How to Grow Your Credit Union From the Inside Out

Many of us have been trained to look outward when it comes to growing companies, whether that means looking to new target markets, potential investors, or evolving trends. But according to Ronaldo Hardy, President/CEO of The National Association of Credit Union Service Organizations (NACUSO), we are missing a crucial step. In episode 106 of The Remarkable Credit Union, Ronaldo talks about why we actually need to start by looking inward as he tackles this month’s BIG question:

How can credit unions shape their brands from the inside out, starting with their people, culture, and impact?

 

Key takeaways

1. What’s your credit union’s vision? Or, do you have one? Ronaldo said, “It doesn’t make sense to have a credit union in a community without a focus on what it will mean to that community.” Another way to think about this is if your credit union disappeared tomorrow, what would that mean for your community? Too many credit unions lack a guiding vision, or North Star if you will, when it comes to their impact.
2. Growth requires proper cultivation. Ronaldo shared a metaphor about growing plants and how important it is to culture them properly. He talked about planning sessions focused on growing deposits and loans without taking into account the environment that this growth will take place in. Culture is not just some touchy-feely afterthought; it’s how effective organizations grow in sustainable, healthy ways.
3. Sometimes a commitment to purpose and values requires difficult trade-offs. We simply can’t be everything to everyone. Ronaldo talked about graciously off-boarding folks at his credit union who weren’t aligned with the vision. Here at PixelSpoke we similarly use our core values to guide all our decisions, including who we hire and which clients we take on. Sometimes that means passing up tempting opportunities because they’re simply not aligned with our values.

 

References & links

• Ronaldo Hardy
• NACUSO
• Southwest Louisiana Credit Union
• Love Alive Church

 

Read the full transcript

Katie Stone:
Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Credit Union podcast. We created our podcast to help union leaders think outside of the box about marketing, technology, and community impact. The Remarkable Credit Union is brought to you by PixelSpoke, a digital marketing agency that works with credit unions to create user-friendly, high-converting, award-winning websites. As a B Corp and an employee-owned cooperative, we believe that business can and should be a force for good.

Each episode we bring on expert guests from the credit union and broader cooperative movement for conversations about the intersection of marketing and social impact. Our goal is to challenge your preconceptions about business as usual, and provide you with actionable takeaways that you can use to grow your membership, improve the financial health of your cooperative and better serve your community. I’m Katie Stone, CEO at PixelSpoke.

Kerala Taylor:
And I’m Kerala Taylor, a co-owner and the director of Marketing and Impact here at PixelSpoke. In today’s episode, we’re going to be exploring the big question. How can credit unions shape their brands from the inside out, starting with their people, culture and impact? And to help us answer this question, we are welcoming Ronaldo Hardy. He is the president and CEO of the National Association of Credit Union Service Providers, also known as NACUSO, which helps credit unions explore the use of CUSOs and the delivery of non-traditional products and services. He previously served as CEO of Southwest Louisiana Credit Union, where he led their certification process as a CDFI.

And fun fact, he’s also the founder and lead pastor of Love Alive Church. I love that name by the way. And Ronaldo, he’s a well-known speaker in the credit union movement. Maybe you’ve seen him speak. I had a chance to see his keynote address at the Marketing Association of Credit Unions conference, the MAC Conference recently. And I immediately had to beeline toward him to ask him to join this podcast and I’m so excited he said yes. Ronaldo, thanks so much for joining us.

Ronaldo Hardy:
Thank you for having me. I’m so glad to be here today.

Kerala Taylor:
We got a lot to talk about today and one thing that I was really intrigued by in your speech was just you talking about brand. We’re in the marketing world over here and often when we talk about brand or rebrand, we kind of are thinking about color palettes and taglines, things like that. But when you say brand, is this really what you’re talking about?

Ronaldo Hardy:
Well, I’m talking about so much more. When you consider brand, to me, your brand is truly who you really are. Another word I would use to really define what a brand is, it’s like an organizational integrity, right? So integrity, when we consider that, it is who we are underneath who we might be saying that we are. And when I consider brand, it’s what you’re truly delivering and it’s so much larger than a logo, it’s so much larger than a statement. It’s what you are truly ready to embody. So that’s what I consider when I talk about branding.

