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Jeff Fair isn’t a banker. But his business life revolves around them.

American Planning Corp., the firm he joined straight out of college and now owns, essentially provides an outsourced chief financial officer for community banks, especially in rural areas, that either can’t afford or can’t attract a high-level, full-time CFO. Many of those banks are starting to face a higher level of scrutiny than ever before.

“The [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] has acknowledged they failed to regulate appropriately during the good years,” Fair says. “They were too easy. Now the pendulum has swung all the way over in the other direction, and they’re being overly tough to show that they’re taking action.”

He says the majority of banks behaved while a handful was irresponsible, but every bank has to deal with the regulatory hangover.

“We’re trying to lighten that burden,” Fair says. “I’m a connector. I find the resources and the needs, and I plug them together.”

This year, Fair founded Curative Advisors, a regulatory-consulting firm that helps banks that are in trouble get out of it. Even Artifex, the graphic-design company he started in 2005, was formed with bankers in mind.

“We saw how poorly community bankers communicated their vision through the media,” he says. As a numbers guy himself, Fair can relate, but he’s hired some creative types who can help.

“It’s a nice diversion from working with numbers all day,” he says.

Fair says he loves technology and dislikes unnecessary travel, but he still prefers to meet in person with a client than by teleconference. By making a trip to a bank in, say, the Mississippi Delta, he can learn a lot about the economic health of the community just by looking at the crops and the local infrastructure. And as a consultant, it’s important for him to be able to read the internal dynamics of a group he’s meeting with.

“There’s so much more you can tell about a person and about the communication and its effectiveness when you’re sitting across a table,” he says. “When I’m on a conference call, as far as I know, the people on the other side are reading magazines or asleep at the wheel.”

Age: 38

If you could have any job other than your own, what would it be? “Probably a bank president. To see the other side of what I do. Banking is what helps communities develop. If I ever get tired of working 80 hours a week, I’ll become a banker; they only work 50.”

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