Meet Tyler Smith
Tyler Smith was born in a little town called Storm Lake in northwest Iowa. His parents eloped when his mother got pregnant at age 16. They drove to Michigan on her birthday to get married and were together for nearly 48 years until she passed away in 2016.
Growing up in Storm Lake, Tyler attended a Catholic School, graduating from high school in a class of just 20 people (19, actually, but because one of his classmates was pregnant, he likes to round up!). Unlike stereotypical high schools where there are jocks, geeks, and drama people, Tyler’s school was so small that students had to be involved in everything and had no choice but to get along with everyone. “You had to dabble in different things, because you wouldn't want to let your friends down if, say, there weren’t enough guys to have a baseball season or to cast a play.” Looking back, Tyler believes that this experience helped him learn to relate to different people in different groups. And, he says, “it certainly opened my mind. I love sports, but my school also helped give me a deep appreciation for music and the arts.”
Though Tyler’s father owned and ran a construction company, Tyler discovered early on that he was not cut out for manual labor. About the only tools he was proficient with, he says, “was a broom or a shovel.” Perhaps his father sensed this as well, because for Christmas one year his father gave him a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, one of the very first mass-marketed consumer models. “This was probably my favorite Christmas memory,” says Tyler, because it spurred a fascination with computers and technology.
After high school, Tyler attended Simpson College, a private liberal arts college in Indianola, Iowa. He intended to study computer science but opted instead for business. While finishing his degree, he took a temporary job with Norwest, a mortgage company, a decision that was fortuitous, as it launched a highly successful career in banking and finance.
Tyler is a life-long learner, and every job he has held has taught him something important. Early in his career, working as a loan officer in a call center, he learned how “to adapt my communication style to the person that I'm talking to, because if you've got on the phone with the customer from New York, and had the same tone, speed, cadence, all of that, as the customer from South Carolina it wasn't gonna work.”
Tyler started at Wells Fargo (where he still works today) at the start of the mortgage crisis. He led a team that managed and sold foreclosed property to recapture some of the loss. During the crisis, millions of Americans lost their homes, and Tyler says, “it was incredibly difficult to see the impact that foreclosure had on families and communities. It is something that drives me today to focus on safe, affordable housing solutions.” The following year, he volunteered to work on the government’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program to address the foreclosure crisis. He started working with housing advocacy groups and developed a program in which Wells Fargo took low value properties and donated them to neighborhood nonprofits for their use. Tyler is extremely proud of this program. “At the end of the day,” he says, “we gave away almost 10,000 houses across the country. That's awesome.”
Encouraged by his experience in 2008, he created a whole Wells Fargo team around community development and continued building his expertise in the area. He relocated to Houston two years ago when he was offered a dream job at Wells Fargo: Community Relations Senior Manager. His region is Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Kentucky. He could have lived anywhere in this area, but he chose Houston as his home.
Tyler loves being here. “Iowa, where I grew up, is about 90% white. My exposure – to different people, different cultures, different beliefs –was very limited. And now I get to live in the most diverse city in the country! I'm so excited to call Houston home. I'm so excited for the opportunity to explore and learn about new cultures without ever leaving the city. Houston’s population is larger than the entire state of Iowa but the longer I am here and the more I get to know it, the more this city shrinks and feels smaller.”
Through his work at Wells Fargo and as a citizen of Houston, Tyler is eager to learn more about his new home. “I want to help Houston be a better place, a more equitable city. I am motivated to go out there and make my contribution.”
