When he was a small business owner, Brett Johnson recalls, he banked with a large financial institution and had problems, so switched to a community bank.
"The customer service was so much better," Johnson says. "That's the atmosphere we have here, as well."
Johnson, 58, was appointed executive vice president and chief risk officer for Chattanooga-based Millennium Bank in September. He joined Millennium amid a long career in banking, though he also had a six-year stint running his own wholesale company.
Johnson, who is married and has four children, says he likes to have interactions with people, and that's key for a community bank.
"In a community bank, people greet you and know you by name," he says.
A native of Shelbyville, Tennessee, Johnson entered banking after graduating from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he studied finance.
"I always liked numbers," he says.
After college, he moved to Georgia where he became a bank examiner, later joining a financial institution in Washington, D.C., as a loan review officer. But after a couple of years there, he wanted to move back to the South.
Johnson was at Fuji Bank in Atlanta for seven years, working on large syndicated deals with Fortune 500 companies. He returned to Tennessee in 1997, working at a local bank in Chattanooga before starting his own business, later selling it and then joining a community bank in the city.
When the Great Recession hit in 2008, he went to work for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., examining banks mostly in East and Middle Tennessee, but some in New Orleans and Atlanta as well, he says. One of those banks was Millennium Bank, and he got to know the management there, including bank President Mike Haskew. He was offered a position at Millennium, and it was an opportunity to stop traveling so much with the FDIC.