On today’s episode, we are joined by a very important leader who was integral to Leader Bank’s founding and continues to oversee all of Leader Bank’s finances. Being a Chief Financial Officer in the current banking environment is no easy feat, join us as we dig into Brian Taylor’s journey of becoming CFO and understand how the recent bank failures are impacting financial portfolios and risk management across the industry.

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Episode Transcript

Greg Farber: 
Welcome to the Building Interest Podcast presented by Leader Bank. In season two of our Podcast, we've been exploring what it means to be a leader through conversations with leaders from within the communities we serve, and from across the world of banking and technology. Each conversation focuses on our guest's personal leadership journey and provides insights on what it means to be a good leader. In our last episode, we were joined by Marty Sunde, an insightful leadership adviser with more than 36 years of leadership experience. He talked about his journey of becoming a leader, and the most impactful advice that he received over the years. On today's episode, we're joined by someone who was integral to the Leader Bank's founding and continues to lead all of our Bank's finances, being a chief financial officer in the current banking environment is no easy feat. So let's dig into his journey of becoming CFO, and see if we can uncover a bit how the recent bank failures are impacting financial portfolios, risk management, and other things around the industry. I'm pleased to welcome to the show, Brian Taylor.

Brian Taylor: 
Thank you, Greg. Glad to be here this week.

Greg Farber:  
I think it's exciting. We've had so many interesting people on the Bank. And we haven't really focused on finance and kind of a key part of banking, isn't it?

Brian Taylor:  
There's a lot that's happening this year in the finance piece of banking.

Greg Farber:
So Brian, you're SVP, Chief Financial Officer here at Leader Bank. And you have been really since the Bank's Inception more than 20 years ago, if I'm not mistaken, pretty much right from the start. But let's go back a little bit past that. So before your time at Leader Bank, and sort of start with the path leading up to the Bank's founding, how did you initially get into finance? And was this like a math economics thing that you were just really interested in growing up? Or you sort of stumbled into this career? And how did you come about having this financial skill set that would set you up to one day, become a CFO?

Brian Taylor:  
Okay, you want to go all the way back?

Greg Farber:
I want to go back. There was a time before Leader Bank.

Brian Taylor:  
There was a time a long...

Greg Farber:  
Seems long ago now, doesn't it?

Brian Taylor:  
Different person, different world. So I guess even as a kid, I liked math I was interested in, you know, it all made sense to me. You know, one plus one equals two.

Greg Farber:  
and nothing else. It's either right or it's not

Brian Taylor:  
Exactly right or wrong. On the flip side, I really had no artistic ability, I couldn't sing, I couldn't do any of those things. I like to play sports, but I wasn't going anywhere in the sports world. So I took a career path went to college. And even in college, I didn't exactly know what I was going to do. But I knew I was going into the business side. And then, or so I thought, and I'll get to that in a second. And then second year, you had to make a decision. So I said, okay, I'm gonna do accounting. So fast forward, I graduate, I'm an accountant, and, you know, graduate move out of the house, couple years later, my parents are cleaning out the house, they bring in a couple of boxes from the house, they're like, these are yours do with them what you want. And I'm going through them clean them out. And there were two books in there about accounting that I had taken out of the library.

Greg Farber:  
and never returned...

Brian Taylor:  
And never returned. Okay? I don't want to confess that. But never return them in their accounting books when I was in high school.

Greg Farber:  
Wow, you had these books back then, they came back around unexpectedly.

Brian Taylor:  
So maybe I was always destined to be an accountant. Okay. And then it just took me that direction.

Greg Farber:
And you started as a staff accountant at some firm or how did that go?

Brian Taylor:  
After college, I went to they call it the big eight back then which that'll date me by itself because it's only big four now. Great experience. So I would recommend that type of experience to everybody and the reason is, so every couple of weeks, every three to five weeks, you go into a new client, you're working with new staff, you're working with new managers, so you have to be very adaptable. The clients have different needs different experiences. You don't know if the staff was on the job the same job the year before, if they're brand new, or if they're right out of school. So it's great training, and things I learned I had a lot of mentors, and create a lot of friends that are actually still friends to this day. And pieces of advice that they gave me where, listen, you're gonna go all these different places, people are going to know more than you like you might be the head on the job there. But you might be working for someone that's been working there for a while. They're going to know more than you go with it. Use their knowledge don't go in thinking you know everything. It was just a great piece of advice that was consistently said early on in my career.

