De Novo Founder Erik Weiner on Raising $42 Million to Launch Portrait Bank

speaker-1
Well, hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Community Bank Podcast. This is the podcast by bankers for bankers. I’m Caleb Stevens with South State Bank’s Capital Markets Division. And as you know, on this show, we love community banks. And one of the things we love is when we see a De Novo Community Bank forming, we have them on every so often to highlight their story. And unfortunately, there’s not many of those today. And so any time we get the chance to talk to a De Novo who has got a vision for a new bank and is doing the work.

to bring a new idea into existence. We want to tell that story. And that’s what we’re going to do today. We sat down with Eric Weiner from Portrait Bank. They are a startup bank that just got regulatory approval or conditional approval, I should say, to start up in the Orlando area. so on this show, we talk about a about Eric’s background and his vision for Portrait Bank. We talk about the capital raising process. We talk about the process of selecting your core provider and building out your tech stack. And so

Enjoy this conversation on building a de novo and what it takes in today’s environment to start a new bank. And speaking of leadership and starting a new bank and the vision that that takes, you need a vision for your bank, whether you’re a startup bank or whether you’ve been around for a hundred years. What is your plan to grow your bank into the future? Well, we’ll invite you to the Elevate Banking Forum. It’s happening this September in Isle of Palm, South Carolina. We’re bringing the best community bank executives together.

for a two and a half day form to give you the strategies that you need to know to grow your bank into the future. To learn more, to view the agenda and to register, click on the link in the show notes of this episode to get all the details. We hope to see you there this fall in Isle of Palms, South Carolina. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Eric Wiener from Portrait Bank.

speaker-1
Well, Eric, welcome to the Community Bank podcast. It is not often that we get to speak with a De Novo founder who is in the process of starting a new bank down in Florida. So welcome to the show. How are you?

speaker-0
Doing great, Caleb, very exciting times. It’s fantastic to be here with you today.

speaker-1
So you and I connected at the Elevate Banking Forum last fall that we hosted in Charleston, the Charleston area. And I’ll just say for our listeners, we’re doing that again. So click on the link in the show notes if you want to get more info on that. We’re bringing all the best bankers together for a two-day experience. But you and I connected there, Eric, and you told me about Portrait Bank and a new bank that you were launching. And so I’d love to just start here. Tell us about yourself, your banking career, and why start at De Novo?

you know these days

speaker-0
Yeah, so I have 30 years in banking, most of it in commercial and corporate banking. Started with Barnett Bank, if you remember that bank in Florida. They had a dominant market share at one point, but I was with that bank in 1996 coming out of school at the University of Central Florida where I had a finance degree. They recruited me to go into their corporate banking school. So did that out of the gate and had a progressive career in commercial corporate banking.

Last three roles, most recently I was at City National Bank of Florida and was there for a little over five years running the Orlando market, what we call our Central Florida team. A good part of that, I was also over our Tampa Bay region, so had a really good time there, great experience, learned a ton in that particular role. Prior to that, I was at Bank United. I headed up their corporate banking team in Central Florida.

another Florida-based bank, a Miami-based bank. And before that, I was at Fifth Third for around nine years, running their business banking and commercial banking team for most of my tenure there. So had a great run, have 30 years all in under my belt, and very excited to be now starting a De Novo bank. And the reason I decided to move forward with this opportunity

was largely based on conversations that I would continuously have with clients and folks as I was progressing throughout the community. And it was very apparent to me and to many others that there was a huge need. There was a void that was created over the years. At one point, if you look back to 2000 in central Florida, there were 38 banks headquartered here. So we went down from 38 to approximately six over that timeline.

And really there aren’t many new banks coming online. So the last new bank to come into central Florida was Winter Park National, which was almost 10 years ago. And they just recently sold to Detroit Federal Credit Union. So there’s been a lot of need for more community banking opportunities here. And we’d hear like a drum beat over and over again from our clients that

speaker-0
They really wanted to have a bank focused here on our community where we were hiring people here. We were having an impact on our local community and they wanted to work with a bank that they had local decision makers, knew the people involved with it and really felt like they were getting great support for their needs and their business and individually.

speaker-1
Well, I assume if your whole goal was just to make more money, you’d probably be better off where you were. So it’s cool to hear that, you know, there’s a, as Jim Collins says, true greatness comes in direct proportion to a passionate pursuit that’s beyond money. Not that money is not important. You got to make a return. You’ve got to, it’s the lifeblood of any organization for sure. But what’s the purpose beyond that? Because that’s what’s going to get you out of bed in the morning and get you going. So I guess.

