The Power of the Pivot: How Rubio ’99 Embraced Change on Her Way to the C-suite

Christi Pennington Rubio ’99 did not initially envision her journey to becoming Colony Bank’s chief brand and business development officer when she began her studies at Columbus State University in 1994. For the Columbus native and Glenwood School graduate, Columbus State was her first choice. She recounted changing majors three times, eventually landing on a business administration degree with a focus on marketing. She realized “this is just me” and credits Robin Snipes and Sandi Hortman for providing her with the academic marketing foundation she relies on professionally. “Looking back, it was my first real exercise in professional experimentation,” she said of changing her major. “Your career will seldom follow a straight line. True success lies not in anchoring yourself to a rigid plan, but in the agility with which you embrace changing landscapes.” Since graduating with her Turner College of Business & Technology degree, Rubio has built a marketing career by steadily progressing through well-known regional and national brands, including Aflac, Synovus and American Tire Distributors Inc. Currently, she’s leveraging her expertise in sales, marketing and business intelligence in a newly created executive role at Colony Bank, where she oversees marketing, communications and business development initiatives across Georgia, Alabama and Florida. Throughout her career, she has consistently integrated classroom concepts like business principles, marketing theories and data analytics into her work. However, one skill she wished she had mastered in college—yet remains vital to her success—is budget management and forecasting. “Gaining a strong command over budget management is essential,” she said. “I am passionate about building financial acumen within my team because empowering them with fiscal oversight naturally fosters greater independence and strategic execution.” Rubio “ruled the court” as an undergraduate intramural volleyball player, competing alongside teammates like Michael Speight ’96, who is now the university’s intramural and club sports coordinator. Throughout her life—on the court, in class, or in her career—she has always placed a high value on teamwork and collaboration. She encourages current students: “Do not underestimate the importance of your group projects. They provide critical, real-world experience crucial for career success.” “At times, learning how to mobilize a group and drive alignment was more valuable than the core coursework; those working groups mirror the realities of the business world,” she continued. “In any professional setting, you will encounter diverse dynamics—from dominant personalities to underperforming team members. Developing the ability to navigate those challenges and guide a team toward successful execution is critical.” Rubio characterizes her 13-year tenure at Aflac as both varied and essential. Initially, she worked in sponsorship and event marketing during the launch of the iconic Aflac Duck. She later moved into business and data analysis, then took on leadership roles in transformational and competitive intelligence—a period that she noted predated the rise of digital dashboards and artificial intelligence. As her responsibilities expanded into senior leadership, Rubio focused on creative, media and marketing strategies. This gave her firsthand experience with Aflac’s early digital transformation, high-profile celebrity alignments, and major sports marketing partnerships that included collaborations with the Heisman Trophy Trust and college football broadcasts. In a notable full-circle moment in her career, she led the modernization of the “Aflac Trivia Question”—a broadcast feature her father originally created in the early 1990s while he led Aflac’s sales and marketing. Her tenure at Columbus-based Synovus presented its own challenges, culminating in Rubio’s leadership of the “One Synovus” initiative: a unified brand and marketing strategy across the company’s multistate footprint. While consolidating the brand was a logical step toward strengthening corporate equity, it required a delicate touch to respect the local and historical identities of Synovus’s 25-plus individual bank brands and more than 300 branches. Alongside this alignment, Rubio executed a comprehensive corporate sponsorship strategy focused on elevating existing partnerships while securing new collaborations with the PGA Tour, FOX Sports and Garden & Gun. While operating in highly regulated insurance, banking and financial sectors, she’s initiated marketing campaigns, overseen corporate rebrands, designed and managed customer loyalty programs, and crunched and operationalized sales data. But it was her role as vice president of marketing at American Tire Distributors that truly tested her. Her move from financial services to establish a marketing department for a major business-to-business tire distributor marked a deliberate new direction in her career. The infrastructure she built proved vital a few years later when the company was acquired. Leading through the transition was a rigorous test, but she successfully brought her team through the restructuring by focusing on open communication and collective morale, keeping everyone steady amid major corporate change. “You don’t fully appreciate what it takes to lead through an organizational crisis until you are in the middle of one,” Rubio shared. “The most significant growth for me was learning how to anchor a team and maintain forward momentum during an incredibly challenging period of corporate transition.” Joining Colony Bank marked a strategic return to the banking sector for Rubio. While she directs its enterprise strategy across brand management, digital marketing, business development, and corporate communications, her leadership is equally impactful at the regional level. She actively collaborates with local market leadership to ensure that, as the corporate brand evolves, each market preserves the authentic community identity and localized engagement that are foundational to customer loyalty. Evolution and adaptation have been hallmarks of Rubio’s leadership at Colony Bank and a direct reflection of her multifaceted career. Just as she has counseled corporate executives, she advises students in business and other majors to view change as an opportunity. “Trust the process and embrace both the doors that open and the doors that close along the way,” she said. “Early in your career, it is easy to mistake a closed door for a failure. In reality, it is often a necessary pivot.”