Forty Under 40: Brian Buckley

During college Brian Buckley worked 12-hour days sandblasting offshore oil rigs, so he’s used to working hard.

The Marion native graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1999 with a bachelor’s in business and went right into the insurance industry.

He sold insurance for the Washington County Farm Bureau for about a year before he accepted a position at ANB Financial. He entered the management training program with the company and intended to work with its insurance arm when his training was done. At the time insurance was new to ANB, so it held promise.

But during his training, which requires stints in various departments, he realized his true calling. “I was working with Philip Knight doing commercial training,” Buckley said. “Every deal was a little different and I felt that’s where I wanted to be.”

He quickly decided he wanted to be the man in charge at one of the bank’s branches, and set out to achieve that goal. By December 2006, just shy of six years into his career with ANB, he was asked to run the full-service branch within the company’s headquarters in Rogers.

His goal is to grow the branch in loans and deposits to the point it can sustain its own brick-and-mortar presence, he said.