Transcription of Larry Wold, Maine TD Bank President for the show Love Maine Radio #316: Rob Gomez and Larry Wold
Lisa Belisle: Larry Wold is president in Maine for TD Bank and has over 30 years of commercial lending experience. I also happen to know he’s a runner and ran the TD Beach to Beacon, and I think had a pretty good time, if I’m remembering correctly.
Larry Wold: I was able to crack the top 10 in my age group for the first time ever, having run all 20.
Lisa Belisle: Oh wow, I didn’t even realize that you were that guy, that you’ve actually… What do they call them, legacy runners?
Larry Wold: Legacy runners, yes.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah.
Larry Wold: Originally, they were referring to us as streakers, but it’s sort of morphed now into legacy runners.
Lisa Belisle: Is that because the runners who streak have a different connotation?
Larry Wold: Yeah, I think my mother took it the wrong way, and so they started changing it.
Lisa Belisle: That’s good. It all comes back to your mother, doesn’t it?
Larry Wold: It does.
Lisa Belisle: We have to make her happy. So that’s kind of an interesting thing, that you finally were able to crack that, and you’ve been running for such a long time. What was it about this year that got you there?
Larry Wold: Well, I think to some degree, attrition becomes your friend in these events, but really was kind of a rededication, and started back this year, running a little more regularly with a younger group of guys that runs at noontime. I had been running more frequently with more folks my age, and by shifting to run with the younger guys, it just forces you to pick the tempo up a little bit.
Lisa Belisle: And how about your son? Does your son also run with you?
Larry Wold: Well, we… You know, we ran together quite a while ago, but he is… At this point, one of them, Eric, is quite a bit faster than I am, he’s got much younger legs, and his older brother, Brian, is a great athlete, but not a runner. So he has run a number of them, but we don’t end up running together.
Lisa Belisle: See, I had that experience also, that my son, Campbell, who knows your son, he agreed to run with me in the Maine Marathon last year, and then realized that his 23-year-old legs were much faster than his mother’s legs, which were roughly twice his age. So he was very nice and ran with me the first half, and then the second half, he’s like, “Well, I think I just need to go faster.” It’s kind of humbling, isn’t it?
Larry Wold: It is, but it’s also, you know, you’re glad your kids are active and outdoors and capable of that stuff.
Lisa Belisle: Of course.
Larry Wold: So it’s a… Like so many things, kind of a mixed reaction to it.
Lisa Belisle: Well, and I was really glad with Campbell, because he was always a soccer player, and he was a baseball player, so running, for him, has been something that has kind of come to him in the last few years.
Larry Wold: Yeah, he, like Brian, needs a ball to chase. But then you discover that that gets harder and harder as the years go by, finding a group to do that with, and running is something… Takes very little gear, and you can do it by yourself, kind of any time, any place.
Lisa Belisle: I do love that about running.
Larry Wold: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: And about running in Maine, because it’s so beautiful here.
Larry Wold: Yes, there are any number of just fabulous places to get out and go.
Lisa Belisle: So why is it that TD Bank decided to become a sponsor of the TD Beach to Beacon?
Larry Wold: The story goes back to when we were People’s Heritage Bank, and we were looking for some recognizable faces to be spokespeople for the bank, and we had approached Joan Benoit Samuelson about becoming the official spokesperson for the bank, and she came in for the meeting to just kind of talk about it, and on her way out of the meeting, noticed that our then-president, Bill Ryan, had a photograph on his table of him finishing the New York Marathon, and that started the conversation about marathoning and running, and Joanie’s dream of this race. And then we had some initial meetings, and it was originally going to be us and another major company that were going to sponsor it. Kind of at the 11th hour, they opted not to participate, and so we stepped in, then as People’s, and underwrote the first race, and it has taken off in a way I don’t think even people like Joanie, who dream big, I think it’s even probably outpaced her expectations a little bit.
Lisa Belisle: It seems appropriate, in some ways, because it’s become an international race, and TD Bank is an international company, so you probably have the kind of name recognition as a bank, internationally, as she does now for the runners.
Larry Wold: I’ve talked about the fact that the evolution of the race and the evolution of the bank have been kind of consistent, you know, going from local to regional to national to international, and also, we like to think, having proved that both the race and the bank can perform on a worldwide stage. It’s been a great partnership.
Lisa Belisle: How did you get into banking? What was… I know that you have education in the banking field, and you’ve been doing this a long time, so what was the original draw?
