Northwest Arkansas Business Journal 2009 Fast 15: Bo Bittle

Bo Bittle, 30
Senior Vice President, Loan Manager
Signature Bank of Arkansas, Bentonville

Claim to Fame: Has directly helped grow Signature Bank’s loan portfolio by $85 million.

Next Step: Hopes to have an opportunity to be the president of his own market one day.

Born Robert William Bittle, his father immediately dubbed him “Bo,” so that’s the moniker he’s answered to for 30 years.

Although he grew up in Fayetteville, Bittle attended Ole Miss, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in the school of business and managerial finance. He spent his senior year there studying for the LSAT, sure he wanted to be a lawyer.

He graduated in 2001 and spent the summer “baggin’ beer” at Liquor World in Fayetteville, ready to attend law school at the University of Arkansas where he’d been accepted.

But something didn’t feel right. He started to question his direction and his father recommended he go talk with Gary Head, then president of Arvest Bank-Fayetteville. The next thing Bittle knew, he was working the teller line at an Arvest in Little Rock.

Ten months later, an opportunity opened up at Arvest Asset Management in Fayetteville, so Bittle applied and came home. He then worked to get his Series 7 license and had just “cracked the seal” on learning about being a financial adviser when Loren Schackelford approached him about working with Head’s startup, Signature Bank.

That was in early 2004, when the bank was actually an offshoot of Community First Bank of Harrison, before a charter was settled for Signature.

He counts himself lucky for having to sit near Dan Hendricks, Signature’s chief credit officer who Head pulled out of retirement for the startup, for the first few months at Signature.

“One of the bigger strenghts of our organization is the communication abilities of our executive management,” Bittle said about overcoming any generational gap at the bank. “They help us figure out the banking business and we might help them figure out something on their phone, or something like that.”

Any gap is more of a asset than a challenge, Bittle said.

To keep in touch with clients and friends, Bittle uses his BlackBerry.

“I hate it and love it all at the same time. It’s able to keep things rolling,” he said.

And Bittle uses it a lot. “I talk to customers more often on Saturdays than I don’t,” he said.

(RELATED: Northwest Arkansas Business Journal’s 15 Young Pros on the Fast Track)