brad garland

I was watching a documentary the other night about Ralph Nader called ‘An Unreasonable Man’. Despite the fact that Nader was never elected a politician, he has been incredibly effective in implementing policy. Some of his efforts include:

- Mandatory seat belts in all vehicles

- Airbags

- Warning labels on cigarettes

- The Clean Air Act

- The Freedom of Information Act

Regardless of your political stance, we can all recognize that Nader has done a lot for our country. The movie got me thinking about how our community needs a well defined purpose and direction. We need to believe in principles and work together to achieve them. I thought about it for a while and in what could only be described as an epiphany, it hit me. I was suddenly exhilarated! I leaned over to my wife, Jenny and asked her if she would indulge me for a second to see if my idea sounded remotely sane. Here’s my challenge for us:

The financial industry is in a sad state after the massive bailouts, layoffs, and bankruptcies across the country. What can we do to pull ourselves out this hole? I believe we need a retooling of our belief system.

This industry, very simply, needs three things:

1) Transparency - At the heart of this crisis is the fact that we haven’t held an open and honest discussion with ourselves or our customers. Transparency is an absolute requirement to ensure we never have a situation like this again. You should be credited for the willingness of your institution to share and contribute. This sharing can be done from the bottom to the top of the organization. Anyone has the right to help carry this movement forward and your voice is needed to do it.

2) Innovation - Innovation is something that gets a lot of talk but not a lot of action. Part of this is due to constraints put on the institutions by regulators but also by the organization itself. Innovation is only passively talked about and not made a priority within the organization. I suggest a mandate encouraging innovative practices for banks and credit unions. One way to do this is to have something similar to the R&D tax credit allotted to small businesses. Allow financial institutions, large and small, to get credit for taking a chance. If banks aren’t allow to think and play creatively, a stagnant environment will continue to exist. Innovation can root from an individual or an organization. The question is what are you going to do to improve things?

3) Education - Ultimately, consumers are getting the short end of the stick. Consumers assume they can’t get sound financial advice from financial organizations and in current times are timid to leave their money in the bank. It’s a travesty. We need educational reform that allows, no requires, bankers to provide a certain level of financial advise to their customers.

Individually, each step is crucial., But only when the three ideas are ‘tied’ together, do we attain transformational change.

This is how the TIE principles were born. This idea isn’t about me, The Garland Group, or Banktastic.com. It’s about making a difference and taking a stance against complacency. What changes can you and your institution make to encourage these principles? How about becoming a little more open to sharing ideas with others? Or testing a new marketing initiative toward a particular demographic? Are you willing to host financial literacy classes at your local schools? The power is in your hands.

Brad Garland is the CEO of The Garland Group and founder of the banker community Banktastic.com. He speaks across the country about opportunities in this Web-enabled world and how to succeed by understanding them.

You hear that statement a lot, right? People don’t scale. Whether it’s stories of endless email or having to ‘trim down’ their RSS feeds or Twitter followers, people can’t keep up with it all. So my thought today was to take the contrarian view and ask, “So what, is that the Web’s fault?”

As everyone knows by now, anyone can post content (regardless of quality). I think the Web community does a good job of filtering the best stuff to us whether through Twitter, delicious, Banktastic, etc. But now, every time I either consider adding a new feed or following someone on Twitter I do a double check:

“Do I really want to do this?”

“Do I really want to muddy the waters with new content?”

That stinks. It’s not the Web or these services fault that I, the individual, can’t process it all. We have this beautifully decentralized ‘service’ that allows the tapping into the most brilliant minds in the world with a click of a button but we don’t because we “can’t keep up.” How sad really…

I guess my question is, how do we overcome? Is it the 10% stuff that Google’s Marissa Mayer was talking about at the Techcrunch52? Semantic search via service like Twine?

The Web is leaps and bounds better than what we had before it but now with the firehose busting at the seams, how do we continue to process more efficiently? Come on, you’re smart, let us know what you think.

This post has been held for quite some time and for the sake of finishing a thought, I’m just going to go ahead and post it. You’ve been warned. ;)

This is a continuation of the first post I was writing about ‘Betting on the future’ and the question was left of why not leave Banktastic as a free, ad-supported service?

Many of the social networking sites today are considered a success based on two things: a consumer market and sizable scale to be able charge for advertisements. I realized early on that since our market was not a consumer based one we were limited in its potential to hit those ‘Myspace’ like stats so we didn’t even try. Instead, we knew we were going to have to get smart on creating this community because we would never have those numbers and advertising only would only take the site so far. But we do have something extremely valuable. We have a focused, highly targeted community in a niche industry that are smart as hell and are often decision makers for their places of business. And there are businesses out there that are attracted to that community. I like to call them ‘premium eyeballs’.

