Ingram's August 2022

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight DeBruce Foundation Kansas City Environmental design and education are fairly distinct career pathways to most casual observers. Leigh Anne Taylor Knight isn’t your typical casual observer. She looks at both as tools to improve the quality of life for others—they just

Ryan Wiebe Bison State Bank Kansas City

In 2018, when he orchestrated the acquisition of tiny Bison State Bank in west-central Kansas, Ryan Wiebe put the Kansas City banking competition notice: Here we come. Wiebe, who grew up in Blue Springs, is no stranger

come at it from different directions. As a former K-12 teacher and administrator with a double major in design back at Mizzou, she has the ideal job of combining the two approaches and helping people improve their lives as executive director and COO for the DeBruce Foundation. She’s a native of Fayette who says her earliest understanding of what it means to serve others came from watching her father at work as a veterinarian. At MU, she wrote a mission statement about using environmental design to improve the quality of life for others and make the world a better place. Her degree in education and work in school districts—Columbia, North Kansas City, and Park Hill—showed her how kids’ lives could be bettered. “Each time I made career changes, it was a unique opportunity to have an impact on a greater number of people,” she says. It fits neatly with her work helping others improve their lives through the foundation’s work. “We’re a ‘do-tank,’ not a think tank,” she says, with programs to increase career literacy and understand the power of networking. Those tools help increase employment stability across one’s lifetime, she says. “These are game-changers for individuals and families,” she says.

to shaking up existing business models—he had a long streak in fast-growth mode with his First Mortgage Solutions, which morphed into First Mortgage Direct, which itself is being absorbed into Bison as its mortgage-lending operation. So why relocate a small community bank to one of the most competitive banking markets in the nation? “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” says Wiebe. He goes back to the Dodd-Frank act of 2010, which further tilted the playing field in mortgage lending. “It created some inequities and inequalities between independent mortgage banking and traditional banking,” Wiebe says. “Same product, same process, different ball game.” So it was easier—and considerably cheaper, given the costs of licensing independent loan officers—to use a banking structure. And small community banks like Bison are eager to sell. In just three years, his team fortified Bison’s finan cials by roughly doubling deposits, assets, and the size of the loan portfolio; can a return to high-growth mode be far ahead? “I hope in five years to have an additional location, likely on the Kansas side,” he says. “We hope by then to be around the $150- $200 million total asset size.”

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