2025 Executive of the Year: Mike Maddox

PUBLISHED JANUARY 2025

Once upon a time, on a high school basketball court in the northwest suburbs of Oklahoma City, a lanky 6-foot-8 teenager would finagle his way into the high school gym after hours, set up his boom box, grab a basketball and start shooting, with each dribble sending out an echo in the empty arena.  

Thunk-thunk… swish. Thunk-thunk … swish. 

Hundreds of times a day. Thousands of times a year.  

The venue was Putnam City North High School. The dream was the National Basketball Association. And the commitment to excellence would become lifelong.

Reflecting on what it took to become a McDonald’s All-American, an AAU national champion, and a member of two NCAA tournament finalists at the University of Kansas, Mike Maddox says, simply: “I always wanted to be great.”

Greatness may be out there for many of us—but not, perhaps, where we think we’ll find it. Degenerative discs in his lower back took their toll in college. With the vigorous assistance of KU’s training staff and an iron will, Maddox played through the pain. But it was clear by the time he played his last game for the Jayhawks, against Duke for the 1991 NCAA championship, that the venue for his personal pursuit of excellence would not be defined by lines on a basketball court.

If you fast forward enough—through law school, thro-ugh private legal practice, then into banking as an untested rookie—you find Mike Maddox today as the CEO of the third-largest bank in Kansas. It’s about to merge with an Illinois-based heavyweight, and Maddox is preparing to take the reins of the combined enterprise. 

What he achieved in 16 years between the founding of CrossFirst Bank and last August’s announced merger with Busey Bank was unprecedented in Kansas City banking history. From a start-up operating with $400 million in capital assembled from 15 investors, Maddox was central to the rise of a regional banking powerhouse.

CrossFirst climbed farther, faster than any other bank in the two-state region, eventually topping $7 billion in assets. That made it an ideal partner for a union with First Busey of Champaign, Ill., creating a combined regional power with $20 billion in assets and 77 locations in 10 states.

The value of the all-stock deal: $916.8 million. An impressive return for investors who rolled the dice during one of the darkest periods in the U.S. financial-services sector then were rewarded for having put their faith in Maddox’s leadership abilities.

That history of achievement makes Mike Maddox our 2025 Executive of the Year in the CEO silo of our C-Suite Awards. And it means that, even if another level of excellence is still out there to be claimed, Maddox has made good on a vow to himself back when the boom box was keeping time to the net swishing in the Putnam North gym.

Learned Competitiveness

“I’ve always been one,” Maddox says in the conference room of CrossFirst’s Leawood headquarters, “to set big goals and it became clear that basketball was something that I had an aptitude for. When I was a kid, well, I think a lot of kids dream about playing in the NBA or playing at the highest level, and of course, those were goals that I had.”

Personal drive would get him only so far, though. “I was fortunate to have great coaches and parents that invested in what I wanted to do. But I was also very self-motivated.”

The hours in the gym, he said, would prove therapeutic as well as motivational. He wanted to get better. “Then I got opportunities to participate on AAU teams and things that allowed me to play against better players and get better.”

The thing about raising your personal bar, though, is that you soon discover others are doing the same. Moving up from high school games to the AAU, then KU was “an adjustment for sure,” he says. In Lawrence, he said, “You step on the floor, and you’re out there in practice with Danny Manning and great players, and you realize, ‘OK, there’s a whole ’nother level I need to get to, so you recalibrate and say, OK, what do I need to do to raise my game and compete at that level?”

What he would come to realize years later was that the experience was creating a template for personal and organizational success. “Part of it is learning the nuances of the game and getting physically bigger and stronger and faster. And I chose to go to Kansas knowing that I wasn’t going to walk right on the floor that first day and be the focus for everyone else, but I felt like it gave me the best opportunity to get better vs. going to maybe a smaller school where I might have been the star on Day One. I wanted to compete at the highest level. I wanted to have a chance to win a national championship.”

The Path Diverges

The end of a dream as a pro player came into focus just before Maddox’s senior season at KU, when the degenerative disc disease in his lower back asserted itself. 

“My family and coach (Roy) Williams and the doctors all met to determine whether or not I was even going to play my senior year, and everybody decided that, hey, I wasn’t going to hurt myself any worse, and as long as I could get through the pain, I could play.”

Williams modified the practice schedule, and epidural steroids helped. But, Maddox says, “At that point, I knew it was time for me to hang up the high tops. That’s when I decided to kind of think about ‘OK, what am I going to do next?’ I was going to get my business degree and somebody suggested that, hey, go to law school, so I took the LSAT in December of my senior year and got accepted to KU Law School.”

Mentally, he was well-armed for that challenge. “You learn when you’re playing at a high level that you get pushed physically beyond where you think you can go,” Maddox says. “It’s pretty challenging, and that kind of mental toughness that you develop through that has benefited me through my business career. You do get thrown curve balls and have to have the ability to just take it one step at a time and work through it.”

After law school, he went into private practice in Lawrence, handling all manner of cases: criminal defense, estate planning, zoning and the like—broad exposure he believes would prove beneficial—then the zest for combat drew him to litigation for three years. 

That field, he says, “is a tough grind. But again, it was a situation in my career where I got thrown into some pretty big stuff at a young age. You’ve just got to figure out how to go do it. It’s like you throw the dog in the pool, and he’d better start paddling. But you pick up a lot of skills doing that. You learn how to ask questions. You learn how to listen, too, and how to follow up and a lot of that’s sales 101. A lot of that legal training, I think, was a great background for me to move into sales and into banking.” 