Greg Farber:
And it kept speaking to you as you gained more and more knowledge you kept kept on with it, obviously.

Brian Taylor:  
Exactly. It was it was one of those things that it's so obvious and so true. Like, we can learn from literally everybody, everybody in a business setting in a life setting know something that you don't know. So why not tap into it?

Greg Farber:  
Absolutely. And so were any of these clients banks? Or was banking not really part of what you were thinking of at this time?

Brian Taylor:  
So, my expertise, if you will, was defense contractors. Oh, okay. Very technical, super, super regulated, even more regulated than banking. Maybe I had one bank client. It was a bank that this is in the 1980s. It didn't have a long life expectancy. And we gave it a going concern opinion, which meant that we didn't expect it to last another full year. So that was my one bank experience. I'm like, Oh, I don't know.

Greg Farber:  
And it was a bank that wasn't doing well.

Brian Taylor:  
It was a bank that wasn't doing well. I was like, Okay, well, maybe this isn't the best choice.

Greg Farber:  
So something must have happened between that. And when you woke up and said, I'm going to be the CFO for a startup bank.

Brian Taylor:  
Right? So there's a couple things that kind of happened. One, it was just time to move on from the public accounting world, it can. There's a lot of hours it can wear on you after a period of time. So you just need to make a change to get into private industry. So I went to a subsidiary of Fleet Bank, which is a startup subsidiary. So I guess a couple of dots are already stuck.

Greg Farber:  
So you're starting to see a fledgling companies sort of starting up, but under a larger banks umbrella.

Brian Taylor:  
Exactly. It was, it was a different company in that it was a startup, but at the same time, it only had a five year life expectancy.

Greg Farber:  
Okay, can I ask why that would be? Why would you start a bank and only give it five years?

Brian Taylor:  
It wasn't a bank?

Greg Farber:  
Okay.

Brian Taylor:  
It was a subsidiary of the bank.

Greg Farber:  
Gotcha.

Brian Taylor:  
Correct. So this subsidiary was created to work out the assets and loans that weren't paying from the Old Bank of New England. So it said, okay, it should take you about five years. So there was this mass hiring, put all kinds of processes and procedures in place, which I really enjoyed that aspect, which I guess that kind of plays in later on as well. And then you go to the five years, and then the company winds down. So the company is winding down. Now I'm looking for a job. So this is where fate plays a role, I guess. So I'm looking for a job and the bank in my hometown is looking for a controller. So I'm like, Okay, this is perfect. I apply for the job, I get the job. So now I'm working at this Bank. I'm loving life, the Banks doing well, it's growing, it's making money, everything's good. And then along comes a larger bank and says, Hey, we liked this Bank, and we're gonna bite you. So I'm like, Okay, well, well, that's the way it is.

Greg Farber:  
And there wasn't room for two controllers.

Brian Taylor:  
There was room they offered a job, but it was up in like, the middle of nowhere mean in my wife would I had no interest in my wife definitely had no interest in going up to I think was called Lewiston, Maine.

Greg Farber:  
I've heard of it.

Brian Taylor:  
Yes.

Greg Farber:  
I couldn't tell you anything about it, right. Unfortunately, no offense to anyone that lives or loves it.

Brian Taylor:  
I'm sure its a great town. It's not near the coast, though. I don't think so.

Greg Farber:
So that wasn't for you.

Brian Taylor:  
That wasn't for me.

Greg Farber:  
But now you've amassed all this experience, you've done small little analytical stuff. For smaller clients, you've done this five year wind down of these these assets that came into a large regional bank, which by the way, I'll date myself I've banked a Fleet myself. So I go back a little ways as well. Never worked there. But I did bank there. And then you moved on to the controller of the soon to be bought out. Bank in your hometown. Correct. So now are you at a crossroads.

