Banking on the region

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Banking is Joseph Rulison’s business. Rochester is his passion.
Rulison, 52, is Rochester market president for Bank of America Corp., overseeing 250 employees at 25 branches from Seneca Falls to Batavia and as far south as Ithaca.
“Joe is your biggest cheerleader,” says Laura Weinstein, the bank’s development manager for the Rochester and Buffalo markets. “He’s the first person to give credit to everyone across the team. He’s not one of those people who takes credit for the successes and puts blame on anything else.”
Rulison is a staunch Republican, though less obviously now than during his days as president and CEO of money management firm Rulison & Co., when his pictures with the likes of Dan Quayle, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp adorned his office.
“I love being involved in the community,” he says. “Everybody needs to be involved in the political system because we’re in a democracy. We have to do our part. Apathy is not an answer. My mother always said one person makes a difference; you have to be that one person. Everybody has to have that attitude.”
As head of one of the region’s largest banks, however, Rulison must appeal to all parties. When talking politics these days, there is a bipartisan theme to his message.
“It’s not a Democrat or Republican issue,” he says. “It’s not a political issue. It’s a community issue, and we all have to be involved with that.
“We want to show, on behalf of Bank of America, that we’re part of the community. We have a commitment. We also want to be part of the solution for where the community is going because we plan to be here for a long time. I plan to be here for a long time.”
Rulison became market president in March 2005, replacing Martin Birmingham when Birmingham left to become president and CEO of what is now Five Star Bank in Geneva.
“Part of the reasoning behind it was that I was very much involved in the community,” Rulison said of his promotion from market executive for advisory services. “We have 16 lines of businesses in Rochester. They were looking for somebody to help put a face on that for Bank of America in the community.”
Rulison has “completely unified and energized the team,” Weinstein says.
“Joe has created a lot of strong ties in the market,” she says. “He’s very dynamic. That really comes across with our local leadership team.”

Active in community

Rulison is among the most visible business leaders in town. He serves on boards of the Greater Rochester Visitors Association Inc., the Greater Rochester Enterprise Inc. economic development agency, the Monroe County Water Authority and St. John Fisher College.
He served as chairman at the college from 2004 until last month.
“Joe Rulison did an outstanding job as chair of the board of trustees during the challenging transition following the unexpected death of Katherine Keough in September 2004,” college president Donald Bain says. “His leadership and judgment assured continuity in college governance and operational efficiency.”
Last month, Rulison was named the outstanding contributor to promoting tourism in Rochester by the Greater Rochester Visitors Association.
Rulison is a past chairman of Geva Theatre, a former board member at the Rochester Museum and Science Center and the Memorial Art Gallery, and former chairman of the County of Monroe Industrial Development Authority.
“I loved being chairman of COMIDA,” he said. “I think it’s important that you serve, but you also need to broaden your experiences.”
Rulison thinks COMIDA is necessary for economic development here, though critics say COMIDA tax breaks do not create promised benefits and come at the expense of residential taxpayers.
“There should be no need to have to do tax abatements,” he says, “but in New York you have to because of the high taxes.”
Having left COMIDA in 2005, Rulison’s economic development efforts are aligned with GRE and, to a greater extent, with the water authority.
“I’m there trying to advocate for an east-side water plant,” he says. “We need to have the ability to develop more water. You cannot have enough water in today’s environment. You have to create it, protect it and then be able to market it long term.”
There may be no greater advocate for Rochester’s fresh-water resources than Rulison.
“When I sat on COMIDA as its chair, a couple of beverage companies looked at Rochester for that very reason,” he says. “This was before water was even an issue. I think that’s going to be our benefit as a region.”
Rulison markets Rochester and its Lake Ontario water wherever he goes, be it Bank of America headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., or other points south and west.
“North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Nevada, California, Arizona, they all are having major water issues, long term,” he says. “As result, you have companies that are going to need water for manufacturing.
“Instead of pumping it to other parts of the country, we need to have people come to us and use that resource right at our back door. That is what’s going to cause us to have a revitalization here on a manufacturing and economic basis,” he says.
Gov. David Paterson, a Democrat who in March replaced the disgraced Eliot Spitzer, made a quick impression on Rulison by signing legislation to make New York part of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact-two days after taking over.
“The first thing he signed was the ability to control water rights,” Rulison says.
The compact-involving eight Great Lakes states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec-is an agreement designed to protect, conserve and improve Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River water resources.
Six states have signed on to the compact, with Pennsylvania and Michigan yet to do so.
“I’ve been saying till I’m blue in the face that water is an economic resource,” Rulison says.
“We have a great work force. We have affordable housing. We don’t have traffic issues. We have great education. The other resource we have that I’m absolutely convinced is going to be our major catapult for bringing Upstate New York back is going to be water.”
As for Rochester weather, “we may have a snow issue, but we don’t have a tornado issue and we don’t have issues with hurricanes and earthquakes,” Rulison says.
“The other thing we’re finding is we have lower energy costs today than other parts of the country, primarily because water and things of that sort to make power are more abundant. Some things are beginning to tilt our way. We went from the Empire State to, especially upstate, a point of disrepair. Now the pendulum is swinging back.”

