TOM KEENAN of KEENAN & PARTNERS MIB’S 2025 OUTSTANDING ASSOCIATE MEMBER During last month’s convention, Tom Keenan was presented with MIB’s 2025 Outstanding Associate Member Award. As the owner of Keenan & Partners, Tom exemplifies everything it means to be a member of MIB. We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Tom and discuss his background, his career and learned more about what membership in MIB means to him. The following are excerpts from our conversation. Tell us about yourself. I grew up in a rural community in the state of Maryland. At the age of 10, I started working on local farms. I helped bring in the hay on horse and sheep farms, which eventually turned into full-time work on dairy farms during the summer months. That experience taught me a work ethic that I wouldn’t have learned elsewhere. I was sent away to boarding school during my high school years. From there, I went to the College of Wooster in Ohio. During my junior year of college, I had the opportunity to travel and experience the beauty of the American West. It was then that I knew I couldn't live on the East Coast. Straight out of college, I moved out west to Portland, Oregon, and I've been here ever since. I've been fortunate to have a career that allows me to travel throughout the West, including the great state of Montana. I've had three phases of my career. When I worked on farms, I helped build barns and fences, which led me to become a general construction contractor after college. I did that for the first 10-12 years of my career. I then moved into commercial real estate development throughout the western United States. I did that all the way up until the Great Recession in 2008, when my career changed immensely. There was no more development work because you couldn't find a bank loan to build any type of new building during that time. I was sitting on my hands for a month or two, wondering what I'd do next. That was when I received a higher calling. I had a lot of community banking relationships. I'd never owned a development firm, but I had arranged many construction, development and land acquisition loans as a borrower. A few months after the recession hit, I started getting calls from those same bankers I worked with, telling me they had a number of distressed projects — condominiums, apartment buildings and even some gas stations and retail stores — that were half built. The developers decided not to complete them because they knew there was no market to sell the finished product. These semi-completed projects were going to be mothballed. The bankers asked me if, with my construction background, I could tell them what the budget would be to complete that project, what the project was currently worth, what it would be worth at completion and if it was worth it to sell that non-performing loan to an investment group or somebody other than the bank. The end goal was to get that distressed asset off the books. Within six months, I had a full-time job advising community banks. I helped stave off failures. We figured out how to get bad assets out the door to clean up the books so banks could raise the additional capital they needed to weather that storm. It was an honor and a privilege to be able to help during that time. I did that until 2013. When we finally finished working and helping clients with that distressed asset book, my company boomed in a different direction. I had banks calling and saying, “We appreciate all the work you did with us in this real estate aspect, now we're going to look at repositioning our branch footprints. We want to open some branches; we want to close some branches. Can you help us establish 20 Community Banker
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