Larry Wold: Well, I originally… I came to Maine originally as a summer camp kid, and by the time I was probably 12, I knew I wanted to live in Maine, and it was that same sort of innocent view of it that so many summer camp and college kids have, and then the recognition that you actually needed to have a job for that to work. And at the time, my father was serving a term as president of the board of the Greater Portland Chamber, and there was a guy on the executive committee with him who ran a bank, and I was introduced to him, and they had a wonderful training program that I was put into. And so it was not quite accidental, because I knew I wanted to end up in the business world, and in the professional end of it, but I didn’t imagine I’d be at it still, 30-plus years later.
Lisa Belisle: That seems unusual, I mean, for people to stay in a field for that length of time.
Larry Wold: I think it was much more typical a while ago, but today, to have been not only in the same industry for 30-plus years, but to have been now at the same bank for almost 27 years, is unusual, because I think we’ve recognized that you need to push yourself professionally and expand your professional horizons, to have that… That it’s okay to really want to be professionally fulfilled. And where I’ve been fortunate is, while I’ve been in the same building for almost 30 years, it’s really been several completely different organizations, because it was a local community bank, and it’s worked its way up to now being this international company. So I haven’t had to leave the building or the profession or the company to have those different experiences and get that kind of fulfillment.
Lisa Belisle: I do remember, having lived in Maine myself for the entire time that you’ve been in banking, I remember People’s Heritage very well, and it was always kind of a mystery to me — I guess I was younger, and maybe that’s why it was a mystery, but — as to why this evolution did take place. So why, in banking, have we seen this movement from small, local community banks to ones that are affiliated worldwide?
Larry Wold: There are probably several factors that play a role in that, but as you may recall, back… I mean, when I started, you weren’t allowed, there wasn’t what we called interstate banking — if you were licensed in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, you couldn’t then bank people in Maine — and so it originally started by passing these interstate banking laws. And then, you know, companies need to change and grow, and there are different strategies to do that, and doing it by acquisition becomes one strategy. And interestingly, what happens then is if you do a couple of these acquisitions, you recognize, “Okay, we need to have people dedicated to this and really good at it,” because executing on it is the critical piece.
Well, then you have a team of professionals who you need to keep busy, and it almost feeds on itself, that, “Okay, well, we’ve done this one, and now we’ve got to go find the next one to keep people happy,” or keep them busy. And at the same time, because of the, to some degree, the regulatory climate, which creates a lot of overhead you have to spread out, and the Internet, to some degree, which has kind of made the banking business a little bit more of a commodity, the only way to… One way to adjust to that is scale, is get bigger, and so we… It’s one of those interesting things, that there was kind of never this public policy debate about “do we want big banks or little banks,” but yet behaved in a way that drove the banks to be bigger and bigger. You even see it today with the local community banks that have a town name at the very beginning of them, that now are all expanding and growing into each other’s territories, so it’s been an interesting process.
Lisa Belisle: Well, and I know that one of my banks is TD Bank, which I think your tagline is “America’s most convenient bank”?
Larry Wold: Correct.
Lisa Belisle: And one of the reasons I have kept this account is because you’ve done things within your industry which previously were unheard of, with expanded hours and weekend hours, and that really made a big difference to me, that banks were known for these sort of… Well, they used to call them “banker’s hours,” right?
Larry Wold: Right.
Lisa Belisle: They were very short, and if you were still working when you needed to deposit your check, then, you know, you were out of luck.
Larry Wold: You were just out of luck, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: And I think trying to respond to the marketplace has really made a big difference.
Larry Wold: It has, and once one person does that, then the next… You know, your competitors do it, and then you’ve got to find the next thing to do. So it really drives the industry, which I think has been very healthy, to make it… I mean, I’m sure it’s no different in this business, that when a competitor tries something new that works, you have to respond to it, and then if you want to differentiate yourself, you’ve got to try something new beyond that. And it drives the innovation that I think is what, first of all, makes being in business interesting, but it’s also what’s driven our country to be such an innovator and do so many wonderful things that they’ve done.
Lisa Belisle: My understanding is that TD is a Canadian bank. Has there been any… I don’t know, has there been any shifting within the banking industry as a result of TD having this, I guess, cultural influence from a different country?
Larry Wold: So it’s been, yeah, it’s been, as our Canadian colleagues say, quite a process, and the goal is to be a North American bank, but having two different regulatory climates would have made that challenging to begin with, but the financial crisis of 2008-2009 probably made that even more complicated than it had been. And a number of the Canadian banks had tried to come down here to the United States and establish a foothold, and quite frankly, none of them had had any success, and so there was a lot of skepticism when TD announced that it was buying Banknorth.