Brian Taylor:  
Now I'm at a crossroads. Now I need to you know, I've got a couple little kids at home. And now here's where fate really steps in and plays a nice little nice, little role. Somebody that used to work at the Bank was now working for this person named Sushil Tuli who's starting a bank

Greg Farber:  
But hadn't started it yet.

Brian Taylor:  
But hadn't started it yet. Okay, this is in the very beginning of 2002. And so I go on, I meet Sushil, and Sushil is full of energy. And he's like, Oh, we're gonna be a billion dollar bank in 10 years. And I'm like, Okay, this seems a little bit. I just came from a bank that was 200 years old. And it took them the full 200 to get to a billion. So, and Sushil is saying, Hey, we will be 10 billion in 10 years, and he's very convincing, as well. And I'm like, okay, and I'm like, startup bank, not a lot of them around. I got super intrigued by the opportunity. So the timing worked out. I left my old bank on a Friday started with Sushil on a Monday. And then that the rest is history in a way.

Greg Farber:
And that was it, you just you rolled in you became the CFO, and you had in front of you a non existent department to build from scratch.

Brian Taylor:  
We had a non existent everything to build from scratch, on the day that I met shale, he showed me the branch, and you could literally look down from the first floor to the basement. So we had no space, it was all under construction. So we worked under some temporary offices.

Greg Farber:  
So now,I want to ask you to describe a little bit and this is something we'll get back to when we talk about complexities today. And looking back at being approximately $4 billion bank and all the financial things that we have going on now. You're looking at this, we're a $0 billion, not even a bank yet with this empty space. What does that look like? What what does a CFO do? Where do you start?

Brian Taylor:  
That was my first question. Okay, where do I start everywhere I've been has had something in place, even the startup that was the subsidiary, subsidiary of Fleet had some things in place when I got there. This really had nothing. So like, Okay, well, I need a general ledger. So now let's create a chart of accounts and do all the things from an accounting standpoint to create the process, and then talking to Sushil, okay, what are the things we're going to be doing? Icorporate that into the system we didn't have. At that point, we needed someone from deposit ops. So I was able to grab a really good person from my old bank that was willing to join as well. So okay, one checkbox. I needed a good entry level staff account. I'm like, somehow managed to find this kid that was just like, energetic, smart, hungry, like, perfect first hire. So okay, two for two in terms of just the hiring, put the processes in place, put the procedures in place, you get a couple of good smart people. and off you go. And then I remember the first day, we're like, okay, we're going to open the doors in an hour. What What, what's going to happen? Is anybody gonna come in?

Greg Farber:
Now, this is at a time we're really online banking wasn't a big thing.

Brian Taylor:  
No.

Greg Farber:
And you want people physically walking in the door? That is correct. And you weren't in charge of the marketing and the fanfare and everything else, but you still had to have a financial institution in place that was ready to accept money and make loans and all kinds of things.

Brian Taylor:  
Right. And keep in mind, we are only about six or seven months after the whole 9/11.

Greg Farber:
Wow, I hadn't necessarily considered that yet.

Brian Taylor:  
There is no... There's a whole lot of backdrop in the economic environment as well. And Sushil already arranged for a bunch of people to come in. So the first day was great. Okay. checkbox one. Okay, now we'll move on to day two, which in some ways is more scary than day one. And you're like, okay, and people just kept coming in. So my roles back then were, you know, people would be like, Okay, why do I want to put money in a, in this Bank that's been open for two days? It's a very natural question. Very good question to ask. So I asked the CFO would actually sit down with some clients back, then Sushil would sit down with clients back then explain to them, the Bank, what it's doing where it's going, FDIC insurance, which was very important for us, during those opening days.

Greg Farber:
So you are, you're bringing folks in in hopes that they will bank with a company that has no financial history? And you're giving them promises of the Bank to come? And really that's all you have.

Brian Taylor:  
That's all we have. We have tremendous capital ratios, which in the banking world is pretty important.

Greg Farber:
But most customers don't look at that.

Brian Taylor:  
Most customers don't look at that.

