As financial institutions, many people would suppose that credit unions make lending money a key focus of their business. But sometimes, over time, they lose some of that focus and fail to adapt their lending programs to members' changing economic needs. That is a little of what Brett Jorgenson found in 2007 when Christina Lethlean, the new CEO at the then-$550 million Gesa Credit Union, brought him to the CU to be the new chief lending officer.

"It wasn't that they were necessarily doing too many wrong things," Jorgenson explained, "it was that they weren't doing a lot of lending overall."

Jorgenson found that many of Gesa's members just didn't think of the CU in terms of filling their loan needs, seeing the credit union more as a place where they could save money and as a place for transaction accounts.

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