to BancFirst’s former territories, Newark, to Columbus, and then Dayton.
"See that?" asks Mann, his heavy eyelids raised slightly to see if his visitor is paying attention. "There’s absolutely no geographic overlap. That tells you a couple of things. One, we have the opportunity to really grow something, and because there’s no market overlap, it wasn’t a matter of closing branches, laying people off, that sort of thing."
Mann knows what he’s up against. The UNB and BancFirst merger puts the pumped-up Unizan on the same playing field as heavy hitters like KeyBank, National City and FirstMerit, all chasing the same customers. But Mann has says Unizan has an edge: It’s big enough to compete, but small enough to be agile and make decisions faster than the bigger banks.
It’s small enough to retain its community bank feel, but packs more lending muscle.
"It’s not brain surgery," Mann quips. "We simply have to out-execute the competition, and we do that by staying closer to our client and letting our leaders make decisions."
