Good Neighbor Podcast Estero
Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of SWFL
Good Neighbor Podcast Estero
EP# 188 - Jason Brewer on Seacoast Bank’s 98-Year Journey and Local Impact
Curious about how a community bank can grow from local roots to a major statewide player without losing its personal touch? Join us as we chat with Jason Brewer, the market president of Seacoast Bank of Southwest Florida, who shares the bank's inspiring 98-year journey from Stewart, Florida to managing $15 billion in assets. Jason provides a fascinating account of his own path, from studying English at Florida State University to becoming a key player in banking and financial services. You’ll also hear about his globe-trotting adventures and how they enriched his professional life.
In this episode, we discover how Seacoast Bank has successfully navigated the complexities of strategic acquisitions, creating a unified culture while maintaining personalized customer relationships. Jason dispels the myth of commoditization in banking, highlighting the unique value of tailored financial services. We also learn about Jason's life beyond the bank, from his community involvement to his personal interests, making him a well-rounded leader. Plus, we wrap up with a heartfelt tribute to community partners and an invitation for our listeners to nominate local businesses for future features. Don’t miss this enriching conversation that celebrates both professional and personal growth!
Seacoast Bank
Jason Brewer
EVP, Southwest Florida Market President
856 3rd Ave S
Naples, FL 34102
(239) 316-5833
jason.brewer@seacoastbank.com
WEBSITE
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Cabo Jim.
Speaker 2:Schaller. Welcome Good Neighbors. Episode number 188 of the Good Neighbor Podcast. Today we have Good Neighbor Jason Brewer from Seacoast Bank of Southwest Florida. Welcome, jason Good morning Jim.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, always good to get to know people here in the community and what they do and share it with our listeners. So let's jump right in. And why don't you share a little bit about what you do over at Seacoast Bank?
Speaker 3:That sounds great. Well, again, I'm Jason Brewer and I'm the market president for Southwest Florida Seacoast Bank. Seacoast Bank was founded about 98 years ago in Stewart, florida, and our mission then and now is to work with people and businesses in our communities to help them continue in achieving their objectives and their ongoing success. In the century since then we've expanded pretty significantly. We're now over a $15 billion asset bank with about 1500 associates all throughout the state, and we've gone from just being in Stewart 98 years ago to going all the way up to Jacksonville, down to Miami on the East Coast, tampa Bay, sarasota, and it's about two years ago when we opened this office down here in Southwest Florida. We had had no historical Southwest Florida presence before that time, and so two years ago a team of our retail and commercial banking partners opened up our office at 3rd Avenue South and 41. And have been growing the balance sheet doing the same thing we've been doing for close to 100 years Just delivering a community bank style execution with the folks and companies in our area.
Speaker 3:In my capacity as market president, I wear a few different hats. On a given day, I work directly with the commercial banking team that we have here, looking for relationships and to support operating companies that have anywhere from gosh $2 to $50 million or over that in revenue every year. We also work with individuals, all the way from an 18 year old who wants to open up their first checking account to high net worth individuals who benefit from wealth management and a planning centered focus that we provide to them.
Speaker 3:So I partner with all our different lines of business and wealth management retail, commercial mortgage making, equipment leasing and all the other things you'd need from your local community bank partner to help you do what you want to do.
Speaker 2:Wow. So as Southwest Florida has grown, you've grown throughout the state. Let's back up your story a little bit. How did you get involved in the banking industry?
Speaker 3:Well gosh, I got out of Florida State University with a degree in English with honors, which means that I read and wrote a lot for four years and really enjoyed it.
Speaker 3:But then when I got out of college, I had no marketable skills or any idea what I wanted to do for a living. A lot of my friends back then were either still in school or going on to grad school or taking entry level jobs at different corporations. You know, my heroes back then and now to a certain extent, were world adventures and poets and rock stars, and none of those appeal to me. I wanted to go out and see the world. So that's what I did for what I thought was just going to be a brief period of time and turned into about five years of kind of going from place to place across the globe and having different adventures. But then, when I was in my mid twenties, after doing that for almost five years, I kind of thought well, this is starting to lose its luster and if I don't watch out, I'm gonna, you know, be a 50 year old guy living out of a backpack somewhere.
Speaker 1:So I better get my act together.