St. John Fisher grad

Rulison graduated from St. John Fisher in 1978 with a degree in political science.
“Joe is among the most enthusiastic and supportive graduates I have known in my 33 years at the college,” Bain says.
Rulison helped with Malcolm Wilson’s 1974 gubernatorial campaign and also worked for the Republican National Committee while a student at St. John Fisher.
His first job out of college was caretaker of the Stone-Tolan House on East Avenue while working on the gubernatorial run of Assembly Minority Leader Perry Durrier.
He then became a sales manager for National Car Rental, a subsidiary of Vanguard Car Rental USA Inc., heading the subsidiary’s upstate corporate travel program. In three years, he increased the program’s revenues by 1,100 percent, from $500,000 to $6 million.
Rulison left the car rental business to be a broker with a predecessor of Prudential Securities Inc. and then with Tucker Anthony & RL Day.
In 1989, he became executive vice president with Marsh Capital Management Inc. Eight years later, he bought out its owner, Joseph Marsh, and renamed the firm Rulison & Co.
Rulison’s pride and joy with his company was Muniflow Inc., a product he created in 1992 to analyze cash flow at municipalities and public entities.
Muniflow was designed “to develop a way we could work with their cash flow so they could manage their day-to-day operations but not keep so much money on the table that they lose the opportunity to invest what they could,” Rulison says.
He has had a patent pending for Muniflow for seven years.
The Monroe County Airport Authority was the first to implement Muniflow, followed by Monroe County and Onondaga County in 1992, Rulison says.
After taking five years to find a fourth client, Rulison was rewarded when Muniflow was enlisted by 55 clients throughout Upstate New York from 1997 through 2001.
“I felt we had something pretty special that could go national,” Rulison says. “My baby was born and I saw that the baby could walk. In order for it to develop into a teenager, it needed to have certain resources.”
In 2001, Rulison sold Muniflow to Fleet National Bank, a subsidiary of FleetBoston Financial Corp. for an undisclosed price. He and seven colleagues joined the Boston-based bank.
“To go from 17 employees to a large organization was a big change, but that was my reason for selling to Fleet and then to Bank of America,” Rulison says. “Having headed up a company was a wonderful experience-to put everything at risk and build a company to the point where it can move to a new level.
“But being the only one at the top, there was no one there to challenge you, and I knew I had too much left in front of me. I wanted to go to an institution where I could be with the best and the brightest and learn that much more.”
Rulison sold the investment management arm of his firm to partners Christopher Hayes and Robert Fischer, who renamed it Hayes Fischer Capital Management Inc.
“Fleet found (Muniflow) of interest because they felt municipalities and public entities were becoming much more sophisticated,” Rulison says. “The service we have was the only one of its kind, and today is still the only one.”
Muniflow was producing $900,000 in sales annually when Rulison took it to Fleet. It will reach $35 million this year, he says, with clients in 47 states.
When FleetBoston Financial was acquired by Bank of America in 2004, the Muniflow footprint grew as the bank’s market expanded from New England and the Northeast to a national scale.
“We expect a 35 percent growth rate with the product for at least the next five years as we continue to expand within the national footprint of Bank of America,” Rulison says. “What’s neat is that the idea started right here, with Monroe County, and is now used nationally.”
In addition to the value of Muniflow, Rulison’s entrepreneurial background appealed to Fleet.
“At the same time, I was able to learn what the culture was,” he says. “As an entrepreneur, you need to be more cognizant of boundaries and compliance because you’re going to affect many more people. That’s been a big adjustment.”
The biggest difference between Fleet and Bank of America, Rulison says, is that branches have more authority to make decisions and services are available to customers nationwide.
“You can do business here while also having business in Florida or California,” he says.
“If you have a child going to college in Florida, or any part of the country, you can make a deposit here and it goes right into their account. If you need to make a mortgage deposit for a second home in the Carolinas, you can make a deposit right here in Rochester.”

