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The Leadership Circle
INVESTING in the REGION
The RCGA’s
Leadership Circle creates added membership value by providing a
unique and invigorating forum to connect executives of small, medium
and large companies with each other and to the broad base of influential
leaders in the St. Louis region.
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Tom
Wind
CitiMortgage |
In dealing with the overall cyclical nature of the mortgage business—when
the market can be significantly up one year and down the next—the
biggest challenge is to maintain consistent profitability. As the
former CFO of CitiMortgage, Inc., and current president & COO, Tom
Wind is ready for the challenge. “With the overall market volume
expected to decline from $2 trillion last year to about $1.4 trillion
this year,” Wind says, “our company still expects to grow the business
in 2002 even though the market is forecasted to be down as much
as 30 percent.”
As a result of the Travelers Group and Citicorp merger in 1998—a
$140 billion transaction that formed the world’s largest and most
diverse financial services company—Citigroup provides its entities
the global coverage, multiple distribution channels, brand recognition
and broader product menu, which are key to CitiMortgage’s market
penetration.
Responsible for overall business operations, one of Wind’s main
areas of focus is to balance additional business volume with a trained,
part-time flexible workforce. He provides his sales organization
with better training and tools to improve the customer experience,
which is essential to growing the business.
“We want to take the mystery and complexity out of the mortgage
process for the customer,” says Wind, who has recently helped implement
a customer-centric website. “We have a small percentage of the market.
We have great growth opportunities.”
Speaking of growth, CitiMortgage announced plans this past January
to consolidate its St. Louis facilities to a new 5,000-employee
corporate campus in O’Fallon in the fall of 2003. St. Louis beat
out several competing regions around the country for this new corporate
campus.
Leadership Circle insights
Did your college major match your career path? If you knew then
what you know now, what would you have studied in school?
Doris
Harris
BRAL Environmental Services, Inc.
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“With my major
in the environmental field/health, I’ve always been fascinated by
the relationships between persons and their environment/work place.
My current career path provides a good context for understanding
such relationships.” —Doris F. Harris, President, BRAL Environmental
Services, Inc.
Andrew
Rosen
Brown Shoe Company
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“After majoring
in Political Science at Saint Louis University, I went on to complete
the Executive MBA program at Washington University. While a liberal
arts degree gave me a broad perspective, the EMBA program was the
critical component to my education, aligning my skills with job
challenges in a compelling way. In hindsight, I could have elected
an undergraduate double major in political science and economics...
but the true value came from Washington University’s EMBA program.”
—Andrew Rosen, SVP and CFO, Brown Shoe Company
Stephen Benz
FedEX
“I had a double major in accounting and management, which provided
a good foundation for my career path. I wish I would have studied
more industrial engineering, however, to help me understand the
true productivity, performances and costs.” —Stephen Benz, finance
manager, FedEX
John Cochran,
Jr.
JS Logistics
“When I started my own company, JSExpress, I made mistakes due to
my lack of knowledge in accounting, billing, taxes, etc. If I had
graduated with a degree in Business Management/Marketing, I could
have avoided many of these pitfalls. Although, sheer drive and no
fear of failure enabled me to overcome most of these problems.”
—John Cochran, Jr., president, JS Logistics
For more information on Leadership Circle, please contact John Diefenbach,
associate vice president-membership sales, 314/444-1184 or jdief@stlrcga.org.
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