Inside the newest building on Live Oak Bank’s midtown campus, Live Oak’s CEO explained the thinking behind having his employees come back to the office (versus remote working) five days a week.

“We're in the same room. We're relating to each other, and we're looking each other in the eye,” said James “Chip” Mahan III, who also serves as chairman of Live Oak. “I don't think you can replace that in a business that's growing this fast … when you're going that fast, 100 miles an hour with your hair on fire, you gotta be together.”

The Wilmington-headquartered SBA lender just got more space for employees to be together. On Thursday morning, Live Oak officials, contractors, Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo and more gathered in the new structure, Building 4, on Live Oak’s campus off Tiburon Drive to celebrate the facility's opening. Representing a total investment of $150 million so far, Live Oak’s compound started with a groundbreaking ceremony for its first building in May 2012.

“On Dec. 31, 2013, six months after we moved into Building 1, we had 141 employees,” Mahan said to the crowd gathered at Thursday’s event. “Today on this campus, we have 708 employees.”

Between 2013 and 2023, the digital bank’s assets grew from $450 million to $11.2 billion and its capital from $50 million to $1 billion, said Mahan, who founded the bank in 2008.

He expects that growth to continue. For example, the next few years could see the groundbreaking for Building 5. Crews were digging behind Live Oak's buildings Thursday to expand an existing pond into a lake to handle water runoff at the growing campus, using the resulting soil to create a pad for Building 5.

And the bank is “constantly recruiting” new employees, Mahan said.

“We’re always looking for great revenue producers. Well, great revenue producers create a waterfall effect, so if I hire another 15 lending officers then I need 15 underwriters and 15 closers ….We’re always trying to find the best of the best to generate the top line revenues throughout the country and continue to do what we’ve done in the past about having more verticals,” he said.

The bank currently has 35 verticals, which are the number of industries Live Oak serves.

Live Oak’s latest building was designed with employee needs and wants in mind, officials said. The architecture firm was LS3P and the general contractor was a joint venture between Monteith Construction and Swinerton, a national construction firm.

The new building has four stories and 67,000 square feet. It is threaded through with Cisco technology and was built using mass timber – a kind of compressed, sustainable wood that's been trending overseas and making its way into U.S. construction. Smaller touches include fabric wrapped around lights and incorporated throughout the offices to absorb noise.  

“We surveyed employees about the first three buildings – what they liked, what they didn’t like,” said Koo MacQueen, head of real estate strategy at Live Oak. “Some of the things that they came back with were noise distraction and a lack of spaces to have private calls or small meetings with one to four people. The other buildings are beautiful, but they really only have offices, workstations and large conference rooms. And so in this building, we've really tried to implement multiple-scale rooms … from an individual telephone booth (pictured above) to two-person huddle rooms, four-person huddle rooms, up to a 12-person formal conference space.”

Chris Boney, LS3P's chief relationships officer, said the design "was all about producing informal meeting spaces and collaboration spaces, ways to work together that's not just your grandfather's cubicle but actually produces innovative ways of interacting between teams and employees."