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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Process of Picking Top Valley Bankers

We don’t pick people randomly. We don’t pick only the pretty people or the smart people or the ones who call us a zillion times to promote themselves. I’m talking about the process of selecting the Valley’s Top 25 Bankers published in this issue of the Business Journal and the process for selecting other people or companies that we honor in other special reports throughout the year. I had several questions from readers in recent weeks about our selection process for special reports and events. I explained the process for this issue’s banker report briefly at our event honoring the bankers on July 18 but I hope to go into a little bit more detail here. Our initial list of more than 100 nominees came from written nominations submitted by readers and others in the business community as well as from independent research done by our editorial staff led by project coordinator and Senior Reporter Shelly Garcia. We had solicited nominations from our readers through announcements in the Business Journal and through mailings and e-mails to professional services workers. At this point, some nominees asked to be taken out of consideration because they did not meet the criteria or simply did not want the recognition. In these cases, we respected their wishes. Paperwork was then collected on all the nominees. Our editorial team asked specific questions of each nominee concerning the criteria that we set up to help make our final 25 picks. The criteria included revenue and growth generation by the individual, significant accomplishments such as starting up a financial services company and longevity in the industry (all the finalists have been in the industry more than 10 years.). Our editorial team then spent hours going through the nominations again to make the final 25 picks. I’ll tell you it was grueling there were so many outstanding nominees. But we could only pick 25 and tried to pick those with the most volume of business or those responsible for greatest growth of their respective financial institutions or who are in high-level management positions where they are responsible for hundreds of employees and a wide area of coverage. We also tried to get a good representation of banks in the greater Valley area in terms of size and business areas. Community involvement was not taken into consideration. Since this is a business journal, we felt that we should focus solely on their professional accomplishments. As always, I’m open to suggestions of how we could perhaps refine this process and make it better for our August 20 Top 25 CPAs of the Valley special report and beyond. Business Journal Editor Jason Schaff can be reached at (818) 316-3125 or at [email protected] .

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