ARKANSAS VISIONARY TOMMY MAY

Building a legacy, one community at a time

By Dwain Hebda

There are many things about retired banking executive and Arkansas Business Hall of Famer Tommy May’s life and career that stretch the imagination and defy belief. His masterful leadership grew a small bank of the Arkansas Delta into a household name, his list of community involvement is long and his courage in the face of personal obstacles continues to inspire people from all walks of life.

But grand as it is, the story of Tommy May pales in comparison to the storyteller himself — a warm, selfdeprecating individual who eschews the credit for much of his accomplishments, deflecting it instead to the people who followed his lead.

that becomes even more important than what your plan is.

“We made sure that it wasn’t about who got the credit; it was about what we were able to do together in the community and make things better. That really is what community banking is all about.”

Born in Prescott and raised in El Dorado, J. Thomas May lived the all-Amer-

TOMMY said. “I graduated from high school and, like my father and others before me, I decided I wanted to go to the University of Arkansas. With my high school grade point average, that was not an easy thing for me to do to get admitted.”

May did get in and continued his laissez faire approach to his classwork while in Fayetteville.

MAY ON LEADERSHIP:

If there was anything that I wish had my name attached to, it would be a quote I found and have used for a long time. It says, ‘Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.’ That’s Leadership 101. Incidentally, the author is unknown. Couple more years, I may put my name on it. It’s been unknown for way too long, and it’s got to belong to somebody.

“First and foremost, I believed in being a benevolent dictator. That’s what everybody thinks I was,” May said with a chuckle. “But it truly has always been about team building, being able to articulate what your philosophy is and ican life of a small-town high school star athlete with far more academic potential than his grades would have you believe.

“When I was in high school, I was having a great time. I was not what I would consider a serious student,” he

“During those first two years, I had a great time. I was really enjoying college life, everything but studying,” he said. “At the end of the second year, I came home with a cumulative grade point average of about 2.2, and I was pretty im- pressed that I’d been able to get it up to that level.

“My dad didn’t share that enthusiasm, and he told me that I was going to stay home for one full year until I matured a little bit.”

The elder May got his wayward son a job in the south Arkansas oil fields, a brutal work assignment performed in the elements that included, in May’s words, “mosquitos as big as sparrows.” Six months was all he could take

TOMMY MAY ON KEYS TO SUCCESS:

My belief is that if you work hard and you make yourself part of a team concept and you submit to the ‘Do Right’ rule, there’s a 99 percent chance that you’re going to succeed. At the same time, there are three great distractors: negative thoughts, negative words and negative people, the latter of which can destroy a team made up of predominantly good workers. Negativity, in thought and word and people, is destructive. They had no place in our organization. They would always be given an opportunity to change, but if they did not change, they needed to find other opportunities.

before deciding a change was in order.

“I decided that I’d go get my own job, and to show you how smart I was and how much I matured; I went down and joined the Marine Corps,” he said. “I remember [Dad] saying, ‘Boy, you’re not near as smart as I thought you were.’ Anyway, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.”

The intense discipline of the service, especially that of an earlier era and in wartime to boot, had a transformative effect on the young Arkie, an education that commenced the moment the bus lurched to a stop at boot camp.

“Shortly after joining the Marine Corps, I saw a movie called ‘The D.I.’ with Jack Webb. I watched it on TV, and it looked pretty fine to me,” May said. “I get on the plane to San Diego and get on the bus, and I’m thinking they can yell at you, they can scream at you, but they can’t hit you.

“Well, you know how movies are, they don’t always tell the truth. I’m about to get off that bus, and a young man in front of me stepped on the [drill instructor’s] boots and he knocked him halfway across the bus. My whole life laid out before me.”

May’s subsequent service in Vietnam from 1967 to 1970 was another major chapter in codifying who he was and what he wanted to stand for.

“Vietnam turned me around both faith-wise and attitude-wise in realizing that there’s a lot of things that are important in life that I was missing and that I needed to do better at,” he said. “One of those was my education, and when I got back Uncle Sam paid for me to go back to college. Got my undergraduate degree in finance, and then I got my master’s degree in finance.”

Another chuckle. “Shows what a little maturity can do for you.”

His entry into banking was more about available opportunity than following a grand plan for his career. In fact, at the time he accepted his first job with First National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans, job opportunities to join Kroger and a ladies apparel company in Houston, Texas, were under serious consideration.

Over the next five years, May worked in the bank’s national accounts division, dealing with large business clients in the region. In 1976, he came home to El Dorado and Exchange Bank, where he steadily built a stellar reputation over 11 years, ultimately reaching the office of president and CEO. In 1987, he accepted a similar job at Pine Bluff-based Simmons Bank, at the time a $500 million enterprise with just two locations in Pine Bluff and Lake Village. It was a modest start to a career that would ultimately cement May’s legacy in the annals of Arkansas business.

“There were some opportunities for improvement [at Simmons] is the way I would summarize it,” he said. “We had some challenges in our own portfolio. We had a few challenges in culture relative to spending. As a team, we decided what we had to do to get it to where we wanted it to be, so we could begin expanding.”

