Dan Blanton had a bit of a conundrum two years ago when Georgia Bank & Trust's holding company reached $1 billion in assets.

The bank's president and chief executive officer wanted to celebrate the milestone but feared that too much revelry might send the wrong message to longtime customers who consider the company their "hometown bank."

"We don't want them to think we're so big that we're like a regional bank," he said.

Although the bank and its holding company, Southeastern Bank Financial Corp., are nowhere near the size of such regional competitors as Wachovia and SunTrust, it is the second-largest banking company in the Augusta-Aiken metro area.

The community bank's entry into the Aiken, Athens and Greenville, S.C., markets in recent years shows the company -- and Mr. Blanton -- isn't afraid of growing beyond its home base.

"I do firmly believe we have to keep growing to remain independent," he said. "A company has to grow to survive."

Mr. Blanton was one of three original employees when the bank was founded in 1988. By the time he was named CEO in 1997, he had solidified his reputation as a banker who could be aggressive yet conservative, and one who could embrace technology without sacrificing the traditional service the bank was founded on.

Taking the CEO seat proved that the self-admitted "wild child" who started on the ground floor as a teller had the mettle to become the public face of a $1.2 billion organization.

"I think that Dan has probably grown as much in his banking career as anyone I've ever observed," said E.G. Meybohm, the president of Meybohm Realtors and chairman of the board for Georgia Bank & Trust.

Richard Daniel Blanton was born the second son of Thomas Vinson and Florence Irvine Blanton in 1950. Mr. Blanton's father, known to everyone by his initials, T.V., was relocated to Augusta in the 1940s as the regional operations manager for Eli Whitt, a wholesale division of Hav-A-Tampa cigars. It supplied area supermarkets and country stores with tobacco products.

The family lived on Ivanhoe Court in Summerville. Mr. Blanton's oldest friend, Bill Bambrick, jokes that the two have known each other so long that they first "met in strollers on Cumming Road."

"We grew up together as neighborhood kids," said Mr. Bambrick, the owner of Loblolly Bay Landscape Co. "We've done everything together through all the years."

Some of that "everything" involved a little mischief as a teenager.

"It sometimes makes it difficult to do business in the city you grew up in when you were a wild child," Mr. Blanton said. "Sometimes it will come back to bite you."

One episode of the past caught up with him during a lunch he had recently with a local businessman he was trying to bank.

"He said, 'The last time I remember seeing you was when you ran out my back door, slammed it and broke it,' " Mr. Blanton said. "Needless to say, I didn't get his business. But I'm still trying."

Staying focused

Mr. Blanton's father sent him to Georgia Military College to finish his last two years of prep school.

"He thought I needed a little rigor in my life, and I did," Mr. Blanton said. "It was a good experience."

Mr. Blanton credits his father as one of the three people who have most influenced his business career, the other two being longtime family friend and banking legend Russell A. Blanchard, and father-in-law Robert W. Pollard.

Mr. Blanton adheres to many of his father's principles, such as doing business with those who do business with you, and not being afraid to make a decision, even if it's an unpopular one.

"He would always say about the old Georgia Railroad Bank that you either walked out smiling or frowning, but that either way, you had your answer," he said. "That's how we try to do banking. We want to give you an answer as soon as we can."

Those who know Mr. Blanton will testify that he, like his father, is a straight-shooter.

"You may not agree with everything he's saying, but he says what is on his mind," said bank board member John W. Trulock, who befriended Mr. Blanton when their children played soccer together at Westminster. "He's not the kind of person to tell you something because he thinks that's what you want to hear. He's never given me bad advice."

For 15 years, Mr. Blanton and his father, a dapper man who enjoyed wearing Hickey Freeman suits, never missed a lunch on Friday, even as Mr. Blanton's responsibilities at the fledgling bank were growing.

"I almost made a mistake and said I didn't have the time," Mr. Blanton said. "We had our little route of places we'd go. The deal was always the same. I'd drive and he'd pay, every Friday."

T.V. Blanton died in his sleep at the family's Ivanhoe Court home March 13, 2003. It was a Thursday.

Hitchin' a ride

Picture this: Masters Week, 1971. Twenty-year-old Dan Blanton's car has broken down, and he is hitchhiking to his family's lake home from Clemson University, where he is a junior studying business administration.

A car stops to pick him up on Highway 221, just before the Strom Thurmond Dam. As luck would have it, the driver is an attractive young co-ed from Appling named Patty Elaine Pollard, a junior at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., who is also on her way home for the week.

