While she was working as a part-time teller in 2005, Mary Jayne Crocker sat down to write a note to the bank’s departing chief lending officer, wishing him luck on his future endeavors. Shortly after that, Jerry Baack reached out to thank her for the well wishes and issued an invitation: He planned to start a new charter; did she want to join him?
“I didn’t know him very well, but I had enjoyed working with him,” Crocker recalled recently. “And I said ‘Oh, OK.’ I was nervous because I didn’t know him very well. It’s a pretty aggressive dream.”
A former FDIC regulator, Baack had already lined up a CFO and chief credit officer from among his former regulator colleagues. He hired Crocker on a part-time basis in early May to handle administrative details while he focused on raising capital, with a goal of $10 million. “I had the luxury of that flexibility to help him at the beginning do just about anything,” she said, while the other two still held down full-time jobs prior to Bridgewater Bank’s launch.
Crocker, who’d reentered the world of finance after raising three children, discussed with her husband how much to invest. The pair settled on $25,000 — “Had I known how it was going to turn out, I would’ve given him a lot more than that,” Crocker said — and she followed Baack into the de novo wilds. That investment, and the partnership which sprouted from Baack’s invitation, has more than paid off, for both Crocker and for Bridgewater Bank. Since opening its doors on Nov. 2, 2005, Bridgewater has grown to $4.7 billion in assets and more than 250 employees.
For her work helping grow Minnesota’s Bridgewater Bank and build its workplace culture from the ground up, Mary Jayne Crocker, now executive vice president and chief strategy officer, has been named a 2024 BankBeat “Outstanding Women in Banking” honoree.
Laying the groundwork
The six-month scramble leading up to Bridgewater’s opening involved a lot of hard work and long days, but it was also filled with an energy and invigorating sense of learning. “We’re doing something new. We’re creating something that’s never existed before,” Crocker said. Lacking any experience in starting a de novo, Crocker nevertheless jumped in with both feet. From finding office space and buying the furniture to fill it to designing a logo and developing a business plan, she became the implementer for Baack’s entrepreneurial vision. “He always has the ideas, and then I make sure that they happen,” she said.
During those early, part-time days, Crocker’s contributions quickly made her an indispensable part of the team. “She just kept taking on bigger and bigger projects,” Baack said. “Since that time going forward, she’s really touched every area in the bank other than lending.” Crocker has overseen HR, IT, marketing, operations, finance, product development, facilities, retail banking and investor relations.
Bridgewater grew steadily over the next few years, navigating the Great Recession relatively unscathed. At a certain point, around when the bank reached 20 employees, internal communication and coordination grew too complex for informal systems, Crocker said in a 2017 article. Enter the Entrepreneurial Operating System, developed by Michigan-based EOS Worldwide. Baack read the book ‘Traction’ by founder Gino Wickman, which lays out the principles of EOS, and brought the system to Crocker, who took on the work of implementation in 2010, rolling it out to everyone from upper management to entry-level employees.
“Her involvement in building the culture, I don’t think we can stress it enough,” said Chief Operating Officer Lisa Salazar, who was hired by Crocker six years ago. “Mary Jayne had the role of integrating [Baack’s] vision for the bank and creating a consistent model for employees and clients as well.”
Rolling out EOC included plans for where the company wanted to be in three, five and 10 years, as well as written job descriptions and organization charts. The system helped Bridgewater identify goals and roadblocks as well as what makes it unique. EOS also helps put metrics on those elements so everyone can tell what progress has been made.
From there, Bridgewater has placed a premium on getting the right people — those who exhibit a match for its entrepreneurial spirit — into the right roles at the organization. The bank is very intentional about hiring and firing, Crocker said, but beyond that Bridgewater treats its employees like partners with an equal stake in the success of the enterprise.
“There’s no rocket science in the way that our bank operates,” she said. “If people are responsive, if they’re accurate, if they’re dedicated, if they care about one another, if they think hard about what they’re doing, if they like what they’re doing, if they’re growing at what they’re doing — it’s a win-win.”
Growing and expanding
Crocker helped position the bank well to turn its attention outward in search of growth opportunities. In 2016, Bridgewater acquired First National Bank of the Lakes, Orono, Minn., which also added an office in Minneapolis’ Uptown neighborhood and a retail focus to complement Bridgewater’s commercial lending portfolio. Crocker was a point person for communications and operational integration. Meshing the two cultures took some finesse, she said, a process she’s overseeing again this year as Bridgewater acquires First Minnetonka City Bank, Minnetonka, Minn.
“It’s a big project, independent of how big the bank is. You still have to touch every part of the bank to be able to onboard it,” she said. “That was, again, a huge learning experience.”
The entrepreneurial vision served Bridgewater well yet again when it pursued an IPO. “When we went public, we sat around a table and said, ‘Let’s go public.’ We knew nothing about what we were doing; none of us had ever worked in a public company,” Crocker said. “None of us had ever done this before. It’s like, ‘Well, we can figure it out.’ So we did.”
Crocker, Baack and the rest of the leadership team spent two weeks on the road, pitching potential investors across the country. Most investment firms were focused on the credit side of the business, but Crocker was there to emphasize the importance of Bridgewater’s culture: “If you don’t have the right people, you can’t make any of this stuff happen.”
Once the IPO was completed in 2018, there was a trip to New York City which included a stop in Times Square to see Bridgewater’s ticker symbol. The moment was especially poignant for the Canadian-born Crocker, who worked for the Stock Exchange of Montreal in the 1980s after getting her bachelor’s degree in finance and computer science.
Bridgewater broke ground on its current headquarters in St. Louis Park, Minn., in 2018, opening in August 2020 with a state-of-the-art building that also houses a restaurant and fitness center. Crocker and the rest of the Bridgewater team brought the same can-do attitude to the project. “We decided we were going to do this, and then figured out how to get it done,” she said, researching other recently built corporate headquarters in the area as they planned for the space.
A branch on the ground level is complemented by office and meeting space on floors two through four as well as recreational zones. The building, which sits on a bustling corner a few miles from downtown Minneapolis, features plenty of light and open spaces. Amenities include greenery, foosball tables, beer taps for local brews and a 16-foot sculpture outside the main entrance.
Because the building is all concrete, leadership had to plan carefully for what they wanted the space to look like for Bridgewater’s needs years down the road. Bridgewater has always put a premium on in-person work as a tool to build culture, Crocker said. “We were very careful about not embracing the work-from-home [approach] during the pandemic.” With this building, Bridgewater has ensured that the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit it expects from employees happens in a welcoming physical space.
Baack was careful from the beginning how he structured the bank, wanting to give everyone a tangible reward for their hard work. “He was very generous from the very beginning in saying, ‘If we succeed, everyone succeeds’,” she said. “For everyone, when the bank succeeds, we all succeed.”
Crocker has taken that directive and built it out to include all aspects of the customer experience and workplace culture to encourage employee well-being and productivity. She’s a strong believer in mentorship, said Salazar, who was drawn to join Bridgewater because of the culture Crocker had built. “She’s changed and touched a lot of people’s lives and really helped build, not only their business acumen, but their character and how they go about to really help build this institution,” Baack said.
Crocker is also involved in multiple initiatives at Bridgewater and in the wider community to encourage female entrepreneurship in particular.
“She’s very good at leading you and also holding you accountable that you’re doing what’s best for the company but also being thoughtful about what’s best for you,” Salazar said. “Most people at Bridgewater see her as synonymous with the bank and its culture.”