Bank headquarters

Bank of America’s Rochester headquarters is at One East Avenue, across Euclid Street from Midtown Plaza. Most of Midtown is slated for demolition to make way for a new headquarters for Paetec Holding Corp. and other development.
“I’m a very big believer in downtown,” Rulison says. “Bank of America is committed to staying downtown. We will develop around Midtown, whether we rehab this building or become part of other development.
“We believe, from an economic standpoint, you have to have a strong downtown in order for the rest of the community to survive.”
Bank of America has some flexibility, Rulison says, because it does not own the 11-story building. It was sold to a New York City real estate investment trust in 2004 as part of the Fleet merger.
Bank of America ranks seventh in the Rochester market with $583 million in deposits, data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. shows. Rulison calls the rankings misleading, citing deposits in other markets that are managed here that would put Bank of America among the top three in local market share.
“Rochester is not a ‘usual’ city,” he says. “There is a lot of wealth, a lot of cultural richness. It’s really a white-collar city in terms of being a business community. That has allowed us to accentuate our lines of business.
“Since I’ve taken over, we’ve had double-digit growth in terms of the lines of businesses. We’ve continued to build our presence,” he says.

Off the job

Away from work, Rulison spends as much time as he can with his wife and four daughters.
“I love having daughters,” the Brighton resident says, then smiles. “They find a way of telling me what to do.
“I take the girls with me to a lot of things I get involved with. I think it’s important that they see it. I want to spend time with them. But it’s extremely important that they learn what their responsibility to the community is.”
The oldest, Libby, is employed by Paychex Inc. in sales. Mallorie is a second-year law student. Morgan is enrolled at St. John Fisher. Abby is in the Brighton Central School District.
“They all work,” Rulison says. “They started working from when they entered high school so they have the business ethic and understand what it means to make a dollar and how to manage it.
“More importantly, they’ve learned to never take for granted what they’ve been fortunate to receive, and to give back to help others that need the help.”
“We have a natural resource; we have a human resource,” he says. “The third part is, you need to have a rich cultural life. I try to instill all three of these in my position at the bank, to bring it from what we’re going to do to really doing what we do within the community.”
[email protected] / 585-546-8303

Joseph Rulison
Title: Rochester market president,
Bank of America Corp.
Age: 52
Home: Brighton
Education: B.A. in political science,
St. John Fisher College, 1978
Family: Wife Karen; daughters Libby, 25; Mallorie, 22; Morgan, 19; Abby 14
Hobbies: Family, politics, arts, wine, golf
Quote: “Bank of America is a strong believer of trying to show a strong community presence but also is constantly challenging of what else can be done to do more.”

07/11/2008 (C) Rochester Business Journal