And it fortunately has been very successful; we actually now have more retail locations in the United States than we have in Canada, and not a whole lot of people south of the border know, necessarily, that “TD” stands for “Toronto Dominion.” I love the story that our CEO was vacationing up on the coast of Canada a couple years ago, and he heard a couple of people with sort of that heavy New York, New Jersey kind of accent say to each other as they saw the TD Bank story up there, “Jeez, I didn’t know TD was in Canada now,” as though it was a… Everything starts in the United States and migrates north.
Lisa Belisle: And you have had a very strong interest in also trying to develop a community presence in Maine, so not only are you trying to make things kind of uniform throughout the TD system in North America, but you also have tried to work with Maine businesses to, I guess, generate greater success and economic stability.
Larry Wold: Yeah, it’s an interesting balancing act, because there are cultural differences, and differences in how economies work in various places, so you have to find that balance between uniformity and consistency, which you have to have to manage something on this scale, but also remain flexible and adaptable locally. And I think the banks generally, and I know TD in particular has recognized we have a role to play in community development, and typically, that’s economic development, but not necessarily limited to that.
You know, one of the things we love about the TD Beach to Beacon is it has created economic opportunities for people and really become, to some degree, a little business all by itself, and driven revenue into the community, but it’s also been great from the standpoint that it gets people outdoors and active, it’s family fun. I always talk about what a great, diverse event it is, right? Because it doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, male or female, fast or slow, fully capable of running or need a wheelchair or a handcycle to do it. It kind of throws the doors open for anybody who wants to articipate in the event, even if all you do is volunteer.
Lisa Belisle: One of the things that you mentioned to our Maine Magazine managing editor, Paul Koenig, in the financial issue is that you’ve enjoyed seeing the new uses that some of our more traditional industries once had — for example, mills, the mill buildings that are being repurposed into spaces for creatives — and I thought that was an interesting comment, that you’re seeing almost this recycling of, or repurposing of things. And as a bank, is there ever any, I guess, risk in trying to lend to entrepreneurs who are engaging in these new businesses?
Larry Wold: I think there always is, and that’s the challenge for us, is to figure out who you do business with and how you do business with them, but there’s always… If you’re not willing to take that on and manage it, you wouldn’t survive in the business, and there are lots of agencies that we work with, the Finance Authority of Maine, the Small Business Administration, local kinds of organizations that provide support to more startup kind of entrepreneurs. And then as people develop a track record, it becomes easier to manage that risk. You almost never make it go… You don’t ever make it go away; you just learn to manage it and find ways to work with it, so that it’s mitigated to the appropriate degree, I hope. But I think about our, even our operations in Maine. You know, our operations center up in Lewiston is in an old textile mill, and we have a state-of-the-art call center that’s in a shopping center, in an old store in the shopping center, so we’ve really sort of not just supported other people doing it, but we’ve kind of supported the process by taking part in it ourselves.
Lisa Belisle: You and I both have children of the same age — my son was in your son’s wedding over this Labor Day weekend — and for me as a parent, knowing that there’s a place to return to, should my children want to return to Maine, is really important. How do you feel about the opportunities that we’re presenting to the next generation?
Larry Wold: Well, I think we’re very keyed into it as a business community, and certainly as a bank, we’ve got a real focus on trying to attract and retain the millennial generation, who, quite frankly, I think have a bad reputation, an ill-deserved bad reputation. We’ve got a number of young folks working for us who are just as hardworking and hungry and dedicated as anybody in a previous generation was. They are motivated differently sometimes, and their work patterns are a little different, but they’re no less motivated to do their best and to be successful. But I think that the demographic shift we’re undergoing is going to be interesting, and it’s because there’s going to be such a demand for workers that there is going to be a lot more opportunity in Maine. We just need to make sure it’s good opportunity, and the opportunity that people are interested in.
Lisa Belisle: So we obviously had this very significant financial crisis about 10 years ago now. Do you feel like we’re out of it?
Larry Wold: Oh, I think we’re out of it from the standpoint of it being a crisis, and I think we’ve been out of that for quite some time. I think people actually probably are starting to lose sight of how close that was to the meltdown everybody really feared. I mean, there was a point in time there where you, almost on a daily basis, didn’t quite know what was going to happen next. So we’re clearly well past that, and I think if you look in Maine in particular, housing prices, as a rule, have come back to those pre-recession levels, employment is back up to that level.
