- April 24, 2024
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By Mike Cavaliere
Contributing Writer
(Click here for more Standing O Award winners.)
Back when Ameris Bank Senior Vice President Garry Lubi was a kid, playing guitar in a garage band he and his buddies called The Cranberry Tick Tocks, he would have told you his future would take place on a basketball court.
“It’s the finesse aspect of it,” he says he liked so much about the sport. “And I was always a point guard, which is kind of like a manager of the team.”
Maria Lavin-Sanhudo, branch manager, didn’t see herself in banking, either. Maybe she’d be a teacher, she thought. Maybe something else.
But when she, like Lubi, got a part-time job as a teller in high school — Lubi in New York, Lavin-Sanhudo in New Jersey — something clicked.
That was nearly four decades of industry experience ago.
“It just evolved from there,” she said. “It’s not that I wanted to be a banker. It’s just what I got into, and I fell in love with it.”
Mirroring each other’s career trajectories further, both were promoted to manager at age 23. They saw their share of bank mergers and acquisitions, too — about five for Lavin-Sanhudo over the years; closer to 20 for Lubi.
During that time, though, Lubi never lost his love of the game. He played in three different basketball leagues simultaneously at points in college. For a few years, he coached junior-high ball at a Catholic school.
“I always looked at my management job as coaching,” he said. “The leadership aspect on multiple fronts is what motivated me.”
In earlier years of his banking career, he was almost like a star free agent, taking his talents wherever he thought they might be most useful. Tampa, Nashville, Charlotte, N.C. — those are just a few of the places he moved to join new teams.
After signing to a smaller-market community bank in Palm Coast in 2007, though (“I wanted to simplify my life,” he says) — and it being absorbed by Ameris at the end of 2012 — Lubi stayed put.
“(Change) could be the best thing that ever happened to you, but you just don’t know it yet,” he said.
His branch is now the company’s top loan-producing office. Since the shift, its numbers have nearly doubled.
“With any merger, just the technological side of it is a pain,” Lubi said. The joke is that every merger comes prepackaged with “90 days of hell, whether you like it or not. Strap on — because you’re going to go for a ride.”
But something in Lubi likes a good ride. At one point in his career, he had 400 associates reporting to him across 47 offices. At other points, he was the odd man out when his position was eliminated in the midst of another company rebranding.
“It’s a time of transition,” Lavin-Sanhudo said. “You do the best you can. There’s a lot of training. Things change. But overall, you just get so used to it.”
Now, though, Lavin-Sanhudo and Lubi are settled — and their roots extend throughout the community.
She was recently re-elected to a second term as president of the Flagler County Kiwanis club, serves as vice president on the Flagler Humane Society Board of Directors and is an adviser to the Flagler Palm Coast High School Key Club.
He is the chair of the Flagler County Chamber of Commerce’s Economic Alliance Council, as well as president of the Flagler County Education Foundation and a member of the Daytona State College Board of Trustees.
“Have you made the world around you better, made a difference?” Lubi often asks himself.
Banking helps him answer with more certainty: For some clients, he says, a loan means fresh tortillas to stock a new taco shop. For others, it’s medical supplies.
“It’s a team concept,” he said. “So much of what we do, it’s such a team effort.”
But a hoops team can’t win without a strong point guard calling shots. The Cranberry Tick Tocks can’t rock without a good guitar playing lead.
“You see people get their first checking account, first car loan, first mortgage,” Lavin-Sanhudo said. “You’re a part of their lives. … We end up inheriting so many families.”