Greg Farber:  
So every time I talk to you, I feel like I learned something new. And in my role, I've learned a lot of things from you. And, and yet, I'm still sort of at that stage, where to me banking is we take in some deposits, we make some loans, and that's that's the core function, right? But at this point, you don't have a lot of deposits. And you have to start generating some kind of financial turnover to be able to get these loans made to enact some sort of revenue and income. And what does that look like for a CFO? Do you sit down and just chart out? What the what the goals look like? Do you have parameters how much we can or can't lend? Do you start with some seed money?

Brian Taylor:  
We started with, so Sushil was successful at raising money. Like literally during the months after 9/11.

Greg Farber:
Not for deposit accounts but as actual capital investment.

Brian Taylor:  
As seed money for the Bank.

Greg Farber:
Okay.

Brian Taylor:  
So you've got that you've got that seed money. And you can lend that out. And then you do bring in deposits. And we all have friend, we all got a friends and family to bank with us. And then word spread, we started advertising right away, primarily focused in Arlington, and then we kind of built it up from there, we were able to leverage certain other things, Sushil owned a mortgage company. So we're able to very quickly get closing attorneys to join with us, we were able to get a couple of pretty good loan originators to join with us, we're able to get approved by Fannie Mae in record setting time because of the relationship.

Greg Farber:
So the old adage of who, you know, really came in play.

Brian Taylor:  
Very true.

Greg Farber:
So now, I don't want to fast forward the whole 20 years, but just sort of Fast Forward maybe five years at a time and kind of think through, now the Bank is taking off, you are going to get to that billion that he promised and so on and so forth. Your role is the exact same in title, but I can't imagine it's functionally anything like where it was started. Talk to me a little bit about how your leadership turned this into a department where now you have lots of staff, you have a full time controller and assistant controller you have you have accounting managers, you have staff accounts, you have entire departments related to accounts payable and wires and all these things that at the beginning, it was just you and two people.

Brian Taylor:  
Correct.

Greg Farber:
How do you lead that? How do you lead that? What are some lessons you learned along the way of "I'm Brian, I have to make this work."

Brian Taylor:  
I'm Brian, I need to make this work. But I can't make this work by myself. The key is to hire good people. If you can hire people smarter than you, you know, because they can, the more they can do, the more the Bank can do.

Greg Farber:  
Why and explain that concept?

Brian Taylor:  
So if I hire you, and you're smarter than me.

Greg Farber:
Thanks. Well, well, you didn't hire me. So I guess it doesn't work.

Brian Taylor:  
I think I might have been involved in decision back in the day.

Greg Farber:
Thank you.

Brian Taylor:  
And it was a good hire. Anyways...

Greg Farber:
if you were to hire me, and if I were to be smarter than you, then you were gonna say...

Brian Taylor:  
Then you're gonna have a lot of good ideas. You say, hey, why don't we do this? And the one thing, when you're a startup, that really translates for forever, you need to be willing to change, like the skills that you have to open a bank and run a startup are not the same skill set that you need when you become a mature bank. And it doesn't change overnight. It's a very slow evolution or change process. So for instance, during those first couple months, we'll go to the extreme, there was no support staff, really, If the lady's room toilet was clogged, I was I was the facility staff, I would go clean it or Sushil would do it like unclogging. Off you go, eventually you go and you hire people with specific knowledge of things. So at the beginning, we didn't have a dedicated IT person. As you move on, you hire some entry level IT people then advanced IT people. Now it is a mature bank, you have very advanced IT people. But the whole time you want to hire people that are smarter, they're even smarter than what their prior grade level was.

Greg Farber:  
So start small, but think big.

Brian Taylor:  
That's a good way to put it. I didn't look at it that way. But yeah.

Greg Farber:
I mean, I love what you're saying here. And one thing that resonated with me is it's kind of it's kind of obvious when you hear it, but it's not necessarily obvious until you hear it is this idea of always being being open to change. And we've had this push at the Bank in the last couple of years really to formulate and come up with our, our brand, our brand identity, who we are who we want to be, of course, we want to obsess about our clients, every company should want to do that. But you put something down in writing, and you say this is really what we're doing. And I feel like that has really encouraged also from the inside, more conversation and more, more new ideas coming up and things so that we are still innovating and coming up with new ideas today, much like you described you sort of had to do you had no choice back then. Right?

