Dave Sternborg is the new branch manager at First Farmers and Merchants Bank in Luverne after 10 years of driving by on I-90 during his commute between Sioux Falls and Worthington.
“It’s a piece-of-cake drive compared with what I was doing,” said Sternborg, whose mother grew up in the Ellsworth area.
He began working for FF&M on June 10, replacing Ryan Wynia, who decided this spring to pursue a local career in production agriculture.
Previously, Sternborg was the senior ag lender with the Fulda Area Credit Union and also worked in various banks in Huron and Dell Rapids and Slayton since graduating from South Dakota State University in 1982.
In the month that he’s been working in Luverne, Sternborg attended Chamber events welcoming improvements to Rock County.
“I am impressed how the communities take care themselves,” he said. “A lot of towns don’t do anything —many just complain and won’t do anything about it. Here they work at it and get it fixed.”
In his position as branch manager, Sternborg said the bank’s role is to help people succeed. “We want the focus to be on our customers and we want them to be as successful as they can be,” Sternborg said.
In the process of helping customers with home ownership or business expansion, he said it’s his job to find practical lending solutions and to steer borrowers toward achievable goals.
For most of his childhood, Sternborg dreamed of becoming a farmer, following in his dad’s footsteps on the family farm near Estherville, Iowa.
However, the early 1980s financial crisis was not a good time to begin farming.
“Thank God I didn’t try to start farming; I would have taken my dad down,” he said, but added that he’s wistful during spring planting for what might have been.
One of Sternborg’s personal interests for more than 25 years has been barbershop music in quartets and chorues, both as a singer and more recently as a director.
“My family likes music, and that particular genre caught my ear,” he said.
Sternborg enjoys spending time with his family — his wife, Lori, and their two adult children and two grandchildren. All live in Sioux Falls.