Company: MCHB
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form Type: 425
Source: 0001518715-25-000085
Chunk: 3

Company: Mechanics Bancorp
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form: 425
Chunk 3
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 bit on your background and your path? . C.J. Johnson Sure, well I'm 42 years old. I went to the University of Michigan. I came out of school and did investment banking as an analyst for three years covering banks through a really interesting time. I was there 2005 to 2008 and ‘05 and ‘06 were kind of boom years for banks, and then you had the total opposite of that in ‘07 and ‘08 with a lot of problems. And after investment banking, that's when I joined the Ford group in 2008 when they raised a private equity fund, a $500 million fund to look at troubled banks and I did all the financial analysis and due diligence around a lot of the problems. We bid on, I don't know 10 to 15 different FDIC receivership deals and was not successful in any of them. But we kept waiting, kept being patient, and then eventually we recapitalized Santa Barbara Bank & Trust right before it failed in 2010. I moved out there. What's interesting about the Ford Group is it's probably the only - I think the only - private equity fund in the country that's also structured as a bank holding company, meaning we can take large investments, control positions in the banks we acquire, and then we have an owner operating model. We all go out there and help manage the bank. We probably put a team of 30 people, 40 people, into Santa Barbara Bank & Trust to help work through the troubled loans. That was a bank that got in trouble, just with a lot of poor credit decisions and we had put a very large credit mark, $460 million on a $6 billion asset bank, so it was very near failure, but we put our entire fund, $500 million in, put our chips on the table and then went to go work it out, and it turned out very well. We had some good fortune with timing, but what we also focused on there, they had one of the best deposit franchises on the Central coast. And we thought that the credit issues were manageable. Scott was there, Nathan was there. A lot of our team that's at Mechanics Bank today was also in Santa Barbara. And then we sold that bank to Union Bank in 2013 or 2012, and then I moved to Dallas, joined the Ford Group in Dallas, and we've raised another fund, a $750 million fund. Along the way I got married. I have three kids,