Martin Rust is a testament to the fact that career — and life — are all about timing.
Rust last month defected to Fifth Third Bancorp from RBC Bank, which is being sold to PNC Financial Services Group Inc. He lives in Richmond and is Fifth Third's new managing director of international corporate banking for Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.
"I did not feel like waiting for the uncertainty that comes with acquisitions" and seized the chance to build for Fifth Third a clientele of European and other foreign business units operating in the Mid-Atlantic region, he said.
But that move is not his timing-of-my-life story — not even close.
Rust could have been in the World Trade Center both times it was attacked by terrorists.
As a Fuji Bank executive, he was driving back from York, Pa., on Feb. 26, 1993, and saw black smoke in the distance — it was coming from the trade center complex, where his office was located. He soon moved to Richmond to work for a predecessor of Wachovia Securities, in part because his wife was convinced that the terrorists would return, he said.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he was in New York and fully intended to visit his old Fuji colleagues the next day at the World Trade Center but for some "inexplicable" reason decided to fly home early because of the bad weather. He still keeps his hotel receipt from that visit and a picture of a close friend he planned to see at Fuji, Brian Thompson, 49, who died in the south tower the next day.
"An incredible guardian angel was working overtime," he said.
Rust claims no divine intervention in his current move. His task is to attract German, British, French and even some Latin American companies — mostly in manufacturing — that operate in Washington, Richmond, Baltimore and other cities. The job appealed to him because he was a commercial bank executive at RBC, studied Italian in his youth and teaches multinational corporate banking at The College of William and Mary in Virginia.
But he will always be cognizant of how he got there. "It has been a long and winding road to Fifth Third," he said.