Kerala Taylor:
Well, I love that phrase, organizational integrity and that sounds great. I think any organization wants to have integrity, right? But let’s talk a little bit about the bottom line too. You mentioned that during your tenure as CEO at Southwest Louisiana Credit Union, your executive team maintained a 1.28% return on assets, a 7% yield on average loans and more than 10% annual loan growth. That’s not bad. I’d say that’s actually pretty remarkable. So I’m just curious how your work around culture and brand helps drive these results or helps to drive these results.

Ronaldo Hardy:
This is what I’ll say. I want to start at the place of and connect with people who have green thumbs, right? I do not have a green thumb, but for those who have a green thumb and have grown plants, they know that it is important that you culture it properly. That if something is to grow and to grow as it is intended to grow in the most effective way, it has to be cultured well. And it is very interesting to me that a lot of times, especially in the financial services sector, we think about growth from a numerical perspective, all on a viable goals right off the bat, right? I’ve gone into planning sessions that the first thing someone wants to do is say, “Oh, we’re going to grow loans by this. We’re going to grow deposits by this.”

And not really considering what’s the environment that that’s going to grow in. And so I’m of the opinion now, some of this is because my master’s degree is in human resource education. So I concentrate in the HR and leadership development and in that of course, organizational development was a piece of that. I got to really see what the impact would be to organizational growth based upon how they culture the environment for employees to be their very best. And then also my undergrad and business administration, concentrating and marketing helped me to really understand the power of a great brand. And what I’ve seen is a lot of times organizations have a disconnect between who they say they are and what they’re delivering.

Either they deliver something internally that’s very strong, but externally they cannot tell that story well. Or they have something, a very strong external message that’s not delivered internally well. So it was very important for me in going to Southwest Louisiana Credit Union to emphasize that in our growth. To make sure that we were going to focus on culture first. And it was a bit of a risk because at that time the financial performance indicators were moving in the wrong direction. So I really had to make sure the board understood that I am not ignoring what we need in quantifiable impacts, but I want to make sure we get there the correct way.

The buy-in from the employees at that point or from the staff and the executive team in particular was built around this conversation that we had in our first planning session. Which was for one full day we talked about if we were no longer here, why would the community miss us? I was getting to the root of what’s going to be our brand and culture? What are we going to deliver on? Who will we be? Why are we here? It doesn’t make sense to have a credit union in a community without a direct focus of what it will mean to that community. And from that, we ended up having, and I know we’ll talk about it down deeper, but we changed our vision to eliminate poverty in our community, which informed our strategy.

Because once poverty was the focus, then we knew the pathway through research on how we do that. And then we started designing the culture around that. What will be the messages that matter the most? What did we need to build in emotional resiliency and emotional intelligence in our employees so that they could serve that aspect of our community well? What did we need to design in our products? But also what did we need to be able to deliver in our community and how could we get that buy-in across the board? So we really decided to start there first, and that made us do some really strong work on our culture. You might remember me sharing that we did an all-staff training day.

And on that day we conducted a poverty simulation that allowed our employees to experience directly for a brief period of time what it would feel like or what those potential members were encountering prior to coming into our lobbies. They cried, they were upset. Some of them I know probably use profanity under their breath. It was hard. And then we made a statement to them to say what we do as a purpose and a calling. And if you don’t feel called to this, that’s okay. We’ll help you to get to your calling. It made us have the opportunity to be assured of the fact that we had the right people to deliver on that purpose.

And that really was the genesis of what we built in culture because we decided that we were not willing to accept what was outside of that framework. So I’ll pause there because I know we have much more to talk about.

Kerala Taylor:
I love it.

Katie Stone:
I love that really building on a foundation of culture. I think it’s something that we try hard to do here at PixelSpoke too, so I love that. I think culture and impact really leading with that. Such a powerful way to approach things. Because you mentioned eliminating poverty in Southwest Louisiana as the vision for Southwest Louisiana Credit Union. I’d like to talk about that for a second. I don’t see a lot of credit unions talking directly about poverty, and I appreciate how you really tackled it head on. Can you tell us more about how you went about pursuing this worthy but really lofty vision?

