CLOSE TO UVEST.

• Author: Maley, Frank
• Position: Uvest Financial Services Group Inc. - Company Profile

A small securities firm cozies up to little banks with services they're not big enough to provide.

John Robison wraps his hands around the horseshoe of gray hair at the back of his head, leans back and listens as Dan Arnold chats with a visitor about the Internet and the potential it holds for their company. The 68-year-old chairman and founder of Charlotte-based Uvest Financial Services Group Inc. doesn't say a word as Arnold, its blond, 34-year-old president, explains how Internet stock trading will affect the market share of discount brokers like theirs.

He finally breaks his silence when asked about his role in the formation and

as chairman of The Scottish Bank, a local start-up. Arnold takes over again as the conversation drifts back to Uvest -- a company that sells investment, money-management and insurance services to small banks that can't afford to buy or build them from scratch. Throughout the discussion, he expands on subjects Robison merely grazes, even answers questions about events that happened before he joined Uvest in 1994. Robison draws a blank, for example, when asked when Uvest first turned a profit, though he owned most of the company at the time. "I've just been an observer on the scene every day, all my life, so I can't really tell you when this happened or that happened," he says.

Arnold manages the company and helps with planning, while Robison provides he strategic thinking. He has grudgingly taken a hands-on approach when nobody else could run it. "I like to create things," he explains. "I don't like to execute. [Arnold] likes to execute. And he can execute all he wants to as long as I don't have to do it."

You might think that Robison doesn't care or that he's a bit spacey. Truth is, he's had irons in a lot of fires over the years. Uvest is one of four businesses he helped found, a moonlighting gig that outgrew his day job. For most of the past 27 years, he has split time between Uvest and Robison & Associates Inc., the recruiting firm he bought in 1972 and grew into a $2 million, eight-employee business before shutting it down after a near-fatal car wreck in 1997.

With 75 employees and 1998 revenues of $18 million, Uvest has outstripped the search firm's numbers and is hawking new products such as insurance. Trotting out new products is less a choice than a survival tactic -- a condition suited to Robison's create-and-delegate management style. He was ahead of the curve when he recognized that crumbling regulatory barriers between banks, insurance companies and brokerages in the 1970s and '80s would push banks into businesses they knew little about. But since then, competitors have emerged, including small banks such as the Bank of Stanly. As barriers continue to fall -- Congress is debating whether to allow banks to do underwriting -- Uvest and its rivals must compete with what the big banks can offer.

"The world's becoming more complicated all the time, so if...