SBA Hot Topic Tuesday: Great Leadership Creates SBA Champions

April 28, 2026

Bob Coleman
Founder & Publisher

SBA Hot Topic Tuesday: Great Leadership Creates SBA Champions

Saul Ramos, District Director of the SBA Las Vegas office, welcomed more than 100 lenders and brokers to the inaugural NASLB Broker/Lender Summit at the Blind Center of Nevada. The event was hosted at the Center’s corporate conference center. The setting carried its own message. The facility employs 60 staff, half of whom are visually impaired, and prepares and serves everything in-house, an operating model built on capability, teamwork, and execution.

Against that backdrop, Ramos opened the summit not with policy, but with people, setting the tone for a day focused on partnership across the SBA ecosystem.

Saul started with a story.

David Ross was a backup catcher for the Chicago Cubs. A team that went over 100 years without winning a championship. Earlier in his career, a team told him, “You’re being traded, let go, fired, call it what you want. Because you are not a good teammate, because you are not making other people better.” That is a punch in the gut in any business, including ours.

Ross did something simple. “He opened up the whiteboard in the locker room. And as players walked in, he started asking them, give me one word. One word that describes the best teammate you’ve ever had.” He wrote the words down. Every day. Then he went on the field and used that list “to make sure that he was the best teammate that he could be.”

Fast forward to 2016. Game 7. The Cubs win the World Series. “Champagne flying everywhere. Guess who they had on top of their shoulders? A backup catcher.” Not the star. Not the highest-paid player. The teammate who made everyone else better.

Saul framed it perfectly. “Today we are all in the business of people.” That is as true for SBA lending as it is for baseball. Execution is not just a process. It is people executing together.

Which brings us to Lexicon Bank.

“My favorite success story… I am rooting for our hometown lender here. Lexicon.”

Saul called it out directly. Leadership matters. Team matters more. “You need a good team behind you.”

Lexicon did not happen overnight. “This journey started about 5 years ago.” And like every SBA lender who lived through it, that journey ran straight through PPP.

Lenders remember. That period tested systems, people, and leadership. But it also built strong SBA lending teams.

And in SBA, that matters more than ever. The product is complex. The process is frustrating. “Time-consuming.” That has not changed.

What has changed is who succeeds.

Saul closed, “If you have team members that can make other people better, we’re gonna do some real good. And along the way, we’re gonna create SBA champions.”