Jeff Boyd is managing director of Northern Trust Bank's Lakewood Ranch and downtown Bradenton offices. He is resource chair of Manatee County United Way, on the leadership team of the Tampa Bay Partnership, and past chair of the Manatee County Economic Development Council.

"My first job was with NCNB. It was 1984 and I had just graduated with a finance degree from the University of Florida and moved here with some fraternity brothers. We were sharing a house on Turtle Beach and, frankly, there was a need to pay the rent. It was going to be short-term; I had lined up Kaplan and was preparing to go to law school.

"I interviewed with Ellis Bank; Emmett Addy was a friend of a friend of a friend. He was a candid guy. He said, 'I'd love to hire you, but I'm going to tell you something that hasn't been made public yet: We're being sold to some bank in North Carolina.' I'd frankly never heard of NCNB, but I went up to Tampa for an interview and was hired as a credit analyst to work behind lenders and do number crunching and analysis of companies and such. In fact, I was the first hire NCNB made in the Sarasota market.

"Even though my degree was in finance, I had every intention of going to law school. I took the job knowing I was going to hate banking; there was no way I was going to crunch numbers the rest of my life. But I found I really enjoyed it; I didn't expect to find the creativity involved in being consultative. The vacuum created by that merger was enormous; I was 28 and I was running the commercial lending team in downtown Sarasota.

"When I did finally leave that company, I had become so entrenched in the community I didn't want to move; the next step would have had to be leaving town. When Northern Trust came to me nine years ago, I said I'd be delighted to join them.

"Now it's 20 years later and I can point to a huge number of things in town I've had a part in creating. My wife and I are raising a family here, we have a home we love; I can't imagine being anywhere else."