Brian Taylor:  
So it becomes embedded in you and you're right 10 years from now. We need to still be creating new ideas, new ways to take care of the customer. One of the things I learned in in college was I had this great small business finance professor, and he went on about you're gonna learn all kinds of formulas, all kinds of ways to do business. But really just remember two things. If if all you get out of your entire college career, are these two things you remember them, you have spent all this money in a wise way. Right? Okay, go ahead. And he goes one on Running a business, just take care of your customer. If you do that, a whole lot of things are gonna go right in number two, just take care of your employees. Who are the people that take care of number one, their number two, if you do those two things, if you focus on those two things, you will always be successful, pretty much. Now, the key with all that is that the clients or the customers needs are always going to be changing the clients when we opened, as you said before, we're not really looking for internet banking, or mobile banking, or any of those technology type of things.

Greg Farber:
But now they are.

Brian Taylor:  
But now they are. So that their needs have evolved. So if we weren't focused on trying to get ahead of that curve, we wouldn't evolve.

Greg Farber:
But this idea of the customer's always right, and putting your customers first putting your team members first. Great ideals, right. But traditionally, we don't think of that really in banking, you go and you buy, I don't know, a piece of clothing, you spent $50 on it, you bring it back the next day, and you're like, This thing makes me itch. I hate it whatever else. They're supposed to make it right and either give you your money back or give you a new T shirt or something. You walk into the bank and you're like, Well, I lost $50 Because you something I've had you had nothing to do with and they're blaming you for it, you can't just go hand them 50 bucks. That's not how banking works, right? But yet, you still have to maintain that trust, and that people want to put their money with you. And that it'll be there when they need to get it back out. How do you How does that different from that retail environment where you can just hand out a different new shirt and say Here, take this one instead.

Brian Taylor:  
Banking is all about trust, you know, trust from the consumer. So how you how do you build that trust? I think the important thing is you first you have to listen to what they're saying. If your first reaction is no, well, that's not good business, right? And it's not good in any business or in any environment, whether you're the retail store, or whether you're a bank. So listen to what they have to say. Maybe they do have a point, maybe maybe we did do something that made them lose that $50. Okay, maybe we have to consider making them whole, or just the fact that you're gonna listen to what their what their viewpoint is that that alone means a lot.

Greg Farber:
The example in my mind is someone who unfortunately gets scammed. And it wasn't the bank's fault at all. And they initiated giving this money away to a scammer, and they come back and they want to somehow have us fix it for them. And we can't. We didn't do anything. But you're right. You listen and you explain where they're coming from. It goes a long way.

Brian Taylor:  
It really does.

Greg Farber:
So now we're talking about the customer. Let's talk a little bit about corporate and community leadership, right. So if Brian Taylor runs the Bank into the ground as the CFO, that's not just going to hurt our team members that now don't have a job anymore, that's going to hurt the community, the standing we have in our in our areas in our neighborhood, and the very people that depend on us for this banking and for these loans. So I kind of want to hear a bit from you about how corporate and community leadership is a factor maybe and how you think about the financial decisions that you make as a CFO?

Brian Taylor:  
Well, some of it goes back to number one before the community are your clients, everyone in the community is a potential client.

Greg Farber:
So when you're making decisions about Leader Bank's balance sheet and moving forward and big, fancy financial terms, the customer is, in your perspective, part of that conversation, even if they're not sitting at the table physically.

Brian Taylor:  
That's correct, the client needs to be. But I also have to keep the bank that one of the key things is I need to keep the bank safe. So things to consider are when things happen in the world, you need to be able to react. So let's take the case of what happened in March where, you know, we had a series of pre large banks that that are no longer around.

Greg Farber:
And unease that comes with the customer base as a result of that.

Brian Taylor:  
Correct there is a lot of there's a lot of unease that develops and you have to kind of react to that. So you need to make sure that the bank is safe, that the bank is worthy of the trust that the clients have placed in

Greg Farber:
you. What does it mean, in lay terms for a bank to be safe?