It became apparent quickly that a single free network would only go so far by advertising only. The Banktastic community is growing each and every week and we love what the community has become but I also saw other groups in the industry that were already connected but just not online. So that’s when the idea of private networks came but with a twist.

The twist is the decision for those specialized networks to be public or private to Banktastic.com. We wanted to allow these offline networks to start interconnecting with one another and allowing information to flow in AND out of Banktastic and their own networks. Now, understand, the content is public not the membership. That is controlled entirely separately and is up to the user to decide who they want to share their profile with. My thought is you could provide value to people that need to connect privately but also connect with them an external public group that connects everyone together. And by tying everyone’s focused networks together at a ‘free’ center will improve how information flow is in the financial space.

Are we on the right track? What are we not thinking of? Hopefully my transparency encourages some comments because I never think we’ve got this whole thing figured out.

The stars aligned, it was a ‘God thing’, or maybe I just got damn lucky but no matter what way you call it, I have rock stars as a development team. Mark, Dave, and Lisa each work their tails off for our company and each bring their own unique perspectives to make Banktastic and this platform great.

As we began building out Banktastic we began, unintentionally, building towards ideals or principles that we believe in. Those principles are still what guide us today and anytime their is a argument discussion about doing something we lean on them to make the final decision. If I’ve mentioned them to you before, please proceed past but if not here they are with some detail attached to each:

1) People are inherently good

As we build this platform, we assume people are going to use it with good intentions and not to hurt other people. Do we therefore think the world is always smelling rosy? Of course not, but we are willing to trust peoples good nature first and learn from our mistakes along the way. This has already paid off as people with the expertise to hurt have helped make our system more secure. People are inherently good if you are open and trust in them.

2) Openness wins

Nothing frustrates us more than services that require you to register to read the entire article or be behind the ‘walled garden’ to even see what’s going on. So Banktastic wasn’t going to be that way. You would be able to see all sections, without registration, only when you wanted to be apart of the conversation would you have to register. Why? We wanted to make sure your efforts were recorded and you got credited for that. You deserve to be recognized for your expertise!

3) Community is king

Maybe it’s the Gen Y in us but we don’t like to party alone. The more the merrier we say. People are smart and we want to show that off. So if it means friending up, ‘banking’ things, thumbs up, policing the system, etc. We want the community to be considered in every feature we create. The community is greater than the sum of its parts.

These are our principles as we continue to build this platform. They are probably not perfect but its what guides each new addition into our system. I would encourage every new start-up to have a set of principles that they believe in and to let those principles guide them as they build their product.

What are your principles as you build your products? I love to learn about yours. Have a great long Labor Day weekend everybody!

I’ve mentioned in a couple of conversations with friends that I feel like I have just thrown a rock in a pond and I’m waiting to see what kind of splash it’s going to make when hitting the water.

You see the rock there? That rock symbolizes something exciting and scary for me. That rock symbolizes what I think/hope/pray is the beginning of something great. That rock is Banktastic, the social knowledge web platform, and we are betting on a big splash as it begins to hit the financial service industry.

Veering in a new direction from our original business is a scary thing because who knows what the outcome may be. Our original reason to do Banktastic was the obvious need to better share information among people in financial services (and that seems to be improving). So that, with a touch of fun/style/community, it allowed us to play in the space that I enjoy so much with the hope that over time traffic would increase to have a place where ‘focused eyes’ would come and we could start offering advertisers a place to sell to a niche audience to offset the cost. But I knew I didn’t want to stop there…

Note: I had a long post here on what my reason was for not stopping at a ‘free’ service but realized that another blog post would probably be more appropriate.

Our company has been fortunate enough, thanks to the tireless efforts of our staff, to be able to bootstrap this new venture in hopes to reap the rewards down the road. We’ve invested around $200K thus far in the development of this product and have yet to accept any VC money (though we’ve been approached). Our rock is about to hit the water and I just hope its splash gets everyone I know drenched.

Today we announced the private release of our new niche banking-specific community site, Banktastic.com. We are definitely excited about it and understand that building any site like this will be a long and hard road. We hope our dedication to keeping our content specific and relevant to the industry helps build the site as a credible source for the industry.

With that being said, releasing new web apps has got to be the most anti-climatic experience ever. Once we finally sent out the invites to the beta users we just sat there and were like, “OK, what now?” Heheh…we didn’t expect 1000s of users to flood the system but come on, we worked hard to get here, we need some fanfare!

Instead, we went home, spent some time with our significant others and called it a day. I know we have a ton of work left to do and are NO WAY close to done but just thought I’d share my experience. Any developers out there experience the same thing?