Business View Magazine | November 2020

116 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2020 CUSB BANK handshake. He then moved to Cresco, where he made pocket loans out of the second floor of the local hotel. During this time, several local gentlemen said they’d like to start a bank and wanted him to be a part of it. So, he helped start that bank in 1888 and was named cashier. In those days, cashiers ran the bank. By the turn of the century, he was named President of Cresco Union Savings Bank.” “My great-grandfather would ride out in a horse and buggy to rural schoolhouses and preach the importance of saving money for one’s future and pass out bank pencils,” Thomson continues. “When the Federal Bank Holiday of 1933 hit during the Depression, Cresco Union Savings Bank was one of only six banks in the State of Iowa that was allowed to reopen on the first day after the four-day Federal Bank Holiday. The bank grew in the late 1930s and 1940s as my grandfather, Perce, and my uncles, would encourage and help farmers purchase more land based on the size of their families, which, in those days were the farms’ main labor force.” Today, CUSB Bank is a $520-million community bank with 87 employees and five locations: Cresco, Ridgeway, Lime Springs, Osage, and Charles City, Iowa, where approximately 65 percent of its loan portfolio is agriculture-based. According to Thomson, the bank’s corporate culture is based on five pillars, which were borrowed from Mike Krzyzewski, head men’s basketball coach at Duke University. The first is Communication. “Why?” he asks. “Because two out of three businesses fail in the first three years because of three primary circumstances: 1) they don’t have enough capital to keep going, 2) they don’t have a strategic plan, and 3) they don’t communicate; the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. So, we strive