Aaron Aubrey
Executive Vice President
Chief Lending Officer
Q&A
What does a good day at work look like to you?
A good day of work is a day spent helping others achieve their goals. Whether it be a customer getting the product or service they need, or helping a fellow employee get a project done well and on time, I genuinely enjoy seeing others succeed. When they win, we all win.
What do you like best about the culture at Kennebunk Savings?
Our culture is all about “others.” It starts with our motto, “Helping One Another is Always the Right Thing to Do.” It’s not just a neat sounding slogan, it’s something we all ascribe to and you can feel that as soon as you walk through the door.
Which one of our brand values (Integrity, Empathy, Proactive, Trust) resonates most strongly for you?
They are all equally important. Any one of them in the absence of the others is not enough to capture who we try to be as an organization. But if I had to pick just one, I would go with trust. At the end of the day, trust is the unspoken force that gets things done in the business world.
What’s an important lesson you’ve learned in your career?
If anyone wants to achieve anything of real significance in the business world, we need to be willing to step outside our own wants and needs to think about the team or organization as a whole. Most successes—and most enjoyment of our work—come when we win as a team and benefit from the camaraderie and momentum that creates.
What would you consider your greatest achievement?
Having the privilege and responsibility of coaching and mentoring so many great people who want to learn and grow and seeing them rise to their potential. On the flip side of that, having so many leaders pour into me and my career over the years and seeing the wisdom they shared pay off again and again. Nobody gets where they want to go on their own. Real achievement happens when we are coachable and when we bring others along for the ride.
What living person do you most admire?
At the risk of sounding a bit sentimental, I would probably pick our former CEO, Brad Paige. He understood “more is caught than taught” and lived out his ideals by leading from the front and setting an example we could all follow. He is an incredibly intelligent person, but lead with heart as much as he did with his intellect. He regularly said things like “I want to do this because it’s the right thing to do.” It wasn’t always the easy thing to do, or the fun thing to do, but it was right. And that’s what mattered. That’s an example I could follow for the rest of my career and never regret it.
What words or phrases do you most overuse?
I am massively guilty of over-using business clichés. Things like “let’s button this thing up,” or “let’s round-table this idea” get absolutely abused by me every day. The fact that I cannot stand these types of platitudes but also frequently perpetuate their use is an irony not lost on me.
What do you love about your community?
I once saw an article describing the people of Kennebunk as “happy, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth Americans.” I have found this to be very true. People from Kennebunk, as with the surrounding area, are kind, willing to lend a hand, and are a people who know who they are and what they’re all about. They care a great deal about maintaining the identity and specialness of the town we all love and call home. I feel a deep kinship to that sentiment and this way of life.