Ronaldo Hardy:
Absolutely. So tell you what contributed to it first. Two things really impacted me and caused me to make this decision about what our organization should be focused on. One, my own background. So I did not come from a well-off background. My parents left their business that they had started, they were entrepreneurs and they felt called to ministry, and so they gave up their business pursuits to do ministry full time. That meant they went from making six figures a year to $25,000 combined. Raising four kids with no governmental assistance. That’s my background. And being able to see what that looked like on a day-to-day basis, what those impacts even look like for the children in those homes, I got to feel that directly.

I also got to see what it was like for an organization to give my parents second chances and opportunities that also impacted me directly. So it was important for me in terms of purpose-driven work to do work that resonated with people who were like me from all backgrounds. So this crosses one thing we know is that the subject matter of poverty is not a racial discussion. I mean it crosses over so many different barriers, and so I really wanted to have that impact and I’m glad that I went to an organization that could buy in to that. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is as progressive as I am in my thoughts when it comes to credit unions in particular, I really honor the genesis of our story.

We really were started and we were formed to help people who did not have access to traditional products and services. People of modest means, people who were in poverty. Our story, our origin story is connected to the disadvantaged. And so when I consider the work that we really should be doing, I still am of the opinion that even with the greatest technology, and that’s one of the roles that I’m doing now, is helping to accelerate that in our industry. I still think that it should lead to the type of impact that we set that we were about from the very beginning.

That’s what really is at the root of what caused that focus, and it was very, very, very good for me to have a board that supported that. To have an executive team and staff that supported that. I mean, we went all in. We certified all of our staff as financial counselors. We built a coalition in the community, so we reached out to every organization that served the need of that audience. Recognizing that we have the financial piece, but the unbanked, underbanked, disadvantaged, they don’t just have issues with their finances. They have issues with access to food and quality healthcare, and they engage with the city parish on things like IDA accounts and they engage with United Way.

So we said, could we build a coalition of all of those entities so that all of our front door would be a front door to all of us? And we found a way to create a holistic solution through that coalition, that not only gave us access, the health center gave us access to put a branch for free. They gave us space in their building to put a branch in a financial desert. The city some years later, even after our transition out and my successor continued their strategic plan. When the city decided to do a small business development center in a disadvantaged community, they reached out to Southwest Louisiana for credit union first as the first partner in that small business development center.

So we really went deep into the work to say we’re going to live out who we say we want to be. And because of that, we also were able to correct… So there were some brand reputation issues when I first went Southwest Louisiana Credit Union. And to go from that to being well-loved in the community, accelerating growth that five years later be leaving the credit union still being on the same strategic trajectory, has increased almost 70% in assets. That’s unheard of in that asset category. Serving the disadvantage and I mean, what better feeling to know that you’re really up to do work that matters?

I’ll tell you this one other thing, because of that, we never, ever, ever, ever discussed any other bank or credit union. And it was not an arrogance at all when I say that it didn’t matter to us, but I think that organizations get way too bogged down in their perceived competition. They don’t dive deep enough into their value proposition to understand what’s unique about me. Who am I serving? That exercise that took us a day of what I consider to be Brain Olympics. I knew that I was going to send the team home tired that day from a whole day to get to the root of why the community would miss us.

Now if I go back and I still do go back and visit because I love that team. If I go back and I ask, why would the community miss us if we were no longer here? That question or that answer is very clear because of the work we did.

Katie Stone:
That’s really incredible work, and you touched on this particularly for a credit union of your asset size. I mean by today’s standards, it’s not a large credit union, about 176 million it looks like. But as you have said, small is a mindset, not an asset size. And I think a lot of people in the credit union movement automatically look to and admire the big credit unions. So I’d love to hear more about that. How was your smaller asset size actually, and no pun intended here, an asset for your team and community?

