Little more than a year after they walked through the front door of 1st Mariner Bank, Jack Steil and Robert Kunisch are ahead of schedule. The bank turned a profit in the first quarter of 2015 and is well on its way toward growing into the prominent local institution its new owners envision.

"We're finally getting to that point where we're going to hit that plateau and things will be more predictable going forward," said Steil, 1st Mariner's chairman and CEO.

"We want to continue to grow the bank organically," he said. "We'd like to add more lenders, expand in the central Maryland market into some of the counties where we might not have as strong a presence. At the same time, we'd like to be the merger partner of choice for some of the other community banks in the market."

Just one year ago it would've been hard to imagine 1st Mariner being in a position to aim so high. The bank foundered through the recession and the years after under the weight of bad mortgages. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a cease and desist order in September 2009 that required the bank to increase liquidity and capital and reduce bad assets.

The bank was sold to Steil, Kunisch and a group of local investors for just shy of $19 million in June 2014.

"We talk about it being a patient," said Kunisch, the bank's president and COO. "And I always said we put it into a coma. Let's just stabilize it. For a bank, capital is everything. We just wanted to make sure we did everything to preserve capital."

The new ownership group put $92 million of new capital into the bank a critical transfusion. But even that wouldn't save 1st Mariner alone. Steil and Kunisch, walked into an organization that was losing up to $2 million a month. They had looked at the largest loans before the purchase, those as small as $500,000. But they had to go deeper.

"Where banks get into trouble is bad loans," Kunisch said. "The first thing we did is hammered the [existing loan] portfolio. We went through customer by customer, all the way down to $15,000 loans, and just made sure we were on firm ground with all those."

At the same time, they set about shifting the bank's culture. They brought in a new CFO, chief credit officer, chief lending officer, director of retail operations, director of operations, a private banker and at least half a dozen commercial loan officers.

"The bank goes from playing defense for three years and now we're on offense,"Kunisch said. "We're looking at our numbers every day. Every day, we want to know how many checking accounts we opened. If a checking account closes, we want to know why."

Steil and Kunisch divided the bank. Some they tasked with seeking new business while a special assets group took on troubled loans and other drags on the balance sheet. Their orders, said Kunisch: "You're our surgeons, man. Just go in and work this portfolio as quickly as you can."

The bank saw its balance sheet contract to about $835 million, down from nearly $1 billion, as it shed problem assets. The FDIC rescinded the four-year-old cease and desist order just after the start of this summer, well ahead of expectations.

And now, just after its 20th birthday and one year under new ownership, 1st Mariner is poised to grow, which is why Steil and Kunisch took on the challenge in the first place.

They saw in 1st Mariner a well-known local institution with potential. The value of the name itself was about $7 million, Kunisch said. The stable of 16 branch offices in Central Maryland could grow organically through acquisitions of smaller banks. And the bones of the bank, the behind-the-scenes infrastructure, is capable of supporting growth that would double or triple 1st Mariner in size. That would give it the chance to compete with much larger, national banks in the local market.

"We'd like to be somewhere in the two to three billion asset range," Steil said. "You're a meaningful player. You're competing for the right-size transactions."

But despite the success, the 1st Mariner's new leaders still haven't managed to check off one thing on their to-do list.

"The investment bankers that helped us with this deal, typically they want to have a big closing party when it was done [last year]," said Kunisch. "We said 'No time for that. We're going to work tomorrow.'"