Speaker 3:And I made a conscious decision, after thinking about different professional opportunities, to start working in banking and financial services. As you know, it's a big part of our national and the international economy. There's lots of different opportunities in banking and financial services.
Speaker 3:I learned working with numbers, but I also enjoy the people side of things and I thought that that'd be an industry where there'd be a lot of opportunity for me to succeed and grow. So I started out 27 years ago as a wealth management relationship manager, working with high net worth individuals, gathering assets and offering them planning services.
Speaker 3:And then, jim, after four or five years of that, I kept running into some limitations from not having a formal education in business there were great opportunities along the way to get credentialed and different certifications, but I really thought I could benefit from taking some time out and giving business some formal study. So I took two years and went to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and got an MBA in finance, and then for the next 12 years I was focused on commercial real estate lending and then workouts when the financial crisis hit in Tampa and in the Pacific Northwest and a little bit in the Midwest. And then just eight years ago, we moved back down to my home state here in Florida and we now live in Naples and I work all throughout Southwest Florida from Charlotte County on down, and it's been a wonderful experience with everything that I hoped for 27 years ago when I started down this path.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. You mentioned the expansion. Has there been any challenges in trying to grow? You know whether it's the economy, the area, the state, anything that's a good question.
Speaker 3:There's always challenges in any business that are trying to grow. I'm sure you can relate and all the work that you've done with the Good Neighbor podcast and the different directions you've gone over the years, and that's certainly been the case with us at Seacoast. When I joined the bank, which again was a little over two years ago, we were a bank with about $9 billion in assets and we're now, as I mentioned earlier, at a little over $15 billion in assets. Most of that, jim, has been through acquiring other banks. So with each of those bank acquisitions you bring into your family a slightly different culture, slightly different operating models, slightly different geography. Fortunately, if you're a bank like Seacoast and some others have done this as well you've got a firm enough foundation in your own culture and operating model and people and systems where it's easier to integrate than if you were a smaller organization who did not have some of those things as clearly defined.
Speaker 3:Having said that, there's always challenges when you're taking in new organizations to your own, so we've worked through those. Over the last two years, again, there's been five different banks that we've acquired and they've all had their ups and downs, downs, but have been great add-ons to the bank we're lucky to be in the markets and with the people that we join with through those acquisitions. And now, as that m a market and banking and financial services has slowed down a little bit over the last I don't know year, 12 to 18 months, for different reasons. Our focus is on organic growth and just taking this big balance sheet and set of resources that we have and looking for ways just to grow from where we are, as opposed to M&A, at least for the time being.
Speaker 2:And that's great. We need it, you know, especially with the way Southwest Florida is growing and the state of Florida is growing. We need the businesses to grow with us. So are there any maybe myths or misconceptions surrounding what you do in the industry that we could clear up for our listeners? Well, that's a good question.
Speaker 3:I think sometimes it's easy to look at banking and financial services as somewhat commoditized, and I think some people outside looking in think well, I just need a bank for a checking account or a loan or for different needs from time to time. And while it's true that much of what we do is fairly standardized across the industry between different companies and that money is fungible, money is money the means by which we do our business is not the same as how we do our business.
Speaker 3:And when I think about what differentiates a banking relationship to an individual or a company it really comes down to having an understanding of what the needs and drivers are for that individual company and that answer is different as is each individual or organization and what they need.
Speaker 3:So the myth that kind of banking is banking to me is something that if you're inside of this industry and see the opportunities we have every day to customize what we do based on an individual organization's needs, then it's kind of difficult to see that as a commodity once you've been through that experience, either as a banker or as the client of somebody who has a good banking relationship.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. You mentioned you were from Florida. Were you from Southwest Florida originally, or how did you end up here?
Speaker 3:Well, I was born and raised in Tampa In fact, my mom's in the same house that they took me home from the hospital to way back when. So I had the benefit of a nice, stable, middle-class upbringing in Tampa, in South Tampa, if you know Tampa at all, middle-class upbringing in Tampa and South Tampa, if you know Tampa at all. And then, for the most part, after I came back from my travels following college, I lived in Tampa, with the exception of those two years in Michigan when I was going to business school, and then when the financial crisis hit in 2008 and on into 2009 and 10, my wife and I I my wife is a fantastic lady and a great friend and advocate, partner, wife, a mother. She is in residential land development and the market for her skills was soft at that point, as was for what we were doing in banking. That was a tough time.
