Ex-rodeo rider saddles up successful business

Tim Wilberding is one of the more uncommon entrepreneurs I've encountered in my long and undistinguished career.

Oh, he has the requisite MBA, mind you, and a thriving business called Loan Analytics Inc., an Apple Valley company that provides loan-portfolio analysis software to banks in the farm credit system.

But he also owns a bachelor's degree in Christian ministry, the product of a lifelong religious commitment.

And he attended undergraduate school on what can only be described as an offbeat athletic scholarship: Wilberding, now 49, was a bronc rider on the rodeo team at Chadron State College in Chadron, Neb. Indeed, he spent several years on the professional rodeo circuit after graduation before deciding to quit at age 27.

He offered a perfectly logical explanation for the decision to climb out of the saddle: "When getting out of bed was the hardest thing I did all day, I knew it was time to quit," said Wilberding, who collected four regional championship trophies along the way. He also gathered some painful memories to go with them, including a broken ankle, a serious concussion and intermittent back problems that plague him to this day.

Loan Analytics, on track to top $350,000 in revenue this year, grew out of Wilberding's 14-year history as a loan officer with the quasi-governmental farm credit system. Farm credit banks provide loans to farmers and agribusinesses but do not accept deposits, instead raising capital via bond sales.

Wilberding's 2009 revenue trend would amount to a 52 percent increase over the 2008 total of $229,000, thanks to the growing pressure from regulators for banks to strengthen stress-testing of loan portfolios. Last year's gross, however, was down 17 percent from a peak of $276,000 in 2007, the result of the economic downturn.

So he taught himself computer programming and in 2000 introduced his first software product, a portfolio stress-testing application that weighs a vaultful of financial and economic factors to determine potential volatility in a loan portfolio.

Wilberding, who runs the business single-handedly from his Apple Valley home, focused on the farm credit system because "I had a Rolodex full of contacts and I knew the system. I was a portfolio manager writing for portfolio managers."

Included in that writing, however, is a tizzy of bewildering phrases and concepts: migration matrixes and concentration risks, cross-sell codes and PD ratings, not to mention a vaguely sinister-sounding entity known as the Basel II Capital Accord (actually an international standard regarding bank capital requirements).

Boil it down, however, and it amounts to a product line aimed at assessing potential risks and returns on the upwards of $150 billion of outstanding loans in the farm credit system. It's that simple -- which was precisely Wilberding's goal when he started the company late in 1999.

"My objective was click-of-the-mouse simplicity" with a focus on elements that are "need-to-know rather than nice-to-know," he said. "The first one provides a payoff, the other one an expense."

As he developed his product line, Wilberding offered a modular approach that allows clients to choose from a suite of 10 credit risk categories, including applications that compile historical performances of various customer and loan categories, calculate optimum capital requirements and even allow lenders to match price against risk on a specific loan.

"This allows our clients to buy what they need rather than pay for an integrated system that includes unwanted applications," Wilberding said.

While his focus on the farm credit system was a logical one given his background, it also tied him to a limited market: He already has 65 of the system's 90 banks as clients. And while he determined long ago that rapid growth is not a high priority, continued growth is.

That leaves him at a crossroads as he approaches the limits of his target market. One potential answer: Wilberding is negotiating with accounting and database management vendors serving conventional banks about partnerships to offer his software to their clients. He's also considering adding marketing talent to his one-man staff to take his products directly to these banks.

Meanwhile, Wilberding remains fully occupied by a business that's growing rapidly this year, and by an active roster of charitable projects. Included on the list: once-a-week volunteering at an Apple Valley nursing home, mentoring an 11-year-old boy in cooperation with the nonprofit Kinship of Greater Minneapolis, and what he called "periodic street evangelizing to share the scripture."