Ingram's November 2022

Bobbi Howe , Chief Operating Officer RE/MAX REGIONAL SERVICES Be honest here: How many people do you know who were writing up contracts for home sales when they were just 10 years old? If the answer is zero, you may now expand your universe by one. Meet Bobbi Howe, the recently appointed COO for RE/ MAX Regional Services, whose history with residential real estate predated middle school in St. Joseph. “I grew up as an only child with a single-parent mom who was a Realtor and producer in the community for over 20 years,” Howe says. “That strong role model for me was what a female leader could and should be. There was no glass ceiling for her; she could work alongside the top people in the industry.” Howe still jokes that she got into real estate at the age of eight because “I went along on every showing outside school hours.” At one closing, where she pointed out that her mother had misspelled “refrigerator” on a document, the response was, “If you’re so smart, you write it up.” So she did. “That’s how I made my allowance, doing paperwork,” Howe says. She earned her own sales license at the age of 18, and “I tried to escape two or three times, but I was always pulled back. It was literally in my blood, and that’s the great thing about this industry—you can make of it what you need it to be. Work as much or as little as you want; your paycheck will reflect the efforts you put into it.” Nearing attainment of a degree in education, she switched to a business major at Missouri Western, and before long found herself back in the real-estate realm. That started with a title company as an escrow closer, but when her mother’s sales team needed to staff up, Howe got the call to join forces again. They worked in tandem for nearly 10 years, and Howe developed a reputation as a top sales pro. But the impressionability that defined her youth was a coin with an

other, darker side. The profession isn’t lack ing in stress; neither is being a single parent. Her mother descended into alcohol abuse and developed mental health issues, which have inspired Howe to support organizations to combat both challen ges. “Plus, I was never Bobbi; I was always

Nancy’s daughter,” Howe says. “I had to make a decision to create a legacy of my own.” That she’s done: Before joining RE/MAX just this fall, Howe had built one of the region’s fastest-growing real-estate firms, mak- ing it into the Top 10 in Ingram’s Corporate Report 100 in 2017 and 2018 and overseeing roughly 500 agents, and she’s been chosen to serve as president of both the Kansas City area andMissouri statewide real-estate association boards.

Shannon Johnson , EVP/Chief Administration Officer UMB BANK

Take it from Shannon Johnson: You want to succeed? Stop trying to be the smartest person in the room, around the conference table or even in the executive suites. “I like to surround myself with people smarter and better than me, people who will give good feedback and who are good partners,” says the chief administrative officer for UMB Bank. That’s not an uncommon managerial approach. This is: “Hire people who could take your job some day,” she says, “then grow them and support them.” That’s a leadership style informed by 20 years of increasing responsibilities at the bank, but long before that, by taking lessons from an invaluable mentor—her grandmother, who stepped in to lead the family construction company in Las Vegas, New Mexico, after her grandfather’s death. “She was a mother of five and a grandmother of eight, but CEO until she was 80,” Johnson recalls.

transact ional—money goes in, money goes out—and I didn’t fully appreciate the commun- ity resource that banking provides, the connection that financial profession- als have with clients, whether that’s an individ ual customer, their fam ilies or a business. That was a happy surprise, something that not only

“I didn’t realize at the time what a tremendous impact with leadership and my own career she was providing. Watching her get to know her employees and their families, she was teaching us that people work to live, not the other way around.” A volleyball scholarship to Rockhurst University brought Johnson to Kansas City, pursuing a degree in psychology and with social work as her plan. She worked for a while at Boys Town in Omaha, but found the emotional attachments hard to manage. After switching into financial services with a Nebraska credit union, she found a comfort zone connecting with people in a business setting. In 2002, she came back to Kansas City to join UMB. “Today I have the privilege to manage different departments—legal, credit risk, corporate risk and human resources—and I don’t have expertise in many of these. But I do work to empower the experts I am fortunate to work with, and reserve the right to get smarter every day learning alongside them.” Early on, she wasn’t sure financial services would be the long-term pathway until a realization struck: “I thought banking was fairly

helped build pride in the financial in dustry, but a career within it.” She’s part of a vanguard of women who have pushed into the highest ranks of financial-services leadership in recent years, and she hopes to keep that going. “It really starts at that entry level of management opportunity,” Johnson says. “It’s one thing to hire in at the executive level, but we need to be intentional in our focus of finding the right candidates at all levels. Being able to build that pipeline of underrepresented talent is a more sustainable strategy.”

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November 2022

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