Business View Magazine | Volume 8, Issue 9

145 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 8, ISSUE 9 GEORGI A COMMUNI TY BANK holding company, while outside directors play an important role in advising and making decisions. Beeley recounts, “My father started me working summers at the bank when I was 16. I worked on the teller line, and I worked in operations, which was more old-fashioned back then than it is now. I loved every aspect of it – waiting on customers, the numbers, it was always in my wheelhouse, even at a young age. After I graduated from college, I moved to Atlanta and worked for a large regional bank in institutional investment sales for almost six years. My father was beginning to consider retirement and if I was not interested in coming back to South Georgia, it might be time to look at selling. My husband and I were looking to make career changes, and we moved to southwest Georgia and have not looked back since. That was in the late ‘90s, before internet banking, before mobile banking, in fact the newest banking technology popular at that time was actually telephone banking. We have come a long way.” Georgia Community Bank has seven retail banking locations with an asset size of approximately 390,000,000 and 85 employees. All branches are located in southwest Georgia in the cities of Dawson, Leesburg, Reynolds, Roberta, Donalsonville, Blakely and the newest location, Albany. The Albany branch is not only a retail banking location, but also serves as the new corporate office. The operations center in Dawson houses the bank’s IT department, and compliance and loan operations, including loan processing. Beeley notes, “We are located in prime peanut and cotton country, we bank a large number of farmers and other agri-businesses. We also do quite a bit of consumer and small business lending. We are one of the few community banks that will underwrite mortgages in-house. We have definitely seen an uptick in home improvement and home buying and refinance loans in the last year. We are able to be very flexible to meet our customers’ needs.”