Interview with CEO Brian Johnson(’98)
Source: PrairieBusinessMagazine.com
From its start as a merger of four rural banks in 2001, Choice Financial of Fargo, N.D., has grown to be a community bank with 19 locations in 17 communities in North Dakota and Minnesota.
In this interview, Prairie Business talks with Brian L. Johnson, Choice Financial’s CEO and board member, about the bank’s history and plans for future growth.
Q. You’re a Jamestown College (now the University of Jamestown) graduate with a degree in business management and economics. What key lesson did you learn in college that you still think about today?
A. I graduated in the late ’90s from the University of Jamestown, and I think they did a great job of setting expectations that college was not a finish line, but instead a bridge to the professional world.
Their work study program placed me in an insurance agency and then a bank, which showed me that my degree was a doorway for opportunity, not entitlement.