But in some ways, you never put that… I mean, certain people won’t ever be able to put it behind them, because it interrupted their professional career, or the housing crisis caught them at a bad time, and they might have lost a job as a result of that, and the value in their house declined, and they weren’t able to keep it. So those people still need a lot of help and support, and there is opportunity out there, and we’re… You know, there’s a real fighting spirit to those of us who are in Maine. Whether you were born here or not, I don’t think makes any difference. If you’ve come here, you have to have a certain toughness about you just to begin with, and so those efforts will continue.
Lisa Belisle: I think about my… Again, thinking about my kids, our kids, and the fact that these were their growing years, you know, this is the financial crisis that they remember being a part of. You know, they were deciding where to go to college, and they were seeing people around them lose their houses and lose their jobs, and at least the ones that are in their 20s now, they’re very aware of having come through this. And that’s kind of a difference between my generation, our generation, and theirs.
Larry Wold: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: It’s a real sense that things aren’t as stable as they seem.
Larry Wold: But every generation faces a different set of circumstances, but I see it even from my oldest to my youngest in terms of the job environment when they graduated from college. You know, when our oldest was out, it was… Jobs were not plentiful, it was pretty challenging to find good work opportunities, and now, Lindsay having just graduated, there… You know, people are almost clamoring to hire young people with good training and education. So it has been an interesting shift, and they just, as we talked earlier, right, they see the world differently, and we were laughing about it at Eric’s wedding over the weekend that when my friends were getting married, we all owned cars and rented tuxedos, and this generation all bought suits to wear so they’d have something to wear afterwards, and they rent their cars, and they have a whole different approach to how they do things. And in a way, the smartphone has replaced the automobile as how you connect with people. You don’t have to drive around and drive to someplace anymore; they can connect instantly, just with something in their pocket.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it is an interesting point that you’re making, that it’s just a placement of their priorities, their funds, their energy, and it’s not really a good or a bad thing, it’s just the way that they are, versus… And not even all of them. I mean, that’s the one thing I think about when we talk about generations, like the millennials: not everybody falls into the exact pattern that we expect every millennial to fall into.
Larry Wold: Right.
Lisa Belisle: The same way that, as a Generation Xer, I’m not like everybody in my generation. So I think that ability to look at patterns, but not always pigeonhole people, is very important.
Larry Wold: Yeah, and I saw something fascinating not too many years ago, it was a reprint of two newspaper articles that basically was talking about this next generation, and they don’t have the same work ethic as us, and they’ve had it too easy, and that whole storyline that you hear over and over again, and the first one was written in, like, the 1870s, and the second one written in the 1940s, and I’m sure you could find another one that was written sometime in the 2000s. And so everybody looks back and thinks they had it harder and had to work more than everybody else, and we’ve managed to thrive pretty well with each successive generation coming along. And I think we hardly got everything right, so I think there’s a good chance they’ll have the opportunity to fix some of the things we didn’t do very well.
Lisa Belisle: I think that’s probably true, and knowing my field, the field of medicine, I’m encouraged to see Campbell and his peers going into what some people are describing as sort of a crisis time, but this is just… They’re just there, so to them, this is medicine, and they’re going to experience it differently, and they’re probably, hopefully, working with people that have been there in the field for a while, going to come up with some new solutions and a new approach, and I think it’s really going to benefit all of us.
Larry Wold: Yeah, and I don’t think medicine is broken, by any means. To the contrary, it’s doing such great things. It’s the business of medicine that is in turmoil right now, and that’ll sort itself out. I’ve got to believe it. It’s too fundamentally important to not get figured out at some point.
Lisa Belisle: Well, I agree, so we’ll just have to keep working on this issues with all the people who are ahead of us, and in our group, and the people behind us.
Larry Wold: And the technological changes that they have to take advantage of are absolutely fascinating, and I don’t… Doesn’t matter whether they’re going into medicine or banking, there’s cutting-edge technology out there that is absolutely amazing, and that they have a comfort with that I know I never will, and so I think that they’ll push the envelope on that in some absolutely fascinating ways in the near term.
Lisa Belisle: I agree. I appreciate your coming in and talking to me today. I’ve been speaking with Larry Wold, who is the president in Maine for TD Bank and has over 30 years of commercial lending experience. Thank you for the good work you’re doing, and keep it up.
Larry Wold: Thank you. Plan to.