Ronaldo Hardy:
Well, I think it made us more nimble. We were able to evolve very quickly. So much so my first year that I was CEO, if all of our trends move forward or accelerated forward for one year, we were going to lose a million dollars in year one. But because of what we were able to do and we were nimble enough to make those turns very quickly and aggressively, our first year we made almost 900,000. So you’re talking about $2 million swing in one year, and then that kept growing all the way up to over 1.2 million. So I mean we really performed very strongly with this strategy. That nimble nature helped us to really operate.

I know agile methodology is huge now, and it was emerging then, but we were able to really be agile before there was a huge push for it in our industry. And so we benefited, like service partners would routinely come in and meet with us and say from a sophistication perspective, we had strategy that mirrored and sometimes was more advanced in multi-billion dollar shops. So our strategy was large, our sophistication was on point, but the small asset size allowed us to be nimble. So we were able to do it much faster than what other organizations who have a really big Titanic ship to turn could do.

Katie Stone:
I would say you’re definitely not the first guest on our podcast to echo that sentiment that one of the big advantages of working at a smaller credit union is that ability to pivot on a dime and change quickly and adapt. So that’s really cool to hear.

Kerala Taylor:
Just as a follow-up, I’m curious what you think about all the mergers and acquisitions in the credit union movement and just the trend I’m seeing toward a big emphasis on growth and a worship of larger asset sizes. My concern is that we just stand to maybe risk losing sight of the heart and soul of the credit union movement, but I’m curious what your thoughts are.

Ronaldo Hardy:
Absolutely. So I believe when there is a strategic outcome, then a merger could be good. So for example, if there were another organization in Southwest Louisiana community that also really wanted to focus on the unbanked and underbanked and the disadvantaged and we really had a similar strategy as an organization and we saw the opportunity to make greater impact doing the same type of work in a community, then that’s when it makes sense. It doesn’t necessarily make sense for us to be going after the same consumer doing the exact same thing. And if we see that there’s an opportunity to be stronger together, let’s do it.

However, what I feel that we are seeing a little bit more of there are mergers that don’t have to happen, right? Saying sometimes it is, “I want growth and growth now.” And it’s not even strategic. It’s like, “Let me just accumulate this growth. I’m not even respecting this audience. I don’t know the particular nuances of this community.” For example, let’s say a firefighter’s credit union merges into community credit union. Firefighters, and I know this because one of my friends is a firefighter, they have a very different dynamic. Their needs look different. You can’t just barge them into a community entity and then expect to adapt right away.

You have to really know the nuances of that particular community. I believe that mergers are taking away that opportunity in particular. I also think that we need to be careful that if we focus so heavily on mergers, build all of these really large organizations and institutions and also at the same time lose sight of our focus, which is to really serve, like I said earlier, that member of modest means the unbanked, the underbanked, the disadvantaged, and we lose our focus. We are just trying to make larger organizations. We keep underwriting to prime borrowers over time. Then I think the argument will be made that we’re just the lowest priced bank and now our industry is at threat.

So for me, I think that we need to be thoughtful. I think that we need to slow down in some of this consolidation and make sure that it’s not ego that’s driving it, but it’s outcome and impact that’s driving it. When the outcome and the impact and the strategy is at the center and there is something that could happen for consumers that would not ordinarily be able to happen without coming together, I support it. But just doing it so we could be bigger and better and brag about what we have in our asset size. Absolutely not.

Kerala Taylor:
Well, we are aligned. Very well said. You also mentioned earlier, and I remember you saying this at MAC too, that a hundred percent of your team are certified, I’m assuming still doing this as Southwest Louisiana certified financial counselors. And we have another client that does this, Peninsula Community Credit Union, and I’ve always thought it’s such an intriguing idea and it seems like something not a lot of credit unions are doing. So I guess I’m just curious what your goals were with this and if you felt like it had a meaningful impact, especially when we’re talking about team members who might not really be on the front lines interacting with your members.

Ronaldo Hardy:
Absolutely. So I wanted us to be able to really live out our mission. And to me from a cultural perspective, once you say, “This is who I am.” So we’ve established our brand identity and we’ve established a culture and we have a clear vision, then for me, we need to be able to live that completely. And I really didn’t see a pathway for us as an organization to really be focused on eliminating poverty in our community, financial empowerment for all without all being in the position to help to navigate people through complicated financial matters. And the thought process around that was also that we’re all distributed throughout the community wearing logo shirts, having people stop us in the marketplace, having people in grocery stores, having people stop us in the community, having people even stop us in the parking lot.