Talk more about that. mean, know Florida has seen staggering growth over the years. I’m sure the Orlando market’s been a massive beneficiary of that growth. And it makes sense that there would be a financial institution that’s there to support those growing businesses. talk about the region and what the economy there looks like.

speaker-0
Yeah, so central Florida, if you look at the Orlando metropolitan five county area, it’s one of the top 10 growth markets in the entire country. If you look at Florida overall, everybody understands the growth dynamic there. You’ve got a thousand people a week moving into the central Florida market. So it maintains its long term viability. There’s, you know, there’s the theme parks, which everybody thinks about when they think about Orlando. But there’s a big.

opportunity outside of the theme parks in terms of growth. There’s the university systems, which are fantastic. You’ve got great weather. You’ve got no state taxes. You have huge growth in advanced manufacturing and biotechnology. There’s a significant amount of growth outside the tourism industry. And I think it makes central Florida a great place to live and work. From a banking perspective, since we’re always a mirror of the community and we’re looking to

to really grow along with the rest of the community and offer value to the businesses and individuals here. As the community grows and as more people move in, they’re looking for more options. And what was very clear is that the options were limited. You were looking at essentially four banks that control 67 % of the market share here. So.

People want more options, they want more local decision making, they want more flexibility, they want more creativity. And I felt like this was a great opportunity for us to really provide exceptional service as well as give advanced technology. And if you can find the intersection between those two things, I don’t think that’s being met right now in central Florida.

speaker-1
Yeah, that’s great. Now I want to get back to that in a minute because I think that’s really important. So we’ve got a lot of community bank executives that listen to this show. Many of them have gone down the path that you’re going down now, which is starting a new bank. But many haven’t. know, many have stayed at one institution for a long time or maybe have always been in one function of the bank, the lending side of the bank or the CFO side of the bank. So many of them may not know all that goes into starting a bank. So I guess just out of our

curiosity, listeners’ curiosity, and my own curiosity, walk us through kind of from start to open, what does that process look like? I know that can be a long, laborious process, but kind of give us just the highlights of that.

speaker-0
just at a macro view, it was probably January 2025 that I went full force into this effort. I had been thinking about it for quite some time. It was something that I thought was a huge need in the marketplace. And candidly, didn’t myself know what the next steps would be. How do you actually turn that dream into a reality? And I started doing research probably around the fourth quarter of

2024 and tried to figure out if we were to move forward with this, you know, what boxes would we need to check? What are the things that we would need to to facilitate to make it happen? And, you know, I started talking with a consultant, started getting some input, started talking with other CEOs in the state who were already a step ahead and running successful community banks. And I kind of put a list together of everything that we needed to do. So.

The first thing I started to do was write a business plan and started figuring out who we are, what we would stand for, why is there a need in the community? How would we help fill that need? And that was kind of the beginning part of all this. A matter of fact, it was over my vacation in 2024, over the holidays, that I started really putting that plan together, putting it on paper, starting to get really serious about doing this.

And I found that when I was at the end of vacation, was a three week vacation at the end of 2024, when it was time to get back to work, I decided that I was so excited with the plan that we put together that I didn’t want to do anything but this. So I decided to hand in my notice upon returning from vacation to focus 100 % on this. So at that time, looking back, it was a big leap of faith. had…

no board members, we hadn’t raised a single dollar, we had no investors lined up. It was just a belief that we could do something better here in the community and that we would have a lot of people rally around the cause. you know, we started out, you know, once I resigned, I started immediately seeking board members. That was really the

speaker-0
the first place to go. needed to put a team together. I knew I couldn’t do it all by myself in terms of raising the amount of money that we were looking to raise. And we knew from our initial business plan that we needed to raise somewhere between 25 and 30 million dollars to make this happen and to do the types of loans that we wanted to do and to have the types of relationships that we wanted to bring into the bank. So.

Fortunately, in very short order, we were able to start adding members to the board. We currently have 13 members on our board, so it’s a pretty significant group. Very well-established people in town, people who also shared the belief that there was a need for a new community bank in central Florida. And they came on and aggressively started going after potential investors that they thought would be excited about what we’re putting together.

