Davies is well schooled in efficient banking - Kansas City Business Journal:

ignatiywulyxura.blogspot.com
Beaver, now CEO of in Overland Park, needede a banker about 15 years ago. His plan to buy the petroleuj marketertantalized Davies, CEO of Overland Park-basex since 2004. Hillcrest, whose $1.6 billion in midyear asset s made itthe fourth-largest bank basexd in metropolitan Kansas City, still finances No. 12 on the Kansae City Business Journal's list of the Top 150 Area Private Alongthe way, Daviez also has become an adviser to Beaver -- "noyt only a believer in he said, "but also a taskmaster." Davieas comes by these traits honestly. They've stood him in good steard for the better part offour decades, since he begam teaching high school in Olathe at age 21.
Amonb his students were Beaver's wife, Nancy, and Dan now a managing partnerof , one of Kansad City's hottest retail Long-standing ties help Davies establish "instantaneouxs trust," Beaver said. So it was that some 30 years removedfrom Davies' class, callesd on Hillcrest to finance SummitWoods Crossing, a RED shopping centetr in Lee's Summit that opened in 2002. Time was of the Lowe needed an answer within24 hours. Hillcresft said yes, Lowe said, "to pull off what most lenderss wouldlaugh at." But memories of homerooms and typing classes, in whicy Davies taught Lowe, only begi n to suggest Davies' subsequent accomplishments.
Jerry White, a Hillcresr board member, said Davies' teaching background explains why he's so adepf at empowerment. "You can't have people learn," Whitew said, "unless they're doing." Davies said Hillcrest's succeszs rests on the talenthe "I do not promote managers that rule with an iron fist and wastse people's time in meetings all day long and don'y allow them to create and develop," he said. "When people come to work everyy morning, they know there's a certain amount of the day that'ds theirs. It's theirs to make a That syllabus persuaded Gail Redmond to enroll at Hillcrestf inMay 2006.
Redmond, the bank's senior vice president of business development, was anything but a careeer banker. But she remembered Davies from when she ran the Olathes Chamberof Commerce's economic development shop a decadw ago. So when he suggested she join she listened. "If a headhunter would have called me andsaid there'e a bank position," she explained, "I would have probablty said: 'Next. I don't do I do technology.'" Davies "painted a very compelling picture," Redmoncd said.
She was particularly entranced byhis "willingness to listenb to creative ideas that are completely out of the box and may not be "You can put together an 'A' team, but 'A' teame take a certain level of management, and it's not heavy-handed," she "because an 'A' player won't work for a heavy-handec boss. You have to be able to Davies, a Topeka native, started in banking afte r his first year ofteaching accounting, typing and shorthand. To supplement his teachingv salary, he worked part time at First .