Published March 2005

Coastal extends reach,
looks to future

By Kimberly Hilden
SCBJ Assistant Editor

After opening two new branches in the last half of 2004, Coastal Community Bank plans to use this year as a time to catch its breath and plan for the future, chief executive Lee Pintar said.

“We’re in the process of strategic planning that could bring about (changes) in our philosophy of goals,” said Pintar, a longtime Everett banker who founded the Everett-based bank in 1997.

Working with Applied Business Solutions, a Rainier-based strategic decision-making consultant, Coastal is working with its board of directors as well as a representative mix of its employees to define “who we want to be and how we’re going to get there,” Pintar said.

That desire for companywide reflection follows a four-month span in which the 8-year-old bank nearly doubled its number of office locations, opening a Freeland branch in September and a Stanwood branch in December and bringing its total number of office locations to five.

Coastal hadn’t planned on opening two branches in such quick succession, Pintar said, but regional industry mergers enabled the bank to follow its expansion philosophy of building branches around high-quality employees already in the area.

The November 2003 merger of Pacific Northwest Bank and Wells Fargo, for example, brought Coastal the services of Cheryl Racine, who formerly oversaw Pacific Northwest’s branches in Freeland and Clinton, he said. And the October 2004 merger of EverTrust Financial Group and KeyBank led Coastal to hire Laura Byers, the former manager of EverTrust Bank’s Stanwood branch.

In all, Coastal has hired three employees to staff the Freeland branch, at 1860 Scott Road, Suite A, and five for the Stanwood branch, at 8728 271st St. NW. Both locations are temporary, Pintar said, with plans calling for a permanent Freeland location this fall and a permanent Stanwood site by mid-2006.

Along with its facility expansion, Coastal in 2004 experienced a 48 percent increase in income from the prior year and achieved greater than 1 percent in return on average assets — a goal for the year, Pintar said. He attributed the positive numbers to good loan and fee income from the real estate sector as well as a solid handling of resources and management from within the financial institution.

Now, with 2005 well under way, the 45-employee organization is focused on another type of goal: creating an organizational philosophy for the future, Pintar said. He added that he expects the strategic planning process to wrap up in April, with implementation staged over the course of the year.

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