This week members of our Vistage group and I will come together with other community leaders to honor Paul Hoffman. An independent judges panel recently selected Paul as the InBusiness Executive of the Year. Paul is a father, husband, community leader, CEO of Monona Bank and member of Vistage 5364 in Madison, Wisconsin.
It will be an exciting celebration as Paul is honored with family and friends around him. He and the other recipients representing their organizations are all deserving of this honor. All too often the media shares the misdeeds of executives and business owners. In this case, the news is great and the community surrounds the recipients to celebrate their accomplishments.
As part of the rationale for Pauls accomplishment, InBusiness shared the following –
No executive becomes Executive of the Year without business achievement, and in this area Paul Hoffmann, who has been with the locally owned and managed Monona Bank for more than 10 years, led the successful acquisition and merger of Monona Bank and Middleton Community Bank. The merger played a key role in growing Monona Bank’s assets from $330 million to more than $840 million, and was negotiated after receiving more than 40 competing bids from other banks.
The success of this transition is one of several reasons why Hoffmann, president and CEO of Monona Bank, was selected as Medium Company Executive of the Year and overall Executive of the Year.
No merger ends with the signing of a deal because of all the integration work that must follow, work that actually begins with an assessment of cultures in the due diligence phase. Now with a workforce of more than 150 people at nine locations, Monona Bank was able to retain all of the Middleton bank’s former employees, and for that Hoffmann credits that pre-merger due diligence, the collaborative work done over the years with people at various local banks, and the support of Monona Bank’s shareholders and board of directors.
Hoffmann calls the merger a major accomplishment, given how well two cultures with a passion for serving the community have fit together. “I would say definitely the merger with Middleton Community Bank is our biggest accomplishment from the past year,” Hoffmann notes. “This is something we have been working on for a little while before that, and I’m really proud that everybody at Middleton found a job in our organization so we didn’t have to let anybody go at all.
Congratulations Paul. You are an important member of our group, and a pillar of the community.
________________________________________________________________________
Dan Loichinger is a Vistage Chair and executive coach in Madison, Wisconsin. He serves executives in companies throughout Southern Wisconsin, and at times, across the world. More information can be found at www.loichingeradvantage.com.