HispanicBusiness

At the rate the bank is growing, has selling it become one of your goals?

Our goal is to grow by a couple branches a year. We were intending to grow this 10 percent a year but we're doing a lot better than that.

We're less than a 2 percent market share in this MSA. The potential is to get to 4 to 5 percent within the next several years. I think we've got a lot of room to grow. We're not at that point (of selling).

What comes after Ybor?

We've got a site under contract in West Shore. We're also looking at Palm Harbor ... and west Tampa. And we've been poking around in Sarasota. We're talking to several bankers in Sarasota. We've identified a couple people that could be our retail branch manager ... but we have to find the right banker to help us from a commercial banking standpoint. We need a rainmaker for commercial banking.

During your banking career, at one point you ran Tampa Bay operations for Alabama-based Colonial Bank, which got swamped by bad real estate loans and was closed by regulators in August of 2009. What happened?

The lesson learned there is you never want to outgrow your management. They did real estate. That's what they did. That's all they did.

You left Colonial in 2007, a while before the real estate meltdown and the bank's failure.

Yes, but the writing was on the wall. You could see what was coming in commercial real estate.

What lessons from Colonial are you applying at USAmeriBank?

To diversify the portfolio. More specifically, hiring the best and the brightest in every area of the bank to make sure you are able to manage the risk. As we've all seen, anything can happen. My real value here is attracting high-quality talent. As a result ... we've grown substantially the first five years, but we've done it responsibly.

Is the economy improving?

It's getting better. It's getting more competitive among the banks. Three years ago it used to be we were winning most every deal. The big banks weren't lending. ... Now the big banks are out there again.

Who's your primary competition?

Our competitors over the past four or five years have been the big banks, the top five here. But we have so much room to grow in market share even when there's more competition. We can live off the crumbs that fall out of their mouths, and that's what we've been doing.

You've got a family history in politics with your father (former Hillsborough County Commissioner and Tampa City Council member Joe Chillura). Any interest in running for office?

No, but I'd like to get more involved in the community.

We've talked about how much time and energy a family takes and how much time and energy building a business takes. Now that the business is maturing -- we're by no sense there yet but it's no longer a startup -- but as it's become a meaningful player in the market that has allowed me to spend more time out in the community getting involved with different boards. We're very engaged in the Ybor initiative and along with that comes the new (baseball) stadium initiative ... I'm very interested in making sure the Rays are comfortable staying in our community.

What are the odds the Rays will move from Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg to a Tampa location?

I would say if we're going to keep them, which I think we will, we've got a 75 percent chance of getting them to come over here. I really think the people who are the decisionmakers in Pinellas County would probably understand that keeping the team is more important than necessarily having them in one spot.

Downtown St. Pete has so many things going for it; the Rays are a very small piece of that puzzle. That real estate could be utilized for all sorts of things. It's a huge redevelopment opportunity in my mind.

I love downtown St. Petersburg, but I also love downtown Tampa and you want the team to survive. I love going to games, but it's empty when you go. That venue itself is challenging.