The Harlem High School graduate thinks she is picking up someone from her alma mater.

"She thought I was going home to Harlem," Mr. Blanton said. "I had my fraternity jersey on. I guess I looked harmless."

The coed quickly realized, however, that the young man whom she had picked up was neither from Harlem nor someone she knew.

"She's getting nervous and starts driving 90 miles an hour, which starts getting me nervous," Mr. Blanton said. "So we're both just sitting there as tense as can be."

She dropped him off just before Pollard's Corner, which is named after her family homestead, so that nobody -- particularly her father -- saw that she picked up a hitchhiker. But it wasn't long before the two saw each other again.

"I called her up that weekend," Mr. Blanton said.

The two saw each other every weekend during their senior year and were soon engaged. They married in August 1972, just before Mr. Blanton went to work at his father's wholesale distributorship.

He didn't stay long. After his father's retirement in 1975, the company replaced him with someone Mr. Blanton describes as an inept manager who clashed with him personally. Mr. Blanton quit and went to work for his father-in-law's wood products business, Pollard Lumber Co., selling pine bark out of a dump truck and operating a knuckleboom loader, which picks up timber with hydraulic-powered clawlike pinchers.

"The fun part was seeing if you could run it fast enough to shut the chip chain down," Mr. Blanton said. "I had a great time."

Mr. Pollard was also a closet banker. He was one of several investors in Georgia State Bank, a small bank with operations in Columbia County, and he served as its chairman. He offered Mr. Blanton a choice: continue working at the lumber yard or go to work for the bank.

Mr. Blanton chose the bank, starting as a teller.

"He didn't offer me a career, he just offered me a job," Mr. Blanton said.

Learning business

Like Mr. Blanton's father, Mr. Pollard is one of the three people whom Mr. Blanton regards as a business influence. Unlike his father, the lifelong Appling resident and World War II veteran was more emotionally distant.

"It took a long time to be comfortable around him," Mr. Blanton acknowledges. "He was a rock."

"He was not a man to give out compliments. He motivated you more by criticism than by compliments," Mr. Blanton said.

At Georgia State Bank, he was offered no special treatment because of his father-in-law.

"Mr. Pollard was not that way, I can tell you that," said Patti Leopard, a former Georgia State Bank employee who later went on to become one of Georgia Bank & Trust's first employees. "He was a wonderful man to his employees, but he expected a lot out of you. In some ways he was harder on Dan because he didn't want it to look like something that was given instead of earned."

By the 1980s, Mr. Blanton had become a commercial lender at the bank, focusing on construction loans. Developers Bob Collier and Ben Brush were among his first clients.

In 1985, Georgia State Bank was acquired by the much larger Georgia Railroad Bank. The dust of that deal had barely settled when First Union acquired Georgia Railroad, giving the Charlotte, N.C.-based regional bank entry into the Georgia market.

The culture clash between the two organizations caused many Georgia Railroad employees, including Mr. Blanton, to leave. Most took positions with other area banks and credit unions. Mr. Blanton decided to get into the real estate business.

For two years he developed subdivisions with partner Scott Higgins, but he never fully divorced himself from the banking business; many of his old construction clients still called on him to help package their finance deals.

"I missed the bank," he said. "I was miserable."

His opportunity to return to banking came in 1987, when he joined The Bank of Columbia County as a vice president. He left the following year when Mr. Pollard, Mr. Meybohm and several other area businessmen decided to organize a new bank -- Georgia Bank & Trust.

Building a bank

The investor group hired three people to put the new bank together -- Mr. Blanton, Ms. Leopard and Patrick G. Blanchard, a senior vice president at First Union who previously had served as president of Georgia State Bank. He was named CEO.

"I always say that for me, it was almost like birthing a baby," Ms. Leopard said. "The needs of a child changes as it grows up, and it's the same thing with a bank. Those first few months were like waiting for a baby to be born."

The bank was poised for success by the time it went operational in 1989. Consumers were reeling from First Union's early missteps in the market, and area businesses were clamoring for a locally owned, locally controlled bank.

The credo from the get-go was that Georgia Bank & Trust would not be a bank that would sell out.

"We had all been through a lot of these mergers and acquisition," Mr. Blanton said. "We had all seen customers mistreated and employees mistreated."

During the first three years, the bank exceeded $60 million in assets. It made its first, and, to date, only acquisition in 1993, purchasing the shares of First Columbia Bank for about $7 million.

