Always Striving

One of the core beliefs at Vantage West Credit Union is to “act on fact.” In other words, don’t make assumptions. Admit when you don’t know something. And then go find the information you need.

A key partner for Vantage West CU in adhering to the “act on fact” dictum is CUES, according to Robert D. Ramirez, CCE, president/CEO of the $1.2 billion credit union based in Tucson, Ariz. “What CUES does,” Ramirez says, “is provide us a lot of factual information that we can use to serve our members and run our business.”

Ramirez and his organization also subscribe to the Japanese philosophy of kaizen, which calls for seeking continuous improvement “of people, processes—everything,” Ramirez explains. “It’s the idea that you’ve never arrived. You’re always striving to improve. That’s why I’m focused on education to improve what we do here, and I pass that on to my employees.”

Here again, he views CUES as a vital ally. For instance, he’s taken “lots of CUES courses,” he notes, including the CEO Institute, which earned him the Certified Chief Executive designation, and he’s attended several CUES Symposium events that bring together pairs of credit union CEOs and board chairs from across the country.

“The mission of CUES fits well with me personally and with what we do here at Vantage West CU,” Ramirez says. “We’re always developing personnel.”

Given that natural affinity with CUES’ mission, it comes as no surprise that Ramirez deepened his relationship with CUES in 2008, when he joined the board of directors. In November, he assumed his duties as the board’s new chairman.

In sizing up CUES’ current status, Ramirez observes that new CUES President/CEO Chuck Fagan has done “a great job” in respecting former CEO Fred Johnson’s legacy, while also moving CUES forward. And Ramirez is excited about the inaugural Strategic Innovation Institute™, with segment one hosted by MIT this fall.

“For credit unions to face our many challenges, we need to find new ways to embrace innovation,” he says. “This program is set up to do just that. Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com said it best—“every business has a shelf life”—and it’s up to us to extend that shelf life through innovation.”

This is “an exciting time for CUES,” Ramirez says—as it will be, he acknowledges, for him as the new chairman of the board.

Predictions and Promises

To his position as the new chair, Ramirez brings the experiences he’s gained in his 29 years, as of February, in credit unions. But premonitions about his career path emerged decades earlier, during his childhood in Nogales, Ariz., one of twin U.S./Mexican border towns 70 miles south of Tucson.

“My mother said, ‘Son, you’re going to be a CPA (certified public accountant) when you grow up,’” Ramirez recalls.

True to his mother’s predictions, Ramirez majored in accounting when he enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson. After earning his degree in 1976, he returned to Nogales to work as a controller for Capin Mercantile Corp., where his father worked as a fabric buyer for 48 years. Ramirez, too, had worked there part time as a youth. He remembers his first payday at age five, when he received 12 silver dollars for helping to build tricycles.

The familial connection with the company goes even further back. Capin’s founder, a Lithuanian immigrant, was a tailor who worked alongside Ramirez’s maternal grandfather, also a tailor, to make uniforms for U.S. soldiers pursuing Pancho Villa after his attacks on towns north of the border in the early 20th century.

After a couple of years working at Capin, Ramirez returned to Tucson to take another accounting job. When he passed his CPA exam six years later, in 1983, he decided he was ready for a new opportunity. He answered a newspaper ad for an assistant controller position at what was then a military credit union called DMAFB Federal Credit Union. Thus began a 29-year tenure at the organization that was later to shift to a state charter and change its name to Vantage West CU.

Ramirez got his first promotion about a half-hour into his first day on the job. The chief financial officer resigned, and Ramirez immediately became the new acting CFO. A few months later, the examiners paid the credit union a visit and issued a “not so good” CAMEL rating, Ramirez says.

He told his boss to give him three months to get the credit union back to a superior rating. “He said that if I did that,” Ramirez recalls, “he’d make me the official CFO and double my salary. We shook hands on it.”

Both men made good on their promises. Then in 1996, Ramirez moved up to the executive vice president position. He had a short stint as acting CEO in 1999 before someone else was hired for the job. Then in 2000, he took over as the president/CEO.

Standing Firm

Like many CUs, Vantage West CU had to ride out some rough stretches in recent years. In 2008, it lost $10 million. At the January 2009 board meeting, “I told the board I was going to get that money back,” Ramirez says. “I said, ‘I’ll find ways to reduce expenses, but I won’t cut staffing, and I’m not going to touch employee salaries and benefits. What I am going to do is to grow into profitability, as opposed to saving ourselves into profitability.’”