Making the Move

As banking consolidations of the 1990s sorted out, Wichita-based INTRUST Bank found itself with two Lawrence locations, looking for a leader familiar with the market. An executive search agent called to tap his reservoir of contacts for a local bank president. 

“At that point, I’d realized that law wasn’t going to be my long-term future, and I said, ‘Well, what about me?’” Maddox says. “That started the interview process, and we went through it over a couple of months.”

The attraction for someone new to banking? “I just felt like I had the ability to figure it out,” Maddox says. “You know, banking is such a people business, and I knew that I had a lot of relationships in Lawrence and a business background and I thought my legal background would help. Then, with my athletic background in building teams and hopefully having some experience and leading people, I thought all that could translate into banking. One thing I didn’t like about the law practice is that you were dealing with people who had problems every day. I felt like in banking, I could help people, maybe, before they had a problem, and maybe help them avoid problems in the future.”

But he also had the self-awareness to know what he didn’t know. He dove deep into training at post-graduate locations, and he made some key hires of experienced bankers, especially in commercial lending.

One, he said, was a woman whom he begged to come work with him. “I said, ‘You don’t have to make one sales call. I’ll make all the sales calls. Just don’t let me make any bad loans.’” For the next six years, the boss became the student, absorbing everything he could about not just making loans, but making the right loans.

The Entrepreneurial Drive

After years of working for a private company with deep family ownership, the entrepreneurial bug bit. “I like being competitive; I like building things,” Maddox says. “I just felt like it was time for me to kind of take what I learned and see if I can do it and build something. I was 39 and I just felt like it was time to try to do something.”

He assessed his options, then settled on starting a bank. An initial group forming CrossFirst approached him, looking for a CEO. “I just felt like if I was going to build something, I wanted to be able to do something for my family,” Maddox says.

Having been part of KU’s 1988 champion team as a freshman, closing his career in a title game, and helping win 103 games, Maddox had a blueprint for success, one that transcended sports.

“I want to be on great teams, and I always want to be surrounded by good people and good coaches, good mentors,” he says. “I’m a huge believer that you know you win as a team, and you’re only as good as your teammates. And so, as we’ve worked to build CrossFirst, it’s been about surrounding us, surrounding all of us, with great people and great talent. And I think that’s what it takes.”

Then you add the drive.

“When we were a $500 million bank, we wanted to act like a $2 billion bank, and when we were a $2 billion bank, we wanted to act like a $5 billion bank,” Maddox says. “We were always trying to raise our level so we can compete with the next group.”

But before any of that could happen, the bank had to get its foot in the door of a banking market more crowded and competitive than any peer city in the nation. And do it as the wheels were coming off the economy with the Great Recession’s arrival and the October 2008 financial services near-meltdown.

“It was a challenge, but it was great at the same time because we ended up—we had a lot of capital,” Maddox says. “We didn’t have any problem loans. And it was a time when a lot of the other banks in town were having to shrink a bit. The only way they could shrink was by moving some of the better customers off, so we were able to take advantage of that and grow.”

It was, he says, “a unique time to be able to grow in the market. In the beginning, the business thesis was, if you’re going to start a bank from scratch there, you’ve got to find a niche. Ours was really businesses and professionals and that kind of middle-market business that wanted service and wanted a personal relationship. We weren’t going to be able to compete with Bank of America or Chase or some of the bigger banks that had more of a retail presence with one location; we had to focus on a certain niche and the good thing was, we could go get the technology to compete.”

That was crucial, he says, because in banking, you pay for different levels of technology based on your size. At that level, “the technology was easy to get. We had a good niche, and then, to me, it was about hiring great bankers, people who could build personal relationships. My big focus was on recruiting talent.”

The pieces came together to go public in 2019 with an IPO that valued the bank at $741 million. With what he calls a great team, a great board and great shareholders, the stage had been set for great growth. Then, almost exactly a year ago, Maddox attended a banking conference in Arizona where he was introduced to executives from First Busey.

“Our board is always looking at strategically what’s out there and what opportunities are there to grow and expand,” Maddox says. “And we’ve looked at a couple of different opportunities that didn’t work.” An initial lunch at the conference ended with mutual agreement to continue the conversation, and over the ensuing months, Maddox says, it was clear that the cultures would align.

“It’s a really, really extensive process, and we spent a lot of time together,” he says. “I think we were both very focused on making sure, No. 1, that it was a cultural fit and No. 2, that it was a business model fit. The last thing you get to is the economics and does it make sense financially?”

With federal approval for the merger coming early in January, Maddox is preparing to shift his duties, “but I’m going to be a long-term employee, you know?” On day one of the merger, he’ll be CEO of the bank, president of the holding company and vice chairman of the board. A year later, he’ll move to CEO of the holding company, per contract terms.

“The holding company,” he notes, “is going to stay right here in Kansas City, so we’ll have a Kansas City headquarters. And we’re going to try growing this thing.”

Even if it means abandoning the CrossFirst brand that was, in some respects, his baby.

“I think banking is more about the people than the name of the company,” Maddox says. “The Busey brand has been around for almost 150 years; our brand has been around for 16 or 17. So they’ve got 60 locations, we had 15. So it just made sense that would be the go forward brand.”

“But really, to me, it’s about the people. So, yeah, we’ll change the signs, but you know, the most important thing is that the names of the people taking care of the customers are the same.”