My mindset was that one of the things that I know you have this feeling too, I can’t stand, and people are like, “Well, such and such says that. Well, such and such…” And it’s the handoff and you got to be handed to this one and to that one, that one, and then finally you get the person that’s all the way at the back of the organization in the small office with the weird door that they can finally do the thing that you want to do. For us, I was like, “No, if we mean this, then every interaction with someone who works with us needs to be one that can lead to the outcome that we said that we’re about.” So no one needs to be in a position where they have to refer people to a specialist.

No, we all specialize in helping to empower you financially. We all specialize in helping you solve these critical financial issues. Nobody will be here without that understanding because if you don’t have that, and also if you didn’t want to get that, you were not meant to be an employee with us. This is where organizations miss it with their culture all the time, is what we’re willing to accept. We are willing to accept because, well, I want to button a seat. It’s not the right one though. I read a book a long time ago and it talked about the concept of the road warrior retired on active duty. I just decided that I’m not ready to go because I need this check.

But I don’t want to do what it is that we’re doing. That makes no sense to me. If we are committed to something from a cultural perspective, then we have to be willing to do what it takes to really deliver that. So that was our theory behind that. I remember when we were first doing it because our state league offered the certification program and when we first registered all of those employees, which was more than they had from all of the rest of the credit union altogether. So our one organization, they called us, “Is this an era?” And they were even like, “I don’t know if we know how to administer this.” And we were like, “Figure it out because this is what we’re doing.”

Katie Stone:
That’s the disruptor in you, right?

Ronaldo Hardy:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Diplomatically disruptive, but I’ll disrupt everywhere I go. Yes.

Katie Stone:
I love it. Well, you’ve mentioned a passion for helping organizations to have the uncomfortable conversations on race. That’s something that we’ve been doing here at PixelSpoke for quite a few years now. Both Kerala and I have served on our equity committee and Kerala has led it for a number of years now and has really brought our whole team into some difficult conversations, but really important ones. And they can be very uncomfortable, but can you share more from your perspective about why those conversations are so important?

Ronaldo Hardy:
Oh, wow. I mean super critical. I’ll start by telling the story of when I went on the journey to elevate this dialogue in our industry. It was towards the end of 2016. I live around the Baton Rouge community and in our community we had the murder of Alton Sterling and then that was followed by also an outside antagonizer coming in and killing police in our community. So we were a very unique story where we had encountered it from both ends. And because of my role as a pastor in the community, then I have been very vocal and on the front lines of pain as it’s emerging. And that season caused me to be reflective about my own professional journey. At that time, I was CEO at Southwest Louisiana Credit Union.

So I’m in my second CEO seat, I’m 32, and I realized at that point how much of my career had advanced because of assimilation. Even as a woman, I know you understand the concept of code switching and assimilating and all of the things that we do because we don’t want to be left out of opportunities. And I realized that I was also on a trajectory where I had a national brand presence in our industry at that time as well. But something in me said that I can’t continue getting it this way. That if I were to be fulfilled in what I was doing and if I were to be convinced that I could be proud of how I was doing what I was doing, then I needed to be able to show up as my full self.

Every day I wake up, I am going to be a Black man. It is what it is. I know people say, “Well, you shouldn’t bring grace into it.” Every day I wake up, I am going to be a Black man. And what I realized is organizations were missing out on the value, the sauce that comes along with that because I’m diluting so much of myself to be a part of environments that if they were really truly for me, they would allow me to be myself. And so I made a decision that I was going to take the gamble where it could have been career suicide to elevate a discussion of this nature. I said, “I’ll be willing to do that. If that happens, I’m young enough to do something different.” And I started this conversation and utilized my voice in our industry.

