Keeping up with Jerry

Jerry J. Williams is the chairman, president and CEO of the $1.74 billion-asset Orion Bancorp Inc., the second-largest privately owned bank in Florida. Headquartered in Naples, Orion operates in Collier, Lee, Sarasota and Manatee counties and the Florida Keys, where the Texan transplant began grooming his thoroughbred bank 28 years ago.

Williams, the majority stockholder, spurred Orion to the top 1 percent of banks and bank-holding companies in the country. Among banks and bank-holding companies with assets of $1 billion to $3 billion, Orion ranked third in the United States and first in Florida in financial performance. From 2000 to 2004, Orion posted compound annual growth rates of 30 percent, 35 percent and 24 percent for earnings per share, net income and asset growth, respectively. With many loans concentrated in Florida real estate development, Orion's return on equity has hovered around 25 percent annually for the past three years.

Affable, straight-talking and remarkably humble, Williams deflects praise of Orion's performance to the managers and employees of what he calls his "boutique bank." In 2006, moving at a steady, calculated gallop, Williams has set his sights on the green pastures of Broward and Palm Beach counties in an expansion that will triple Orion's deposit market to about $100 billion.

Chairman of the Florida Bankers Association, a board member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta and a member of the government relations council of the American Bankers Association, he's on the move from sunup to sundown, pausing occasionally to look over his shoulder for signs of competitors.

We followed Williams one recent winter day, beginning at his Naples headquarters.

7:40 a.m. Jerry Williams parks his black BMW behind Orion's headquarters on bustling Tamiami Trail, where he takes a wake-up call from Florida Bankers Association CEO Alex Sanchez. The question of the week: How to handle requests for FBA fund-raising help from political candidates? Williams starts his day tiptoeing through the delicate ballet of staying neutral but relevant to the state's political powerbrokers.

8:05 a.m. Williams, 45, tall and tan, climbs the stairs to Orion's executive offices on the second floor, meeting senior managers with urgent questions along the way. Orion's security chief updates him on bank robberies-not at Orion-near the East Coast. Could be the work of Orlando pros who had been lying low, she tells him.

Williams stops by the boardroom, where he manages to crack a smile on two of three grim-faced government auditors. "We get audited about 400 times a year," exaggerates Williams as he leaves the boardroom, a faint drawl betraying his Texan origins. "It's too nice in there. They don't want to leave."

8:30 a.m. Williams' executive assistant greets him in his small office with a review of the day's calendar and telephone messages. A packed briefcase sits against a wall. Seven photographs, all of his wife, Heather, and sons Conrad, Hunter and Wade, ring the office.

A couple of executives poke their heads into his office. They rave about the previous evening's welcoming party for the Florida Atlantic coast bank officers who will join Orion as it opens 12 offices during the next three years in Broward and West Palm Beach counties.

"One of [the Atlantic bankers] said, 'All these people like each other. It's like a cult,'" chuckled one Orion executive. Williams smiles, pleased. For him, Orion's corporate culture is everything.

8:41 a.m. Williams heads downstairs for a retail briefing chaired by Andy Kirkman, Orion's executive vice president for retail banking. Pausing in the lobby to greet a customer and some sleepy-eyed employees, he avoids a neatly stacked pyramid of doughnut holes next to the gourmet coffee and tea.

"It's a phenomenal thing," Kirkman tells the half-dozen senior managers about Orion's home-equity loan production. "The loans never stop." Beaming, the managers have been reporting year-to-date production goals at 100, 150 and 250 percent. And it seems nobody is satisfied with 99-percent compliance with customer-service quality goals. A lot of "Gee whiz, thanks guys, I couldn't have done it without you" pass back and forth across the table.

Williams praises, and then warns the group not to let "good feelings" override Orion's devotion to numbers.

"This is our report card," says Williams, leafing through the latest industry market report. Numbers count, feeling good doesn't, Williams preaches.

He chafes at another burr under his saddle: In the report, he zeros in on a competitor's pathetic performance in the booming Naples marketplace; however, the competitor's recent press release suggests just the opposite.

