In 2023, Diamond Vogel Paint celebrated the completion of its innovation center which will house research and development scientists collaborating to improve the paints and coatings the company has been making since its founding in 1926. Innovation like this along with technology and relationships has always been part of the foundation of the company, something Drew Vogel, grandson of founder Andrew Vogel, knows well, having grown up in the family business. Not surprisingly, these basic tenets of the paint manufacturing company dovetail well with the other industry in which the family has stakes: community banking.
Vogel was born and raised in Orange City, Iowa, and studied at Orange City’s Northwestern College before completing an industrial administration degree at Iowa State University. “I went to work for the paint company right after school,” he said. “I hadn’t planned on it.” In fact, he had been offered two other jobs and couldn’t decide between General Electric or Caterpillar. So he called his dad, Frank, for advice. Frank asked, “What do you get excited about?”
The pair had never discussed him going to work at the paint company, but Vogel had always enjoyed his work there growing up. So he interviewed with his uncles. “It’s easier to take advice from an uncle than a dad,” Vogel said. While the uncles offered him a job, it was his dad who was really his boss and mentor for 15 years.
When Frank wanted to retire, Vogel moved back to Orange City, and soon thereafter, Frank bought what became Iowa State Bank, a $17 million ag bank chartered in town. “I felt that if I didn’t get out of the way [at Diamond Vogel], Drew wouldn’t be able to develop into leadership,” Frank told the Northwestern College magazine in 2018. “It’s a great gift that Drew took over. He’s a better manager than I was.”
More than just trying to stay out of Drew’s way, however, was Frank’s interest in ensuring the bank stayed locally owned. “His observation was that communities that don’t have a bank, or one that is owned locally — over the years, there is not as much support for community growth as communities that do have that,” Vogel said. Banks that are locally owned “feel a responsibility to be part of projects that help build the community, quality of life, or economic base,” he said. “It’s fulfilling to see the bank, in its own way … respond to that. It’s a pretty big part of what motivates me and motivated our family.”
Since joining the Vogel Bancshares and bank boards in 1988, Vogel has seen assets grow to just over $1 billion in 2023, and loans grow to more than $750 million from $8 million. Much of that growth came through acquisitions, something very familiar to Vogel. In the last 50 years, the paint industry has gone from 3,500 independent manufacturers nationally to 350 today, he said; Diamond Vogel was responsible for some of that consolidation.
“That helped us be in tune and prepared for what the bank would need to do as the years went on,” he said. Iowa State Bank as it stands today is the result of six different charters coming together as one.
For his role in that growth, Vogel was named a 2024 “Amazing Outside Director” by BankBeat magazine.
Vogel believes his background in customer service, relationships, sales and marketing has benefited the bank over the years and influenced the bank’s diversification. President Leroy Van Kekerix agrees. Vogel’s general business sense and his background in manufacturing have been very valuable as the bank created a commercial loan department, he said.
“Manufacturing, sell and distribute, personal service, retail. It’s a departure from ag,” Vogel said. “We love the ag business. Our bank has really good specialists in beef and pork and grains and commodity and row cropping. But I think we’ve been able to expand our bandwidth in regard to commercial and industrial.”
The bank has grown into “a pretty decent regional company,” Van Kekerix added.
Vogel also is well-versed on the impact of rules and regulations. “Knowing that you have to be astute and understand what the regulations are and how to honor those and meet those regulations was something that helped us as we went into banking,” he said. “We kind of kidded sometimes with folks at the bank that we went into banking because we thought we were going to move into a business that wasn’t so highly regulated.”
The Vogels’ work in the community through both the paint company and the bank earned both Frank and Drew Vogel spots in the Iowa Business Hall of Fame in 2017, the first ever inductees from northwest Iowa. “I guess we must have done more things right than wrong,” Drew Vogel quipped. “We were just honored to be associated with those folks and those companies.”
Vogel transitioned into chair of the two boards in 2018-19. Despite having been president of a company, Vogel has balanced his past experience with the duties of bank chair, Van Kekerix said. “He’s really allowed the staff and management to run the bank while he’s guiding the bank in a general way,” he said. “That’s a hard blend, and he’s really done that well.”
“I really recognize the Vogels have treated it as a family-owned bank and a community bank,” Van Kekerix said. “And Drew learned that through the paint company.”
“Relationships were something that was part of the company right from the beginning — customers, employees, suppliers. I think that’s carried across into banking as well. Community banks obviously are and should be about relationships,” Vogel said. “Relationships have always been the important part of how we’ve liked to do business.”