Local Business and Finance in Boone, North Carolina--Keith Shockley

Interview with Keith Shockley by Willard Watson, for the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, in conjunction with the Smithsonian traveling exhibition "The Way We Worked."

"My name is Keith Shockley, I was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in April, 1989. Grew up in Emerald Isle, North Carolina, which is the southern part of the Outer Banks, I lived there until about 12 or 13 and moved to Blowing Rock and went to Blowing Rock School for Seventh and Eighth grade, Watauga (High School), and then AppState. I work at Wells Fargo as a relationship manager and deal with local businesses and help them with any and everything related to finance. My main role is to help them with commercial loans, deposits, and merchant treasury, a lot of bank products but mostly help them with lending and expanding. That’s kind of most of the work that I see is businesses that want to grow. My main responsibility is really to grow and maintain the commercial loan portfolio and manage the clients in that portfolio and acquire new clients in the area. And so I would say that if you were to describe what I do, it’s really just be a resource for local businesses."

How did you decide on a career in banking?
"To be honest with you it kind of, I kind of realized I wanted to go into finance, not necessarily banking, when I was in college. I found myself just really interested in business books. Like I would pick ‘em out, when you’re in college you don’t really have much free time to read what you want and for some reason I was finding the time to read. This was right in the middle of the Great Recession in 2008, and I had no idea what was goin on, I was like, Dow Jones, who is that? And so I wanted to figure all this out and I read this book and it was called Too Big to Fail and it was about just all of the Wall Street Banks and how Bear Sterns and Neman Brothers fell and how Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia and that whole dynamic and just realized like all the deal."

Read the full transcript below. 

Tags: BHS-work, BHS-Main-Street, BHS-Small Town, BHS-Job-You-Had

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