May’s early time at the helm was notable thanks to two natural gifts: the ability to assemble and inspire teams and a spartan attitude toward costs.

“To say I was conservative would be a pretty accurate description of me when it came to expense controls, and I was conservative when it came to identifying market potential,” he said. “I spent my first years here dealing with asset quality challenges, and then I became a bear on expense controls, and as those things developed, the earnings of the company were better and the capital accumulation became better.

“We would then seek out acquisi-

TOMMY MAY ON ETHICS:

What is your philosophy about how this organization is going to run? That was a very important thing I had to articulate. I will tell you that first and foremost it was what I called the Lou Holtz ‘Do Right’ rule. It was sort of a thesis statement; I don’t care where an idea comes from, if it’s not the right thing, don’t do it. Not that I’m a goody-two-shoes or anything like that, I’m just telling you that I have found being on both sides of that, you’ve got to remember others are watching. If you’re the CEO, you’ve got to send the message not only verbally but in your own actions. I truly tried to do that.

tions to begin to diversify where we were based on what our capital would permit us to do. It’s very hard to diversify too far based on the limited capital of $500, $750 million banks, so you had to grow the institution, accumulate good earnings into capital and then expand. My philosophy was more of a long-term, controlled expansion.”

The process worked like a charm, growing the bank to $4 billion in assets over nearly 30 years. And it drew the blueprint for everything that was to come under May’s successor and prodigy George Makris, now passed to May’s longtime underboss Bob Fehlman. Today, the Simmons brand is a $27.5 billion enterprise with more than 200 locations in six states. Throughout its market areas, the bank is as well-known for its community involvement as it is for its return to shareholders, which is another legacy of May’s time at the helm.

“I believed we are only as good as the communities that we serve,” May said. “If there is one type of institution that can really make a difference in the community, it’s a bank. I believe that every institution in the city is important, but none are more important than banking. I brag on Simmons because of your, because of our philosophy to make a difference in the communities that we are in today.”

Navigating the bank through the up and down cycles of the market represented an enormous challenge, yet even this paled in comparison to May’s ALS diagnosis 17 years ago. Commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, ALS is a progressive neurological condition for which there is no cure. But while the disease forced May into relinquishing his executive role at Simmons Bank, he still leads the charitable Simmons First Foundation and is also chairman of Go Forward Pine Bluff, a group working for the revitalization of the city.

And even though his condition has affected his mobility and speech, no one who knows him can honestly say the disease has yet to gain the upper hand over May’s mind or his spirit.

“I will tell you, it’s my faith in God,” he said. “I believe that He has a purpose yet for me to fulfill, and that’s not just at work or in my community, that’s with my family and with young bankers. One of my commitments to myself and my so much of his life, career and faith. He holds no illusions about where the ALS road leads, but mortality is no truer for him than for anyone else living, so he doesn’t let his particular circumstance dictate his purpose or his potential. And anyway, that role in his life has already been filled.

“God didn’t expect me to sit around

TOMMY MAY ON RESILIENCE:

Feeling sorry for myself, I do not do. There was a time I did. I went to the very bottom, but I came out of that fairly quickly. You’re not human if you don’t feel the impact of a diagnosis like ALS; sometimes I hear myself saying things that sound like this is good ol’ apple pie and Chevrolet, but it’s not. Time is sort of, of the essence you could say. Who knows? Some people live five years and I’ve lived 17 years with this disease. But instead of sitting around the house, most people with ALS that I know are very involved because they still want to make a difference. Some because of their faith, some because of family and some just because of who they are.

Lord is that I want to live every day as if it is my last day. It’s easy to say, but it’s a hard thing to do because by doing that, it means leave nothing undone, leave nothing on the table. That is a hard, hard thing to do, but if you don’t try, you never will.”

The best example of May’s indomitable attitude may well lie in the fact that despite his condition, he continues to golf, an embodiment of the old-school trash talk, “beating you with one hand tied behind my back.”

“I play with one arm,” May said matter-of-factly. “I have a golf cart that will lift me up basically to where I’m standing, not quite, and I can put a seatbelt on. I play left-handed. Mr. Makris introduced me to a crowd one night at an awards event. He said, ‘I want you to know Tommy May makes the rules, he changes the rules, and he interprets the rules.’”

May’s golf game is the perfect illustration of the adaptation and perseverance in the face of adversity that has informed and feel sorry for myself. He expected me to make a difference and that’s what I’m trying to do,” he said. “To me, it’s not an issue of legacy, it’s an issue of doing what you can when you can with what you’ve got. That means if there’s a project that we’re working on, I’m going to give it 100 percent.

“I think, if you were to ask my children and my grandchildren and others, they would tell you that my focus was always on doing the right thing. One time one of my grandchildren said, ‘How do you know if it’s the right thing?’ I said, ‘Hopefully, your gut will tell you after all of the years that you’ve heard your parents and your grandparents talking about the right thing.’

“In business and in life, sometimes my interpretation of doing right and somebody else’s interpretation was a little different, and that’s OK. As long as my heart and soul are right, that’s all that I ask for because that takes care of everything else.”