Brian Taylor:  
So in lay terms, so one of the things we look at it as we want to be liquid meaning for anybody comes in, we've all seen the movie, It's a Wonderful Life. They had a run on the bank. So in those days, people had to physically walk in and Jimmy Stewart's there and he's saying your money is not here. Your money's in this house. Your money's in here.

Greg Farber:
Hey, they stood outside the bank this March, and we're standing in line to get money. So it's still a thing.

Brian Taylor:  
It's still a thing, okay, but now things can happen a lot faster. Internet banking, if if Greg wants to remove his money from bank X, all you have to do is go online, do an ACH transmittal in the money can be someplace else tomorrow. So things move very quickly.

Greg Farber:
So it's easier for customers to enact that I hate to use the word but panic that you see when there's unease in the in the environment.

Brian Taylor:  
Right, so now, we don't..

Greg Farber:
We can't just keep people from taking their money they're allowed to take, they're money.

Brian Taylor:  
They're allowed to take their money, right, and they should have access to their money. So what we do now is we keep what we call extra cash balances. We don't keep it in the vault. It's not physical, it's not physical cash, like they like was in the movie.

Greg Farber:
But it's available money.

Brian Taylor:  
it's available money. So we keep our money generally at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. So we'll keep hundreds of millions of dollars there. Not earning as much as potentially could in loans, we're making that choice to provide safety and trust in the banking. For us in the whole banking system.

Greg Farber:
It's an intentionally naive question of that would Federal Reserve Bank ever run out of money.

Brian Taylor:  
Only if the US Treasury runs out of money.

Greg Farber:  
So by design, that's never going to run out. So that's a very safe place to have this extra liquidity that you're speaking.

Brian Taylor:  
There is no safer place in the world, in my opinion,

Greg Farber:
Not even Fort Knox?

Brian Taylor:  
Not even Fort Knox.

Greg Farber:
I love it.

Brian Taylor:  
That would be gold bullion. So...

Greg Farber:
Okay, so we have this reserve so that if we need to access cash unexpectedly, we have a way to do that. And why is that important? What would happen if we didn't have access to that money?

Brian Taylor:  
Think the banks that went out of business, they ran out of money, they were profitable banks, they weren't making money until they had a until they ran low on cash.

Greg Farber:
And so then you're at a point where you, they couldn't hand out actual money to their customers. And that's what ultimately led to the to the takeovers and the collapse,

Brian Taylor:  
Right, basically, they had that run on a bank scenario, they ran out of cash, they ended up being closed.

Greg Farber:
So besides having the extra liquidity, how has that impacted your own outlook on financial risk management and how we want to run things here?

Brian Taylor:  
Lessons learned from the Brian Taylor's viewpoint? So we do modeling, we do a lot of modeling in terms of what happens if, okay, and some of the models are what happens if interest rates go up by 1%. 15 months ago, looking at the models You know, I said okay, well, the likelihood of going up 100, pretty high. 200. Okay, 300 in a year, less, so 400 in a year, even less, and we didn't even model the up 500. So I'm like, in my head, I kind of discounted it. I'm like, it's not gonna be got 500 basis points in it. 400 basis points in a year.

Greg Farber: 
You're probably not alone, most people wouldn't have expected this.

Brian Taylor:  
Well, maybe lesson learned, maybe I should have. Right, maybe I should have thought of the potential.

Greg Farber:
So now that it's gone up five, maybe we would be naive to think it would go up another five, right. But you have to be prepared for the next unknown, which might not be so it could be something else.

Brian Taylor:  
That's correct.

Greg Farber:
So how do you prepare for the unknown?

Brian Taylor:  
You, banking has a history of a lot of different types of unknowns. So a liquidity event is not a new event. Going up 500 basis points, although very uncommon, if you look back to the 1980s interest rates got up into the 18%.

Greg Farber:
So there's a historical precedent...

Brian Taylor:  
Correct.

Greg Farber:
...that things could go further than they've gone.