It ended up growing and accelerating. I was saying to our industry at that time that we were not far off from what would be national scandals. That I was looking across the board at what consumers were doing and what they were valuing and seeing this new civil rights era emerged, of which I believe we’re still in. But one of the biggest indicators of that was this idea of economic empowerment and how dollars drive decision making. So when consumers started making decisions about dollar distribution based upon where they felt included, I knew something has changed. Before George Floyd and before all of the popularity around DEI and the performative acts that came, I started saying, “We got to do this differently.”

And it was about so much more than just race. It was about race, it was about gender equity. It was about making sure that we had inclusive environments for everyone. I talked to you all earlier before we recorded, I was a big proponent of pay parity and making sure that women were given the same rights and the same access and the dignity of doing this job. They should be paid well. So for me, it crossed over into my personhood. That I needed to feel fulfilled and that I was modeling… I have this thing that I call audacious authenticity, that I believe that everybody could not only get to the best outcomes for themselves, land in the best seats for themselves, and feel the best about themselves when they are audaciously authentic.

I have not found that it has limited access for me. Now, it means that every place isn’t for me and when I’m not invited in, because if the environment is not designed to consider me, why do I want to be there? What I have seen is the more audacious I have been about my authenticity, the better I’ve been able to show up in environments. The better I’ve been able to be as a leader, the more impact that I’ve been able to make. And also I have found that so many people want a lot of the same things that I desire. They just needed somebody to be bold enough to do it. So here I am again, and here I was then being diplomatically disruptive. That’s what really led me down this journey.

I’ll say this, it went further for me as well as a credit union CEO, because I also thought, “How can we make this deep community impact without this? How can we say that we’re about underbanked, unbanked, disadvantaged? How can we say we’re about that?” And our organizations don’t model inclusivity. So for me to have stronger community impact, then the community had to be represented, and it’s that simple.

Kerala Taylor:
I have so much I could potentially say on that side. I really appreciate your answering. Like Katie mentioned, we’ve been doing a lot of that work at PixelSpoke and it’s just made us such a better team. When I joined PixelSpoke, it was maybe about eight really nerdy white people, and we had one remote worker who is in Nicaragua. And it’s not just about how different our team looks today, it’s just about all the perspectives we bring to the table and we’re better at making decisions and we’re better at just thinking about any decision that we have to make through a more inclusive lens. I mean, we weren’t doing it for the bottom line, but it’s been so good for her business as well.

So keep talking, keep speaking up. I find the credit union movement tends to be a little squeamish when it comes to talking about racial issues head on or poverty for that matter. So I really appreciate your voice. When it comes to speaking up, if folks can’t tell from listening to Ronaldo, you sound like a pastor when you talk, and I’m curious how your work as a pastor has informed your work as a credit union leader or vice versa. How do they feed each other?

Ronaldo Hardy:
It is so interesting because the overlap is very strong. So I think that being a pastor by nature, number one, connects me with community all the time. So it’s hard for me to be in any organization and not consider what’s happening in the community. But also in the pastoral seat, you have a variety of people who you are serving all with unique needs. They also typically bring more of their challenges within that community to share in what their joys and pains. So it keeps me aware of where the issues are so that my impact could be deeper and leveraging what access I have in financial services to make that happen. A work that I came to the credit union industry where there’s more heart integrated into the decision-making.

So the alignment was really good for me and I truly do, I feel like, lead organizations with that pastoral heart and mind. Pastors are nurturers. They care. That’s where that emotional IQ comes into play. Now, remaining… So part of my decision, by the way to be bivocational is that I told you I grew up, I was a PK and we didn’t have a lot of money, so I was like, “I’m not accepting that.” I want to make sure that I build a certain amount of financial independence and that my kids did not have this negative association with what the church meant to our financial structure at the house. So that’s part of why I’ve remained bivocational.

I always have to mention that because people are like, especially when they see our church is established and thriving, they always think, “Are you going to leave one to do the other?” I’m almost 10 years, we’ll be 10 years old in January, and I’ve been still doing both, and I will because I’m committed to that. What being in the professional sector has done for me of being a credit union CEO in particular in my past and remaining at the top of organizations, it’s made me so much stronger as a pastor in particular as it relates to managing the business operation.