Speaker 3:So we sought out opportunity in a different area of the country and moved out to seattle. We were there for a for a few years working and raising our daughter and then, when the economy started to recover a little bit down here, we were approached with an opportunity for my wife to come back down in 2016. And it was a great opportunity for her and then for me as well, as I found out more about some other opportunities in Southwest Florida. So I joined a great bank down here and had a good few years with them from 2016 until I joined Seacoast Bank just two years ago, and we're tickled thing to be in southwest Florida. We really feel like we lucked into being in this area which, even though is a Tampa native, has always been in my backyard, frankly.
Speaker 3:I was ignorant to all this area has to offer in terms of living, working, raising kids and everything else that everyone around here has long since figured out right and we, we love it down here.
Speaker 2:That's why we live down here. So I know, being in your position, you probably have not the most of free time, but it's probably a little limited. But what do you enjoy when you do get a moment?
Speaker 3:oh yeah, just in terms of having fun. Well, I mentioned my wife. She's a great friend and partner.
Speaker 3:We have fun together and, uh my, we have a a wonderful 17 year old daughter who's just doing fantastic, and a little 15 pound mutt named taco who gives us money every day. So the four of us have a lot of fun. And then also, you know, I still like to read quite a bit, listen audiobooks, podcasts like yours and others there's so much good content out there, and he's of us have a lot of fun. And then also, you know, I still like to read quite a bit. I listen to audiobooks, podcasts like yours and others. There's so much good content out there and easily available.
Speaker 3:And I'm active in the community in different not-for-profits, so I'm the board chairman for junior achievement in southwest florida. I also do some work with florida gulf coast university and then just get involved in other ongoing efforts that we do as a bank, but also that I do as an individual to support the community. And then finally, just to kind of clear my head, I like to ride my bicycle. I've done some bicycle touring, so I just love being out and about on my bike, either by myself, with friends or with a group, and between that, work, sleep and everything else, that's enough to fill up a week Absolutely, and getting outside and enjoying Southwest Florida is why we all live down here.
Speaker 2:That's right. So is there one thing you wish our listeners knew about Seacoast that maybe they're not familiar with?
Speaker 3:Well, southwest Florida is an interesting banking market because we have a lot of good banks and bankers down here. Like many markets, the banking landscape can be fairly barbell shaped, where we've got some great community banks, some of whom have as few as, let's say, $100 million in assets and some of whom have $2 trillion in assets. Those are the larger national banks that have kind of local presences and I think that a lot of people in our community really appreciate the delivery model of a community bank because they want that phone call without going to voicemail, they want a quick answer, they want an advocate within the system to help them out. But often some of the smaller banks don't necessarily have the resources or the balance sheet to work with some of the larger companies or larger individuals in our markets.
Speaker 3:On the other hand, some of those larger banks that may have those resources don't always have as significant of a local presence as they would need to deliver those locally. We at Seco seek to kind of find that sweet spot of having a balance sheet and resources that's big enough to support not only small businesses and individuals but medium sized companies, larger real estate projects that need a little bit more capital but still want that local relationship. So we're right in that sweet spot of having the resources and the people Perfect.
Speaker 2:How would our listeners go about contacting you if they wanted to learn more or, you know, had questions?
Speaker 3:Well, we always love seeing people in our branch here at 3rd Avenue South and 41, and we're open during regular business hours, so anybody's welcome to stop by and say hi, we've got a great branch with Ron Tanguay our branch manager and our team taking good care of all of our clients. Anybody can email me. My email is jasonbrewer B-R-E-W-E-R at seacoastbankcom. Folks can also go to our website at seacoastbankcom and gosh yeah, we'd love to talk to anybody that we can about how we can help them out and just generally give them advice.
Speaker 2:I love it. Any last words for our listeners.
Speaker 3:No, I just wanted to thank you again for having me and for all you do in the community and what you've done with the Good Neighbor podcast. Really appreciate all the good work you're doing along the community with us.
Speaker 2:Well, it's been a pleasure, Jason, getting to know you. Thank you for being such a good neighbor and I hope to see you out in the community soon. Thank you.
Speaker 1:Jim, thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast Estero. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNPestero. com. That's GNPAsterocom, or call 239-296-2621.