Jerry J. Williams is the chairman, president and CEO of the $1.74 billion-asset Orion Bancorp, the second-largest privately owned bank in Florida. Headquartered in Naples, Orion operates in Collier, Lee, Sarasota and Manatee counties and the Florida Keys, where the Texas transplant began grooming his thoroughbred bank 28 years ago.

Williams, the majority stockholder, put the spurs to Orion, which now ranks in the top 1 percent of banks and bank holding companies in the country. Among banks and bank holding companies with assets between $1 billion and $3 billion, Orion ranked third in the United States and first in Florida in financial performance. From 2001 to 2005, Orion posted compound annual growth rates of 34 percent for earnings per share, 38 percent for net income and 27 percent for asset growth. With many loans concentrated in Florida real estate development, Orion's return on equity has hovered around 25 percent annually for the past five years.

Affable, straight-talking and remarkably humble, Williams deflects praise of Orion's performance to the managers and employees of what he calls his "boutique bank." In 2006, moving at a steady, calculated gallop, Williams has set his sights on the green pastures of Broward and Palm Beach counties in an expansion move that will triple Orion's deposit market to about $100 billion.

Chairman of the Florida Bankers Association, a board member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta and a member of the government relations council of the American Bankers Association, he's on the move from sunup to sundown. He pauses occasionally to look over his shoulder for signs of his competitors.

We followed Williams one day last winter, beginning at his Naples headquarters.

7:40 a.m. After rising at 6 a.m. to have breakfast with his family, Jerry Williams, 45, parks his big black BMW behind Orion's headquarters on bustling Tamiami Trail, where he takes a wake-up call from Florida Bankers Association President Alex Sanchez. The question of the week: how to handle requests for FBA fund-raising help from political candidates. Williams starts his day tiptoeing through the delicate ballet of staying neutral but relevant to the state's political powerbrokers.

8:05 a.m. Williams, tall and tan, climbs the stairs to Orion's executive offices on the second floor, meeting senior managers with urgent questions along the way. Orion's security chief updates him on some robberies of other banks near the East Coast. Could be Orlando pros who had been laying low, she tells him.

Williams pokes his head into the boardroom, where he manages to crack a smile on two of three grim-faced government auditors. "We get audited about 400 times a year," exaggerates Williams as he leaves the boardroom. "It's too nice in there. They don't want to leave."

8:30 a.m. Williams' executive assistant greets him at his small office with a review of the day's calendar and telephone messages. A packed briefcase sits against a wall. Seven photographs ring the office, all of his family-wife Heather and sons Conrad, Hunter and Wade. He met Heather in Fort Myers, where she was a competing First Union banker.

A couple of executives poke their heads into Williams' office. They rave about the previous evening's welcoming party for the Atlantic coast bankers who will join Orion as it opens 12 offices during the next three years in Broward and West Palm Beach counties. "One of [the Atlantic bankers] said, 'All these people like each other. It's like a cult,'" chuckles one of the executives. Williams smiles. He is pleased. For him, Orion's corporate culture is everything.

8:41 a.m. Williams heads downstairs for a retail briefing chaired by Andy Kirkman, Orion's executive vice president for retail business. Williams pauses in the lobby to greet a customer and some sleepy-eyed employees. He avoids a neatly stacked pyramid of doughnut holes next to the gourmet coffee and tea.

"It's a phenomenal thing," Kirkman tells the half-dozen senior managers about Orion's home equity loan production. "The loans never stop." Beaming, the managers have been reporting year-to-date production goals at 100, 150 and 250 percent. And it seems nobody is satisfied with 99 percent compliance with customer-service quality goals. A lot of "Gee, thanks guys, but I couldn't have done it without you" passes back and forth across the table.

Williams praises and then sobers the group with a warning not to let their "good feelings" override Orion's devotion to numbers.

"This is our report card," says Williams, leafing through the latest industry market report. Numbers count, feeling good doesn't, preaches Williams, a faint drawl betraying his Texas origins.

Williams chafes at another burr under his saddle. He zeroes in on a competitor's pathetic performance in the booming Naples marketplace, revealed in the report. However, the competitor's recent press release suggests just the opposite.