Because while it’s interesting that the church and credit unions are very heart focused organizations, really moving out of the heart to reach people, there is absolutely a business side to successfully leading a church and making sure that we do have a budget, that we do strategic planning, that we can be sustainable. So I’m appreciative of having the business background that I have because I do believe that that helped to accelerate not only the stability but the growth of our church, but I love the church because it keeps me connected to the community in a way that strengthens who I’m as a CEO too.

Katie Stone:
I just want to take a moment and recognize two jobs, four kids, podcast guests.

Kerala Taylor:
So my next question is when do you sleep?

Ronaldo Hardy:
Every now and then we get to squeeze a couple of hours in, right? I do really value rest. I am a person. I live my life with this concept of life needs work, rest, and play. So I’m always looking at those buckets and seeing whenever I’m feeling a little bit off, then I know somewhere I’ve missed it in one of those buckets, right? I’ll give you this nugget, and this would be great for organizations listening as well. I have this thing that I talk about in gaining and maintaining momentum, and sometimes I have to apply it to my individual life. But I have found in all of my leadership lanes that three things really drive momentum, both in gaining and maintaining it.

It’s order, diligence and unity. So it’s making sure that things are in order. Whenever there is disruption in an organization, you should really look at what’s out of order. Something is not together in the systems. Diligence. I like to say diligence is what you do when desire leaves because some people really believe that they’re being diligent, and I’m like, “No, you just desire it.” When you go to the gym the first three weeks of the year and you really are excited. Desire is leading you there, but that day that you have no desire, then we’ll find out if you’re actually diligent. So diligence matters, and then unity.

Those are the three things that guide, in my opinion, how you gain and maintain momentum is what I look at first. Anytime I see a disruption in the organization I’m leading personally, I come back and I apply those same things to me. When something is out of whack, I’m like, “What’s out of order in my work, rest and play?” Right? And then I’m making sure I’m diligent and I remain unified with whatever I’m a part of, but that’s how I structure my life. So trust me, there’s always going to be a time when I’m going to say, “This work will have to wait because I am ready to have some fun,” or “Hey, I can’t have fun today because I’m tired. I need the rest.

I am learning to balance them all well. And turning 40, accelerated that growth in that area.

Katie Stone:
Thanks for sharing that. What a great tangible takeaway for our listeners.

Ronaldo Hardy:
You’re welcome.

Katie Stone:
All right, so we have some rapid fire questions for you. These are just fun, shoot from the hip questions and answers. And my first one is, if you could have dinner with one historical person, who would it be?

Ronaldo Hardy:
I have to say two. And only because one historical person is living and one is no longer living. So I consider my historical figure that is living Barack Obama. President Obama, his vibe just does it for me. He makes me feel… Every time I hear him talk, I’m like, “We can have dinner together. We’ve been knowing each other forever.” And then when I think of one that is deceased now, I do think of Martin Luther King.

And the reason why I think of Martin Luther King in particular was recognizing that he truly was going against the grain now. It’s easy for us to romanticize his birds and all that he represents now, but he didn’t get that love when he was going through it. So I love to talk to him about what he did to maintain his fortitude in the resistance.

Katie Stone:
Great. All right, next question. What is your favorite meal?

Ronaldo Hardy:
I love crabs. Dungeness crabs at that. It’s my comfort food. If I’m having… I think we all have this comfort food. If we’re having a bad day, I can’t explain it, but when I’m having the roughest of days and my wife shares this with me, we both are there. We both look at each other like, “You want crabs today?” That’s Q4. It didn’t go that well, and we need something to turn the day around.

Katie Stone:
I do have a follow-up question. Drawn butter, lemon, hot sauce, just straight crab?

Ronaldo Hardy:
Butter and lemon but they need to be seasoned very well because I’m from Louisiana and we love our spice, so I want my nose to run a bit. That’s the qualifier that we haven’t done spice on it. Right?

Katie Stone:
Very nice. Cool. All right. What’s your favorite cause?

Ronaldo Hardy:
My favorite cause really is just uplifting the disadvantage, right? So my passion has been, in particular the vision that I left Southwest with, eliminating poverty in our community. I believe that if we saw the financial challenges of individuals, we really helped them to accelerate in every facet of life. And it matches with my personal mission statement, which is to change the world by building the people who will change the world.

