Growing up in Riverside, California, Doug Heding had the beach, the mountains, and the desert all within reach. One family camping trip might end at the beach in Carlsbad, and the next in the mountains at Big Bear. His father was a school administrator, and his younger brother also went into education, but Heding would find his own path. At age 20, he was living on his own and working to pay for Cal State San Bernardino when he decided the GI Bill might be a better path to pay for school, and everything changed.
That single decision launched a career that would take Heding from the U.S. Coast Guard to President of Private Wealth at First Business Bank. No one in his family had mapped that career, so he'd have to figure it out himself.
Southern California to the Midwest
When Heding's younger brother graduated from high school, their father took a new job in Southeast Wisconsin, relocating the family to Brookfield. Heding, already living on his own and working through his first year of college, used the family's new address on his enlistment paperwork when he joined the Coast Guard, which made him a Wisconsin resident before he'd spent much time there at all.
He enlisted with a plan to serve two years of active duty, four years in the Reserves, and earn the GI Bill and use it to finish college. Then, something unexpected happened.
"I enjoyed the work, the camaraderie, and felt like I was making a difference," Heding said. So he re-enlisted for four more years. By the time that enlistment ended, he faced a calculation many service members confront: re-enlist again and you're halfway to a military retirement, or get out now and go back to the reason you went in.
He decided to get out. But first, a deployment to the Persian Gulf would point him in a direction he hadn't anticipated.
The Books That Built A Career
The ship Heding served on during the Iraq War hadn't been retrofitted for a war zone. Carrying almost 50 percent more people than it was designed for, there was no common space to speak of. The days were divided between standing watch, running missions, eating, and resting. When he had downtime and wasn't tired enough to sleep, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but read.
He started working his way through books on economics and finance the way you might stumble into a new hobby, finding one interesting, then another. By the time he got back from the Persian Gulf with six months left on his contract, he knew exactly where he was headed.
"I knew when I got out, I was going to go back to school for finance," Heding said.
He arranged his discharge so that he got out on a Friday and started at UW-Milwaukee's business school that next Monday. He'd watched other people leave the military without a plan and struggle to find their footing, and he wasn't going to let that happen.
"I set it up so I didn't have a chance to get comfortable," he said.
The Interview That Opened A Door
Two months into his first semester, Heding was already applying for internships. He made it far into the process at M&I Bank before a vice president stopped him: "You haven't taken the right classes yet. You don't know what you don't know."
That executive admired his ambition and spent two hours with him anyway, walking through how banking works, where strong career paths begin, and what to do first. His advice was to start as a teller to learn how a bank functions before doing anything else. For Heding, who had grown up in a family of educators with no bankers or executives to call on for guidance, that conversation was a turning point.
"I felt like I understood the industry, and it lined up with what I was interested in," he said.
He began applying for teller jobs that same day, but it took four tries to get an offer. Fewer than six months earlier, he'd been effectively third in command on a warship, and now no one would hire him as a teller because he didn't have cash handling experience.
"Back then, nobody really knew what to do with veterans," Heding said. "They couldn't translate that experience into the skills they were looking for."
Finally, Wauwatosa Savings Bank, now Waterstone Bank, gave him a shot. Within three months, they'd seen enough to know he'd outgrow the role quickly and moved him into a new treasury management group. He spent half his time learning systems and processes from the ground up and the other half back at the bank as its only treasury management expert, handling sales alongside everything else, all while finishing his degree full time.
"I learned how to build a business within a larger institution, right from the ground level," he said. "That was a great experience."
Moving Through The Ranks In Banking
From treasury management, Heding made a move into credit, joining The PrivateBank, now CIBC, as a credit analyst. The bank was transitioning from a traditional Chicago private wealth firm into a commercial middle-market bank with wealth capabilities. Then, a private banking relationship management role opened, and Heding stepped into it.
From there, U.S. Bank recruited him to take over a retiring banker's book of business in their private bank, where he spent four years strengthening his wealth management expertise. He also went back to school, earning his MBA from Marquette in two years while working full time, drawing on his federal GI Bill after using Wisconsin's separate state-level benefit for his undergraduate degree at UW-Milwaukee.
