Goodbye corporate world, hello small business

Gary Nordin was frustrated with the slow-moving bureaucracy he had to deal with as a manager for Bank of the West at their Little Falls branch. After 20 years in the financial services industry at several large banks (including American Bank of the North in Mt. Iron) in 2008 he said, “I quit.”

Not too many people quit their jobs in these times, but Nordin thought he was in an okay position to do it. He had saved. And he had a plan. Part of the plan was to be a stay-at-home dad for a while, and his wife Sarah, a social worker, would re-enter the workforce for a while. Nordin loved the time he was able to spend with his little daughter, now 5 years old. “It was really the greatest thing,” he said.

But phase two of his plan was to get back to work - this time under his own rules, not corporate ones. His vision was to start his own business with a diverse set of financial services, and last fall it became a reality: TWM Financial Services was born. Located in the US Bank building in Virginia, Nordin is currently offering tax preparation (individual and corporate), financial consulting, and is a licensed collection agency.

I asked him how he likes the transition from being a manager with a staff to delegate responsibilities to, to being the boss who has to buy the paper clips. “I’ll tell you, this is the most exciting endeavor I have ever experienced in my life,” he said. “Besides having a child, of course, because that is the major most exciting thing. But besides that, this has been the most positive and rewarding experience of my life.”

Green folders that were lined up across his tidy desk represents tax clients he is working with now. In another office, Dean Hilderbrandt was at his desk working the phones in the collections department. Nordin hired Hilderbrandt as his collections manager, and he comes with a lot of experience. “I am trying to build a company of experts,” Nordin said. “There is no substitute for hands on experience.”

With tax season in full swing, and a rising demand for collection services, those were the areas that Nordin decided to focus on first. But he has plans for more services in the near future, including loan management, property management, mortgage lending and other real estate related services.

What is “loan management”? I asked him. “It’s a service to organizations that are providing micro loans to new and existing busi- nesses in and around the state. There are hundreds of non-profit community-based organizations that have financial institutions provide this service for them now, and they are paying a large fee to have them do so.”

Nordin gets out a pen and paper and explains it to me. If an economic development organization, or Iron Range Resources, or the Northeast Entrepreneur Fund (for example), loans X amount of dollars to a variety of businesses each year, they are being charged X percent per loan by a bank for the servicing of that loan. “I can provide the same service for maybe half what the bank is charging them, and they can save a lot of money,” he said.

“The banks won’t like that,” I surmised. And Nordin said, “Isn’t that the greatest thing about competition? Maybe they don’t have to charge as much as they do.”

I note that his offices are in the commonly referred-to “U.S. Bank building.” He tells me that there are some services his landlord won’t agree to let him offer in the building, because U.S. Bank is its largest tenant and they don’t want to ruffle any feathers there. But Nordin is okay with that, for right now it’s just collections, tax preparation, and financial consulting. He’ll cross the other bridge when he gets there.

And to use another metaphor, Nordin explained his leap into small business ownership this way: “It’s like I was on this boat, and at the end of the long journey, I’m moored on this new land, this new continent. But before stepping foot on the new land, I burn the boat.”

“I love it,” Nordin said. “There’s definitely a spring in my step these days.”