Katie Stone:
Well, I think you just answered my last question, which was going to be, what is your life slogan? One step ahead of me already.

Ronaldo Hardy:
And I have a story there. So change the world by building the people who will change the world. When I convince that, I like to say I’m a people builder. That’s where I’ve made my greatest investment in life. And I developed that a few years ago in response to a lot of people were like, “Well, you’re doing this. You’re in credit unions, you’re in church, you’re a dad, you sing.” Because I sing as well. And they were trying to understand like, “Make it all make sense for me. You do so many different things, how do you do it?”

I was able to challenge that eventually and say, “No, I do one thing many different ways.” I wake up every day to build people and I have the opportunity to do that in my home, in my community, through my church, through my work. Everywhere I go, I have one thing that I do every single day. I just do it many different ways.

Kerala Taylor:
I love that. As much as I would love to continue our conversation, I feel like there’s so much to talk about. It is time for our final take. And just as a reminder, our big question today was how can credit unions shape their brands from the inside out, starting with their people, culture and impact? So in just a few sentences, Ronaldo, can you summarize your thoughts on this question?

Ronaldo Hardy:
I think it starts with understanding the community that you’re serving, so really understand where you are and why they need you. And then I think it is going a bit deeper to determine who you want to be in that story of progress. And once you have that, that’s where we get our vision and mission from. Once you have that, it’s being committed enough to that vision and mission to do whatever it takes to be able to deliver on that. Like I mentioned to you earlier where we did our poverty assimilation, where we off-boarded people who didn’t match it, certifying all of our financial counselors.
All of that was the internal work, creating an organization, an internal culture of celebration around progress. That was the internal work to make sure that the beautiful things that we communicated externally so that there will be synergy between the culture was a match. And I believe that that is the way to get started. Nothing grows well unless it’s cultured well, and when you culture it well, tell your story well, and that’s how you do it all well.

Kerala Taylor:
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Ronaldo.

Katie Stone:
Such a pleasure.

Ronaldo Hardy:
Absolutely.

Kerala Taylor:
Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty inspired right now. And as far as our key takeaways go, first I just want to highlight Southwest Louisiana Credit Union’s vision of eliminating poverty. I really hope that all our listeners will take this opportunity to revisit your credit union’s vision or maybe visit it for the first time. Do you have a vision statement or do you know what it is? I loved what Ronaldo said about how it just doesn’t make sense to have a credit union in a community without a focus on what it will mean to that community. And another way I like to think of this is if your credit union disappeared tomorrow, what would that mean for your community?

I do worry that there’s too many credit unions that lack a guiding vision or a north star, if you will, when it comes to their impact. Secondly, growth requires proper cultivation. I really loved Ronaldo’s metaphor about growing plants and how important it is to culture them properly, which is probably why most of my houseplants end up dying. But Ronaldo talks about going into these strategic planning sessions that are focused on growing deposits or growing loans, and just don’t take into account the environment that this growth takes place in. Culture is not just some touchy-feely afterthought, it’s the foundation for how effective organizations can grow in sustainable and healthy ways.

Lastly, it’s important for us to remember that sometimes a commitment to purpose and values requires difficult trade-offs. We simply can’t be everything to everyone. Ronaldo talked about graciously off-boarding folks at his credit union who weren’t aligned with their new vision. And here at PixelSpoke we similarly use our core values to guide some of our most difficult decisions, including who we hire and which clients we take on. And sometimes that means graciously parting ways with a client or passing up what might seem to be a tempting opportunity simply because it lacks that values alignment. All right, well thanks for joining us today for another great episode.

The Remarkable Credit Union is brought to you by PixelSpoke, a digital marketing agency that works with credit unions to create user-friendly, high-converting, award-winning websites. As a B Corp, an employee-owned cooperative, we believe that business can and should be a force for good. You can learn more and check out our work at pixelspoke.coop. That’s PixelSpoke, all one word, dot C-O-O-P. Until the next time, I wish you the best of luck in making your credit union remarkable.