Heding then spent four years running a team of business bankers and treasury management professionals covering Southeast Wisconsin before being recruited to BMO to co-lead their Milwaukee private banking market. Within a year, he was running their Western Wisconsin market from a downtown Madison office, commuting an hour each way from Brookfield rather than asking his family to move. His daughter was finishing elementary school, and his wife had her career, so he felt an hour on the road was a reasonable sacrifice for their happiness.
Where Client Focus Comes First
More than 13 years across large institutions taught Heding a great deal and helped him figure out where he does his best work.
"It's very hard to be operationally efficient and deliver a personal experience for clients when you're that big," he said. "At the end of the day, I think we're all client-driven people and it becomes harder and harder to do at a larger institution."
When First Business Bank reached out, he started talking with Dave Seiler and Jim Hartlieb. The culture, the access to decision-makers, the ability to act without working through layers of process — it resonated with what he enjoyed about the Coast Guard.
"In the Coast Guard, I worked on small teams," he said. "Small teams of people would figure out how to get a lot of stuff done. I tend to enjoy that more than working through large, complex processes."
Investing In The Experts Who Guide Our Clients
As President of Private Wealth, Heding oversees the advisors and leaders who work directly with clients across First Business Bank's Wisconsin and Kansas City markets. He holds the Certified Private Wealth Advisor designation, which he pursued for its focus on the complex situations high-net-worth clients often face: estate planning, trust structures, executive compensation, and tax strategy. It's a leadership role that keeps him close to the work he's always loved, working with a team focused on protecting and growing clients’ wealth.
While Heding still meets with clients directly, his role has expanded to include developing the team that serves them every day. "When you're working directly with clients, you derive joy from the relationships you build with individuals and families," he said. "That doesn't change at this level. It just arrives differently."
He finds real satisfaction watching our Private Wealth team grow, building confidence, strengthening expertise, and discovering what drives them. To him, developing his team and delivering for clients are two sides of the same commitment: the stronger the team, the better the experience clients can expect.
"It's a very similar sense of satisfaction," he said. "It just shifts."
His philosophy on private wealth comes from a straightforward place. People work hard to build what they have, and they want to make the right decisions for themselves and their families. A good advisor's job is to think through the options a client doesn't know to ask about.
"You don't know what you don't know,'" Heding said. "That's why you hire an expert. I can put trim and doors in my house, but I'm not a finished carpenter, so there will be parts that are crooked and I'll see it every day. With financial planning, you might never see what you missed until it's too late. A professional who helps people grow and protect their wealth every day knows what to look for before the problems show up."
Giving Back, Especially To Veterans & The Arts
Heding's community involvement reflects two causes he feels strongly about: veterans and the arts.
On the veterans' side, he knows firsthand how many former service members leave benefits unclaimed, either because they don't know they qualify or because they've seen others who struggled harder and don't feel their own situation warrants it. He received his own VA disability rating only three years ago, more than two decades after leaving the service.
"A lot of people get out and say, 'I'm fine. My buddy had all these really bad things happen, but I'm okay,'" he said. "And there are a lot of folks who run into hard times and have health issues, but they never got into the VA system. They don't have the health care they need, even though they qualify."
The arts matter to him for a different reason. He served on the board of the Sharon Lynn Wilson Center for the Arts in Brookfield and sees arts funding as an access issue as much as a cultural one. Sports, art, music: these are the outlets where young people discover how they're wired, and those opportunities are narrowing.
"Some people find their outlet through sports. Some find it through art or music," he said. "But those avenues for young people are becoming fewer and fewer, and it's important to support the organizations that keep them open."
At Home In The Woods
Since settling into Wisconsin life, Heding has fully embraced the state’s outdoor life. He hunts, fishes, boats, skis with his family in the winter, and ice fishes. He describes sitting in the woods before sunrise, watching the forest come alive around him, as one of the most grounding things he does.
"There's nothing better than sitting in the middle of the forest with nothing around you before the sun comes up," he said. "The birds start chirping, the squirrels start running around. It's very calm."
For someone who grew up near Los Angeles and spent a year deployed to the Middle East, the Northern Wisconsin woods are a long way from where he started. But when asked what success looks like five or ten years from now, Heding doesn't reach for growth targets. He talks about the people.
"We have a very strong wealth management group here," he said. "I feel like I inherited a strong group of people who deliver an incredible client experience. Success is continuing to develop our folks, making that client experience even stronger, and making sure that as our most experienced people eventually retire, we have the team in place to continue that legacy and keep delivering what clients have come to expect from First Business Bank."
