New Inland Northwest Bank president and CEO, Russell Lee, is excited by what he sees for the bank’s future.

The new top exec says bank officials will continue to explore other acquisitions similar to the one the bank just executed when it signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fairfield Financial Holdings Corp., which owns Bank of Fairfield. The purchase, which is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year, is valued at $21 million.

“I think the biggest opportunity for us is from the consolidation of community banks in our market area,” Lee says. “Spokane and North Idaho both have seen some strong local banks being acquired by larger institutions that might not be as focused on the Inland Northwest as the banks that they acquired were. These markets are our only focus.”

Lee, who has more than 35 years of financial services industry experience, officially joined the bank on June 29. He previously had served as president and chief operating officer at Burlington, Wash.-based Skagit Bank. Prior to leading Skagit Bank, he had served as president and COO of Bellingham, Wash.-based Peoples Bank.

Lee says he was looking for an opportunity to be more involved with a bank that was community oriented.

“I like the Spokane marketplace, and INB has a lot of appeal. It’s a clean bank with nice financial numbers,” he says.

Lee, who lived for nearly 40 years in Western Washington, says he and his wife personally enjoy the more intimate sense of community they have so far experienced in Spokane.

He’s just the third CEO in INB’s history since it was founded in 1989. Fred Schunter was the first CEO and served in that position until 2001, when Randall Fewel took over the top spot. Fewel has been with INB a total of 21 years and plans to retire in June 2016. Until then he will remain with INB’s parent company, Northwest Bancorporation Inc., as its president and CEO, he says.

Northwest Bancorporation., the Spokane-based parent of Inland Northwest Bank, reached the agreement to purchase Fairfield Financial Holdings Corp., which owns Bank of Fairfield, near the end of June. The transaction is valued at almost $21 million.

Based in Fairfield, Wash., a small farming town 30 miles south of Spokane, Bank of Fairfield has seven branches in Eastern Washington, including one in downtown Spokane and another in Spokane Valley. As of March 31, the bank had $151.6 million in total assets, $103.1 million in gross loans, and $134 million in total deposits.

Fewel says the combined company will have about $600 million in assets. 

“The opportunity to join forces with other smaller banks within our market area, like the Bank of Fairfield, is also a great venue for growth,” Lee says. “The focus remains on local banking, but we can bring more resources to our customers—and potential new customers—by combining our assets.”

As for Fewel, he says in looking back, he’s most proud of the fact that INB survived the Great Recession.

“A few of the bullets did hit us, but none of them were fatal,” he says.

INB has now put together a string of 14 consecutive profitable quarters, Fewel says. Net income for the first half of 2015 was $1.6 million, up from $1.3 million for the first half of 2014, INB says in its recently released second-quarter earnings report.

“We have fully recovered from the Great Recession,” Fewel says. “A big key has been good loan totals. We’ve had no loan losses for the year. We were experiencing loan losses of well over a million a year during the recession.”

INB’s total loan on June 30 of this year were $363 million, up from $317 million a year earlier and from $278 million on June 30, 2013, Fewel says.

“The second quarter (2015) should go down as one of the busiest and best in company history,” Fewel writes in INB’s second-quarter report. 

INB had roughly $180 million in total assets when Fewel became CEO. Before recently agreeing to acquire Fairfield Financial Holdings Corp., Northwest Bancorporation was managing $450 million in assets, Fewel says. The company currently has 130 employees, up from 120 a year ago.

 “We feel we cover the Inland Northwest well. We’re doing well, but we’ve got to get bigger,” Fewel says.

Last September, for the first time in INB’s history, the bank hired a full-time marketer.

INB chose Jason Miller to be the vice president of marketing after he spent the last four years as a digital and interactive director at Spokane-based North by Northwest Productions Inc. Says Fewel of Miller: “He’s going to get us noticed.”

Fewel says the company acted on Miller’s recommendation to continue as a sponsor for the INB Performing Arts Center located downtown at 334 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.

“After studying whether to continue our sponsorship, he came to the conclusion that our name associated with the Performing Arts Center is valuable exposure in the community,” Fewel says.

The INB Performing Arts Center had revenues of $1.4 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2013. Total attendance at the INB was 189,040 for shows such as Wicked, a Broadway show that ran last May. That show alone brought in nearly 50,000 attendees.

Fewel admitted that had he seen the economic crash of 2009 coming, in 2006 he would not have agreed to sponsor the performing arts center until 2016 at $150,000 per year. Fewel says INB just agreed to sponsor the Performing Arts Center again from 2016 to 2026, this time for $180,000 per year.

“The recession had us playing defensively. Now, it’s time to go on the offensive and promote who we are and what we do,” Fewel says.

Adds Lee: “Our experience is that INB customers are on whole very happy with us and very loyal to the bank. We need to be better about telling our story.”