Everett’s Coastal Community Bank emerges stronger after recession

  • By Quinn Russell Brown For The Herald Business Journal
  • Thursday, November 5, 2015 11:23am
  • BusinessEverett

By all accounts, the past decade did a number on Washington’s banks.

In 2006, more than 100 were headquartered in the state. Due to a mixture of mergers, acquisitions and closings, less than half remain today.

The number of banks headquartered in Snohomish County went from 14 to just seven.

One of those is Everett’s Coastal Community Bank, which tripled its market share to emerge from the recession as the largest bank headquartered in the county, measured by both assets and deposits.

“We probably bank every third business owner,” said CEO Eric Sprink, looking out the window of his office on Evergreen Way.

Sprink, 43, joined Coastal in 2006, just in time for the early signs of the downturn.

“I thought it would be really cool to be a CEO going into a banking crisis,” he said earnestly, then burst into a laugh.

For Sprink, tragedy plus time has brought comedy, or at least a little levity, to the largest banking crisis in decades.

“It was tough, but at the same time, you look back and you laugh at the things you did,” he said. “The teammates you got through it with, you’re a lot closer now.”

Most of Coastal’s clients are small business owners.

“At the height of the recession, we stopped and said, ‘We have 465 clients who are now partners. We need to help them and they need to help us, or else none of us are going to get through it,’” Sprink said.

In 2010, Coastal lost $6 million but hired 35 more employees and started to fund construction projects.

The bank has expanded from seven branches before the recession to 12 in 2015, rebounding from a low point of 61 employees in the darkest days to 142 today.

The bank opened new headquarters and a branch at 5415 Evergreen Way in Everett in 2014. Its newest branch opened in Marysville in August. A merger with Lynnwood’s Prime Pacific Bank was expected to follow in October, but the deal was voted down by Prime Pacific’s shareholders. The move surprised leadership on both sides.

Sprink gave his staff 30 minutes to reflect on the failed merger, then told them it was back to business as usual.

“Yes, I’m bummed I didn’t get the merger, but that doesn’t stop who we are and what we’re doing,” Sprink said. “Coastal is doing so many good things. We’re making a difference. Our shareholders are winning. Life is good.”

Sprink credits Coastal’s current momentum to its board of directors being aggressive during the downturn (he also serves on the board).

Tom Lane, president of Dwayne Lane car dealerships, was chairman throughout the recession. He said he and Sprink often saw each other more than they saw their own wives.

“That was a horrendously dark period. You can tell by all the banks that went away,” Lane said. “Eric would not and could not take exclusive credit for the survival of the bank, but I can guarantee you that without his link in the chain, it would’ve been a lot tougher, if not impossible.”

Lane attributes part of that to Sprink’s candid style of communication.

“You know exactly where you stand at the beginning, middle and end of every conversation. It is painfully clear to everyone involved,” Lane said, laughing. “There are no hidden agendas.”

Hal Russell, who sits on the board of Community Bankers of Washington with Sprink, echoed an appreciation for his straight talk.

“There’s a fine line between being direct and being rude, and what Eric is not is rude,” said Russell, president and CEO of Commencement Bank in Tacoma. “He’s got a good sense of humor, and he can bring that humor into a sensitive discussion: he has the ability to make it sound a little more fun and upbeat, and get his point across.”

This knack for conversation served Sprink well at the beginning of his career.

As a freshman at Arizona State University, he worked nights and weekends in a call center for Security Pacific Bank. When his employer merged with Bank of America in 1992, many upset customers unleashed their frustration on him and his coworkers.

“You deal with people’s financial situations and it’s very emotional,” Sprink recalled. “I hated it. I didn’t hate getting yelled at, I hated what we were doing.”

So he asked the district manager if he could start working with customers face-to-face in a branch.

“I said, ‘I know how to do new accounts, I know how to do loans, I know where all the service centers are. People are upset and I think I can help them.’”

He worked at Bank of America until a merger with NationsBank in 1998, hopping to Centura Bank in North Carolina.

He earned an MBA from the University of North Carolina at night, which let him move from hands-on lending and retail banking to the corporate realm of quality improvement and mergers and acquisitions. “It was nice to see both sides,” he said.

When Centura Bank was acquired by a Canadian bank in 2001, Sprink declined a move to Toronto, opting instead for a job at the family-owned Washington Trust Bank in Spokane.

In 2006, a headhunter called him about the opportunity to work below Lee Pintar, Coastal’s founder and CEO.

Sprink agreed to learn the ropes from Pintar and eventually replaced him as CEO of both the bank and the holding company.

“You’re probably saying somewhere in this, ‘This poor guy can’t hold a job,’” Sprink said. “It’s all right, I’m getting better as I get older.”

Despite his background at larger banks, Sprink said he’s always had the mindset of a community banker.

“There are community bankers at all institutions,” he said. “It’s someone who cares about their customers and goes out of their way to help people.”

Still, he admits, “it’s much harder for a corporation to embrace that philosophy the larger it gets.”

At bigger banks, for example, clients tend to belong to the bank, not the employees who secure them, and employees get shuffled around every few years to prevent them from collecting accounts that they can leave with one day.

At Coastal, the employee owns the relationship with their clients, Sprink said.

“Our customers like Coastal because of the person they’re dealing with. …” he said. “No one says, ‘I love that building.’ They say, ‘I like the people in it.’ And then they get a warm feeling for the brand as an offshoot.”

This attitude is one reason why forgiving the loans of Oso slide victims was a no-brainer for Sprink. Such a no-brainer, in fact, that he shies away from even addressing the subject anymore. His one-line response — “We did it to pick a fight with the big guys” — reflects his disbelief that national banks would try to collect losses.

Outside of the office, Sprink stays active with a wife and three daughters.

“We’re a soccer, soccer, soccer family,” he said. “My wife played. She got me into playing. My kids all play.”

His oldest daughter, Chase, won the U-14 national championship this year. Sprink expects no less from his team at Coastal.

“We want to be the best,” he said. “We may not be today, but we’re gonna be tomorrow.”

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