Photograph by Shane Van Boxtel/Image Studios
Patent attorney turned banker John Brogan never shies away from a challenge. Whether it’s a major career pivot, securing capital for a tech startup, or serving on the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation board, Brogan brings his head and his heart to his work.
The Bank of Kaukauna CEO and Fork Farms co-founder sat down with Insight to discuss why the banking industry needs to adopt a tech industry mindset, what community banks bring to the table and how creativity is central to it all.
Insight: Transitioning from law to banking on the heels of a financial crisis in 2011 seems pretty daunting. How did you navigate that?
Brogan: There is no better teacher than fear, right? My dad didn’t have any banking experience when he [started working for] the bank, so I always thought, ‘well, if my dad did it, I could probably do it.’ There were lots of other people at the bank, and I relied heavily on the people who were there and their experience. But really, it was just quickly coming up to speed and getting an understanding of how the mechanisms of a bank really work. I took a one-week financial managers [course] at the graduate school of banking at UW-Madison. That gave me at least an understanding [of] where to look. I was a patent litigator, and patent litigators are somewhat unique among lawyers in that for every case you have to learn a brand new technology. For instance, I worked on the “seed war” cases between Monsanto and Syngenta where they were fighting over the patents and licensing associated with Roundup Ready. In the process you need to learn about the introgression of trades. I learned about how seed works and how backcrosses work, so that when I stand up in front of a jury, I can explain it to them in a way that they can understand. Patent litigators are like translators. You take this super complicated information, after sitting down with experts for months on end, so you can walk into a room and pretend like you have a Ph.D. in that subject. I love that about the practice. My favorite part was working with experts and just the steep, steep curve of learning something new.
After you got your feet under you, what was your first order of business as CEO of Bank of Kaukauna?
When I first came into the bank, I had this twin problem — how are small community banks going to survive? And how are they going to overcome these challenges of efficiency and scale? I was pretty technologically focused, so when I came in we started implementing some technology and doing some different things to move forward. It occurred to me that we needed to become more like technology companies because, whether we like it or not, banks are technology companies. Historically, technology was security. You’d have big, thick vaults and people with guns to make sure that people couldn’t run off with that physical asset; but in a new reality, where 99% of transactions occur in electronic space, banks have to live in the electronic space. We have to think about how to protect your money and maintain the security and the efficiency and all of that at scale. So for a small, family-owned bank founded in 1879, I knew that we really needed to move forward. In 2016, we acquired a cybersecurity company [StrataDefense] that specialized in financial institutions. The idea behind that acquisition was we need to always have these tools available and deepen our skillset. It’s hard to look at it through the lens of 2023, but in 2016 people were not talking about cybersecurity quite the same way that they are now. For the past six or seven years one of my major focuses was getting that up to speed.
What do businesses today need to know about maintaining security?
The bottom line is there is no one solution to security. It starts with people — don’t click on links that you shouldn’t click — but then there’s a million layers of security behind it. You put in filters and firewalls and security scanning. At StrataDefense, we assume that humans are humans. In other words, they’re gonna make mistakes. We assume that the main systems will fail and that somebody will have gotten in, and our job is to prevent them from stealing anything. The idea is you put a wall and then another wall and then another wall and another wall. And so you have this layered series of security, that by the time you get to the inner core, even if you can get a foothold, you probably can’t get anything out.
How do you see the banking industry changing in the future?
We are one of the smaller banks around, but even at our size, doing less than a $2 million loan is almost not worth it because there’s so much more work and monitoring. What I’m worried about is if small banks [are] not that interested in lending to very small customers, how are new businesses going to get started? Chase may have flashy whistles and bells, but they don’t really want to bank your business that makes $200,000 to $5 million a year. They don’t even really want to see your business until you’re making $20 to $30 million a year. So what happens is there’s this stratification of the financial industry, and all of the players have fallen into slightly different niches. We primarily focus on business. We’re mostly a commercial bank. And the reason why is because we have particular expertise in that we can help people transition from $200,000 in top line revenue to $2 million to $5 million to $10 million. We’ve been really fortunate to play bigger, just because we have an incredible talent pool in [President] TJ Minnehan, [CFO] Tamara Mattioli and [VP] Travis Jones. It’s really driven by the talent of the organization that keeps us going. I see more differentiation in terms of what industry you bank or what values you bank. I think that increasingly it won’t always be about convenience, but it will be about what causes do you support. Is it community focused? Is it taking the money out of the community? Because when you take that money out of the community, you really deeply decrease the multiplier effect. And all of a sudden the lack of banks of a certain size hurts the business community. To keep banks of all sizes viable is really important. And I think sometimes people miss that, particularly in the midst of a banking crisis that we’re kind of going through right now.
You have an impressive art collection at the bank and have been a big proponent of the local arts. How does your support of the arts intersect with your work at the bank?
Creativity is one of the most critical aspects of life, work and business. I think that we often think of creativity as frivolity rather than as the core of what we do. When I put art on the wall, there’s two reasons. One is because I want people who walk in to think. They don’t have to love it. I don’t want them to hate it — although some have, but mostly what I want to do is spark a conversation because I think we’ve lost a sense of dialogue. Keeping creativity at the forefront is saying we have opportunities to think differently, to create businesses differently. Every time you’ve hit a problem, you often need creativity to solve that problem. I think the notion that we’ve divided creativity from business is insane. This is particularly true in Wisconsin, which spends the least number of dollars on the arts of practically any state in the country. I view creativity and art and supporting the arts as central to the attraction of talent in our community. I serve on the WEDC board, and you see this connection between investment in the arts and who you can attract. There’s real opportunity to grow an amazing community here, but we have to be mindful it doesn’t take care of itself. That’s why I’m on the Trout Museum of Art board, work with Imagine Fox Cities and the Fox Valley Data Exchange. I love living here. This is my home. I’d say in the last decade things have really moved forward a lot. All the positive changes that I’ve seen are really great, and I’m excited about where we’re going to go next.