The deal gave Georgia Bank & Trust $131.3 million in additional assets and two branches in Columbia County. The deal also brought Ronald L. Thigpen, First Columbia's president, into the Georgia Bank & Trust organization. He and Mr. Blanton had been roommates at Graduate School of Banking at Louisiana State University in the 1980s.

"You get to know somebody pretty quick in that kind of a scenario," said Mr. Thigpen, who is now the bank's chief financial offer. "We had confidence and trust in each other early on. It was just a natural transition."

The big transition for Mr. Blanton, however, came in 1997, when CEO Pat Blanchard abruptly resigned to help an investor group form a rival community bank, which today operates as First Bank of Georgia.

Mr. Blanton was No. 2 in the organization and was the logical replacement. The intensely private Mr. Blanton, however, had to learn showmanship, something that appeared to come natural for Mr. Blanchard.

"That was hard for him," Ms. Leopard said. "Dan and Patty have always been very private people. They would really prefer to be at home instead of out at this event or that, but they've learned to do that very well."

Mr. Pollard never had the chance to see his son-in-law take the helm of the organization. He died in 1995 after a long battle with cancer.

Mr. Blanton said that for many years after Mr. Pollard's death, he felt he had to work extra hard to prove himself to the bank's board of directors. Those who sit on the board, such as Mr. Trulock, say they have never doubted his capabilities.

"If he didn't have the confidence to do it, he would have never taken the job," Mr. Trulock said. "If you look at his record, it speaks for itself."

Personal passions

Mr. Blanton is the consummate banker, save for one thing. He's a gardener, not a golfer.

He's landscaped the 9-acre tract he and Patty carved out of the Pollard family property in Appling shortly after their marriage 35 years ago.

"Where he lives should be the botanical gardens of Columbia County," Mr. Bambrick said jokingly.

Mr. Blanton's other passion is restoration. His family's home is partially built from vintage heart pine he salvaged from a farmhouse in Salley, S.C. That struck his father-in-law, whose business was based on the sale of new wood, as crazy.

"At first he said, 'Why would you want some old wood?' " Mr. Blanton said. "He ended up loving it."

His passion for renovation spills over into his company's bank branches. The holding company's Southern Bank & Trust Aiken branch office at 149 Laurens St., a 100-year-old structure known as the Tavelle House, features a 1920s-era art deco check desk in the lobby that Mr. Blanton found.

At Georgia Bank & Trust's downtown Augusta branch in the historic Cotton Exchange building, he spent nearly two years searching for an antique teller line before settling on an 1880s-era counter that had been used at a bank in Kentucky.

"I had all these companies tell me, 'We can build you something that looks like what they would have used back then,' " Mr. Blanton said. "I kept saying, 'No, I want the real thing.'

"That's why when we bought (the Cotton Exchange) building, I didn't let anybody touch it," he said.

The road ahead

Mr. Blanton is awestruck when he looks at how far the company has come during the past two decades -- from one office on Wheeler Road to 14 in a two-state region, all supported by a high-tech, 55,000-square-foot operations center on Columbia Road.

"I look around the operations center and say, 'We can justify this. We can afford this,' " he said. "It's a little mind-boggling."

In 2002, when Georgia Bank & Trust reached $500 million in assets, Mr. Blanton challenged the bank's employees to double the company's size in five years.

"We did it in four," Mr. Blanton said.

He's not about to let off on the throttle.

He issued the same challenge when the bank reached the $1 billion mark, a tall order considering the company's growth rate is beginning to slow as it matures.

Mr. Blanton acknowledges the company is acquisition-averse and prefers to grow "organically." He also reiterates that Georgia Bank & Trust's holding company is not for sale, ever.

"I don't know why a company can't be profitable from generation to generation," he said. "People think they have to build up a company and sell it."

Early investors in the company (about 95 percent of its shares are owned by area residents) were told not to buy the stock if they expected to get rich in a few years.

However, those who did buy into the company have been rewarded: A $10,000 investment in the company in 1988, adjusting for share splits, reverses and dividends, would be worth approximately $126,000 today, a compounded annual return of 13.5 percent.

As the bank continues to saturate the Augusta-Aiken area, Mr. Blanton said the company's "opportunity to grow lies as much outside the market as inside."

He foresees the company gradually expanding its footprint throughout Georgia and South Carolina during the next several years.

And after that?

"We laugh and say we're going to leave North Carolina for the next generation," he said.

Reach Damon Cline at (706) 823-3486 or damon.cline@augustachronicle.com.