Brian Taylor:  
Exactly. So I'm still looking at, okay, what happens to our balance sheet if rates go up further from here, even though when I listen to economists, when I listen to other people, rates later on this year, there's potential for them to go down. Okay, so that means we as a Bank, and I as the CFO needs to pay the Bank and the bank's balance sheet. If interest rates go up, more than what they're doing, or if interest rates go down. In one of those things, as you become more liquid, there's different things and strategies to employ. But basically, the lesson learned is need to be ready for pretty much anything.

Greg Farber:
So financial flexibility is the key lesson from these banking events.

Brian Taylor:  
Correct.

Greg Farber:
Alright, so lastly, kind of as we as we go to wrap up here. I mentioned earlier that we had a gentleman named Marty on last episode and he did a great job of talking to us about what's called professional brand or theme. This is something I've been thinking about since that conversation as well. It just came up in conversation with another team member the other day, and we were talking about our own individual sort of brand or theme. And he talked about blending imagination with results, which speaks to all of us, I think, in the sense that we want to be innovative, but we also have a company to run at the end of the day. Do you have a theme or sort of particular mantra that you live by? That's the Brian Taylor way.

Brian Taylor:  
I don't know that I have a Brian Taylor way. I have a couple of philosophies maybe in life, okay. One of them is I don't know where I got it. But many years ago, someone showed me this poem called me in the mirror, not the Michael Jackson song. This is an actual, like, 20 line poem. And basically, it says, you know, don't worry about anything else in the world. If you can look in the mirror, in the person looking back at you, is giving you a good look. And you can look that person in the eye. Okay. Things are good. Great poem, by the way, like I said, Only 20 lines long,

Greg Farber:
I'll have to look it up. Because that is definitely good advice. And I've heard it said other ways, similar sort of concepts. But yeah, you have to be at peace and take care of who you are. Before you can go out and do things for others.

Brian Taylor:  
And the second piece of my philosophy is really, you can't change yesterday. Okay, if you did it right yesterday, if you did it wrong yesterday, doesn't matter.

Greg Farber:
But you can change how you go forward.

Brian Taylor:  
But you can change how you go forward in you can learn from yesterday, like we're all we all make mistakes. But those mistakes are in the past. Now you learn from them. And hopefully you don't repeat them. You make new mistakes. And you gotta be willing to make the new mistakes.

Greg Farber:
Is there a particular you mentioned your your business professor and the two points? Is there any other particular advice that you would give to young professionals starting out who are maybe doing just like you did, they graduated with an accounting degree, they stumble upon some old books, and they go, Oh, this is what I meant to do. What's next? What do you tell them?

Brian Taylor:  
I would say, so, if you can go to a place like I went, I happened. I lucked into going to a place a public accounting firm that gave me tremendous variety of opportunities. And so I was at, like I said, defense contractors, I was a banks, manufacturers, working with all kinds of different people, that kind of an environment is a great environment to be in. If you can surround yourself with people from different everything's, you're gonna learn a whole bunch of different things. He's early in your career, you don't really know where you're going to end up. So the more experiences you can have when you're young, the better.

Greg Farber:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Brian, this I like I said earlier, I feel like I always learned something when I talked to you. And we've had so many conversations we've we've played tennis outside of the office, we've gone on walks and talked about me and my career future. We've never really talked about you. And this was awesome. I really appreciate taking the time and hearing your background and all the interesting little steps along the way in particular that opening up the branch and looking into the basement. Yeah, that gives you an appreciation of where we've come and thank you for taking us there.

Brian Taylor:  
Thank you, Greg. The man in the mirror. By Dale Wimbrow, when you get all you want and you struggle for self in the world makes you king for a day. Then go to the mirror and look at yourself and see what the man has to say. For it isn't your mother, your father or wife whose judgment upon you must pass. But the man whose verta counts most in your life is the one staring back from the glass. He's the fellow to please never mind all the rest for he's with you right to the end. And you've passed the most difficult test. If the man in the glass is your friend. You may be like Jack Horner and chisel a plum and think you're a wonderful guy. But the man in the glasses, you're only a bum if you can't look him straight in the eye. You can fool the whole world down the highway of yours in you can take pats on the back as you pass, but your final reward will be heartache in tears if you cheated the man in the glass.

Greg Farber:
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