Why We Sent Three of Our Own to Banking School

Recently, three people from Primitive traded their day jobs for classrooms at Texas Tech’s Rawls College of Business. CEO Jerred Hurst, Director of Business Development Morgan Sisson, and Client Strategist Lauren Godinez spent the week at the Texas Tech School of Banking, a program that’s been training community bankers for more than 50 years.

Why would a marketing and PR agency send its people to banking school? It’s a fair question.

Because You Can Better Represent an Industry You Understand

Primitive’s list of clients in the banking industry has grown and is not slowing down. Every one of those relationships depends on us delivering effective marketing services, and we provide more value when we better understand the world in which they operate. Community banking has its own language, its own regulatory pressures, its own way of thinking about risk and growth. You can write a decent press release or develop a suitable campaign without any of that. You can’t build real strategy without it.

The Texas Tech School of Banking exists for people already inside the industry, bankers looking to move into leadership. It’s a two-year program, one intensive week each year, covering everything from reading a bank’s financial statement to running a full simulation of managing one. Our team went through the same sessions those bankers attended.

That’s the kind of understanding that doesn’t come from a client call or discovery workshop. It comes from sitting in the room with bankers leading an industry we represent.

The Other Half of It: Relationships

We spent a week in rooms full of community bankers from across the state of Texas, meeting new people, making new friends, and talking shop. Being there as a marketing partner, listening and learning, and not just showing up to make a pitch gives us a different kind of credibility. It shows we're invested in the industry.

We’ve built a strong pipeline of banking clients over the last couple of years, and we intend to keep building. One way we do that is by knowing the industry well enough that our clients don’t have to explain the basics to us before we can help them. Attending the Texas Tech School of Banking gave us new insight into the industry and opportunities to hear from bankers about their work and how marketing plays a role.

What It Means for Our Clients

None of this changes what we do daily; it changes how well we do it. When we sit down with a bank client now, Primitive team members bring deeper industry knowledge to every conversation. That will show up in more effective strategy, better questions, and messaging that comes from a place of understanding.

Sending three people to a week of banking school doesn’t give us the acumen to run a bank. But it’s the kind of investment that will show up in our work, which is where it needs to show up.