"Are you kidding me?" Williams asks in mocking disbelief. All hat and no cattle, he surmises. Somebody needs to look into this deception, he mutters. The SEC, bank regulators, the media who bought it hook, line and sinker. Somebody. "People can say whatever they like. That's why we like the numbers, because the numbers don't lie," he tells the group.

Orion's numbers are good.

About $1 Million Profit per Week

Orion reported profit of $6.5 million for the fourth quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2005, an increase of 40 percent compared with profit in the fourth quarter of 2004. Deposits were up 29 percent to $1.3 billion, while loans at Orion grew 41 percent to $1.5 billion as of December 2005; it can make loans up to $35 million.

Orion's total assets grew by $478 million to $1.78 billion in 2005.

Orion closed $1.15 billion in loans last year. Of that, $915 million was in commercial real estate, much of it construction loans.

"For us to get a clear picture, we focus on the core business," says Williams. One leading indicator is the increase in noninterest-bearing deposits, because "these folks don't have to bank with us," Williams observes.

Allen C. Ewing Co., an investment banking firm that tracks banking industry performance, ranks Orion No. 1 on its list of the top 10 high-performing community banks. Ewing Co. says Orion has the best return on equity in Florida.

Its return on average equity, a measure of a bank's profitability, was 30.29 percent for 2005. Williams predicted Orion's annual profit would reach $50 million by the end of 2005-"about $1 million a week." It exceeded that, at $62.7 million.

Texas to Ohio to Key West

Williams was born and raised in Athens, Texas, a town of 10,000, 73 miles southeast of Dallas. His family and upbringing infused him with a strong work ethic.

"You work six days a week, go to football games on Friday night, maybe a community college game on Saturday and church on Sunday," explains Williams, who played "both ways" in high school football-wide receiver on offense and safety on defense. He started cutting lawns, and then inherited his brother's paper route.

His father and grandfather, prominent business owners in town, were strong influences.

Athens is hometown to some big players: Clint Murchison Jr., one of the original owners of the Dallas Cowboys football team, and Robert Bass, who led an incendiary battle for control of the fiercely independent St. Petersburg Times in 1990. Most of Williams' family still lives in Athens.

He graduated from the University of Kentucky with a bachelor's degree in business administration in 1984 and went to work in banking in Ohio. In 1987, a 27-year-old Williams jumped at the opportunity to become president of First National Bank of the Florida Keys. By 1994, the bank's assets had more than doubled. Williams bought controlling interest in the bank and began its transition to Orion Bank.

"I tell young people to take risks early in their careers," says Williams, who was named in 2005 to the Junior Achievement of Southwest Florida's Business Leadership Hall of Fame.

9:00 a.m. A conference call with the chair of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta finance committee doesn't happen, so Orion executive vice president and senior commercial lending officer Martha Huntenburg and commercial lending vice president Tom Hebble take the opportunity to update Williams on blueprints and maps, which provide detail about the Broward County location, spread across Williams' desk. They recommend leasing more space than originally had been planned.

10:15 a.m. Orion's downtown Naples office is a multimillion-dollar extreme makeover of a Naples legend-the Swamp Buggy, a bar known for its drive-up lane. Orion isn't a retail banking operation and doesn't need a lot of branch offices, just a few really nice ones. "It's a billboard," Williams says.

Williams is a hugger. Inside, he hugs customer service reps and branch managers. Somebody has baked cookies.

He heads to a conference room with Skip Quillen, owner of Culinary Concepts, which operates four restaurants in Naples-two Chops City Grill restaurants, Pazzo! Italian Cafe and Yabba Island Grill.

"He started in the kitchen. I like guys who started in the kitchen," Williams says.

After Quillen's yearlong tour of potential United States markets for opening new restaurants, Southwest Florida emerged as the winner last year. He wants to open two more in Naples, and he and Williams are talking. Of Williams, Quillen says it takes "vision and guts to bet on a restaurant."

"He tells us what he sees in the market, we tell him what we see in the market," Williams says. "That's the difference between a transaction versus a relationship."

Williams says Quillen was a leader in Fifth Avenue's revival. The success of his restaurants allowed Quillen to start Karma Club five years ago, which raised about $250,000 for six local charities in 2005. Orion has contributed $10,000 each year. "He doesn't have to do it," Quillen says, "but he does."