Certified Federal Credit Union CEO Steve Weakley is one to give credit where credit is due (no pun intended).
He continues to recount the contributions of Donna Simpson, the late EVP and COO of Certified Federal Credit Union who passed away last August following a cycling accident in Idaho. She was like family to Weakley, who says they were the “best of friends.”
At a Vons Foundation golf tournament when Simpson was a district manager for the grocer, Weakley ended up on the same foursome as her – and they had a great time, starting a lasting bond.
“You know Donna, she had a personality with such charisma that by the end of the day, she’s everybody’s best friend, so it just naturally grew to where I said, ‘I want to get you on the board here at the credit union,’” he said.
She came onto the board and served for a long period of time, Weakley said, until the time was right for her to join the credit union staff.
“I always felt that she and I were like the yin and the yang, where she was the extreme extrovert and I’m more in the middle, but I love numbers. She was out there as what I called her, the ultimate rainmaker. But you talk about personalities; we were both Aries, so sometimes we would bang heads, which you do sometimes in business, but then it’s over and we would just move on.
[RELATED: Friends, Colleagues Celebrate Life Of Donna Simpson At Dedication Ceremony]
“We had a great relationship from the very beginning,” Weakley said. “To bring her over here was one of the best things that we ever did, because it got us somebody who was at a very high standard, very well respected in the industry, but a real go-getter who helped us really grow.”
About the same time, in 2009, Vons Credit Union merged with Certified Grocers Credit Union.
“We always said that if we were going to merge with any credit union, we want to merge with Certified because it served all the grocery industry, and we wanted to serve all the grocery industry. So that was a transformative event at that particular time. I brought on Donna about the same time, and she was the one who unleashed all of that potential for us.”
“‘No,’ was something that never, ever bothered her,” Weakley added.
Her famous saying was, “‘No’ just means not today.” One grocer in particular said “no” for five years, but she eventually got them on board.
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