Ramirez stayed true to his words, despite pressures from regulators to do otherwise, notes Dale Whittaker, Vantage West CU chairman, who has known Ramirez throughout his credit union career. (A side note: Whittaker recently received the Gene Ball Award from the National Association of Credit Union Chairmen. Active in credit unions for 56 years, Whittaker has been on the Vantage West CU Board for 43 years.)

“When everything was going south [in 2008],” Whittaker says, “the federal and state regulators kept pushing us to cut back, to close some branches. Well, Bob had a different idea. We stuck with him, and he proved to be right.”

As Ramirez saw it, cutting staffing, salaries, benefits and branches would have impeded member service. And that ran counter to the credit union’s mission. He refers to the thinking of Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, one of Ramirez’s favorite business books. Sinek’s premise is that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.

Thus, at Vantage West CU, “our mission is very clear,” Ramirez says. “We start with a why statement. Why do we exist? We exist to help our members achieve their financial goals. That’s our No. 1 priority.”

Ramirez wasn’t about to shove that mission aside in reaction to the recession. His approach of continuing to pursue growth, even in down times, has brought good results. Based on the latest financial performance ratios from the National Credit Union Administration, Vantage West CU’s net worth ratio is at 12.46 percent as of Oct. 31, 2013, compared to its peer group average of 10.44 percent. The peer group consists of credit unions with assets equal to or greater than $500 million, approximately 422 credit unions from across the nation.

On the lending side, Vantage West CU has a loan-to-share ratio of 102 percent, outpacing peers. At a recent meeting of leaders from large credit unions to discuss loan strategies, many reported loan-to-share ratios of just 60 percent, Ramirez says.

He credits much of his credit union’s loan growth to a healthy indirect lending program, even though indirect lending, in general, “has gotten a bad name in the industry,” he notes. The key to success, in Ramirez’s view, is to have a clear understanding with dealers in the program.

“When you’re consistent with the way you execute your model,” he says, “people accept that. We’ve been very consistent about the loans we will take and what we won’t take. And dealers know that.”

Another step Vantage West CU took to boost its loan growth was to diversify into a new market. It opened a loan center to support its two existing branches in Phoenix, where the credit union now gets two-thirds of its indirect lending volume.

The loan center facilitates indirect auto loans. “We receive contracts from our auto dealers within the Phoenix metro area and our team at this center underwrites and processes these loans for us,” Ramirez explains. “It is strictly a loan center. The team does make outbound calls to the dealerships, but its primary focus is to underwrite and process indirect auto loans for us.”

Time to Weigh Options

Besides the credit union management savvy gained over 29 years, Ramirez brings substantial board leadership experience to his new CUES post. Currently he chairs the Mountain West Credit Union Association. Previously, he was board chair for the Arizona Credit Union League before it helped form MWCUA. He also serves as a director or officer for several Tucson community organizations.

One thing he’s learned serving as board chair for various organizations, he says, “is to make sure you listen more than you talk.”

As the new CUES chair, Ramirez feels one of the key issues in CUES’ future will be possible collaboration with other credit union organizations in offering educational programs and other means of assisting credit unions in accomplishing their missions. He also envisions technological innovations in how CUES delivers education to its members.

Motherly Wisdom

In his free time, Ramirez shares family activities with his wife, Katharine, and 17-year-old daughter, Gabriella. He also enjoys bicycling, rollerblading and operating his fleet of radio-controlled model helicopters. And he’s an avid reader, mostly of business-related books.

In 2009, Ramirez was chosen as the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Man of the Year. A year later, Tucson’s Father’s Day Council named him Father of the Year. The council raises money for diabetes research, an issue that’s “near and dear to my heart,” Ramirez says. “My mom had diabetes, and I have lots of relatives who are diabetic.”

His mother, now deceased, was a key influence for Ramirez. She championed perseverance—a quality that has served Ramirez well many times in his career, whether it was in his repeated efforts to pass the CPA exam, or rebounding after getting passed over the first time for CEO at Vantage West CU, or facing regulators’ criticism for his strategies during the recent recession.

“My mother was one of my biggest mentors,” Ramirez says. “She used to say, ‘Never, ever give up. Never quit.’”

Dianne Molvig is a freelance writer based in Madison, Wis.