Most people who grew up in Round Rock remember when this place was cornfields and a two-lane road. Hunter Leatherman not only remembers it, he was shaped by it. Hunter is a Round Rock native, a Cedar Ridge High School grad, and now Vice President of Business and Community Banking at Frontier Bank of Texas. His parents were bankers. He started as a teller in 2019 and built from there. But one of the most formative chapters of his life had nothing to do with a loan document.
When Hunter was young, he worked as a bat boy for the Round Rock Express. He was in the clubhouse. Doing laundry. Packing bags. Dropping players at the airport at midnight. Nobody was micromanaging them. The players trusted them to get it done. “The biggest thing I probably took away from it,” Hunter told me on a recent episode of Rock Solid, “is working hard when no one’s watching.” They were there before the players arrived and long after they left, critical to everything, invisible on the scoreboard.
That ethic follows Hunter into banking too. He’ll tell you the worst time to build a relationship with your banker is when your balance sheet hits zero. By then, there isn’t much anyone can do. The work that matters, like the work in that clubhouse, happens long before anyone’s paying attention. It’s about showing up consistently, doing the right things for the right reasons, and being willing to be inconvenienced in service of something bigger than yourself.
These aren’t baseball lessons. They’re not even banking lessons. They’re life lessons. And if you’ve ever wondered why some people seem to have this quality wired in from a young age, Hunter has a clear-eyed answer: it’s mostly how you’re shaped early. But it can be developed through repetition. Through choosing it again and again until it becomes automatic.
What’s the most important work you’re doing right now that nobody’s watching? Connect with Hunter Leatherman on LinkedIn or visit Frontier Bank of Texas, and listen to the full episode below.