Myself, along with the board, we started talking with people. think I went on about five coffees a day, a lunch, a dinner, maybe even a happy hour for, I think about 365 straight days. It was definitely quite an experience to do that. But we successfully raised over the last year around $43 million. So we’ve had a huge following in the community. And a matter of fact, we just had our first shareholder meeting the other day.

And we had over 100 people in the room that came out to support us. An enthusiastic group of people who, you know, not only will support us in our business endeavors and in terms of spreading the word, but most who intend to do business with us and refer us to family and friends and colleagues. So there was kind of a groundswell support that we were able to leverage onto in the community. And again, it’s because we have great people on the board.

We’ve hired great employees, people who are well known, well respected, and it’s enabled us to really make a real impact and gain a lot of momentum into the community. So there’s the fundraise side, which was huge. There was having a business plan that made sense that was really big. And then there was the regulatory side, which everybody hears about. You have to go through a significant number of steps.

speaker-0
You know everything from the board members getting approved all of the executives are bringing on board have to go through the process Many on the phone will or on the podcast will will be familiar with the IBFR process and all you need to do to get approved as board members and executives and It’s a lot of paperwork. It’s a lot of gathering information testing business plans doing models for your financials and

you know, there’s all of those steps going simultaneous as you’re raising money. And then comes in the core systems where you have to select your core system, which, you know, you’ve got pretty much, you know, a week with every single one of those core providers because you want to choose the right one. And we wanted to be very technology forward. We wanted to make sure that we could deliver for the client base that we want to bring in. And that is a very intensive process. And, you know, actually

That’s probably the biggest surprise of all is that people were telling us when we entered in that the last steps in the process would be raising the money and getting the regulatory approval done. As it turns out, we did pretty well with the fundraise. We did pretty well with the regulatory approval and we’re moving very closely to the finish line. It’s the core systems and the amount of work streams and the amount of products and services that you need to create from scratch to bring into the system.

that’s taken us the most time. that’s probably gonna be the final piece of the puzzle for us to open in June is getting all of our systems complete and operational for our clients.

speaker-1
Is that it?

speaker-0
Yeah, it’s a few steps in there. probably only went through a portion because we also missed the real estate side and finding your branch and doing the build out and all of those things, creating your brand, your name, your logo. Think of everything you have to do in creating a normal business and multiply it by probably 100 along the way based on all the other regulatory components involved. we’ve had a lot of fun, Caleb. This has been

you know, really something that we’re all really passionate about. We’ve got an unbelievable team and it’s amazing how fast it’s gone.

speaker-1
Yeah, well, that’s a really helpful overview. And I’m sure there’s a million different decisions under each of those stages that you walked us through. But thanks for kind of giving us a lay of the land. Going back to the capital raise, mean, that’s one of the things you hear when it comes to De Novos is it’s really hard to raise capital. You even if there’s been a little more openness, it seems, from the regulatory side to new banks coming down the pipe. It seems that way from conferences I’ve attended. It seems like regulators are open to that.

It’s hard to raise money. hard to attract the right people on your team to invest in your idea. So what was your message? What was your selling point to the investors that you were trying to attract to build out your capital base?

speaker-0
Great question. know, fortunately, we had a lot of support from the very beginning. We, you know, our message was, was really around the quality of people that we have. As I started adding more board members, those board members were all very well connected in the community, very well known, had very loyal followings themselves. I’ve also been here in the market for, for most of my life and been in banking here for 30 years. So.

There was some built-in credibility from things that I’ve been involved with in the past. But really, I give more credit to the board. As we started building out the director list, every person we added on seemed to have a whole other group that followed them and felt really strong that they wanted to support their efforts. And it just kind of took on a life of its own. We went from zero to 23 million in very quick order. were there within, I think we…

Open the fundraise in October of 2025, officially open start collecting funds and by December we were already at 23 million. So we had a very fast start. We did go through a little gap where we were getting a little nervous. It was early January, right after the holidays. And we went through about a three week lag, which we were just trickling and we were very close to our, you know, $28 million.

gross minimum, would have been 26 million after organizational expenses. So we were just a few million away and we went through a drought. I call it the lag after the holidays. we were getting a little nervous, but by the end of January, we were back rolling again and it didn’t stop after that. So 43 is where we are right now. We still have a week or two left, but at this point, we’re just trying to collect folks that are

you know, working through their IRAs and trying to get their funds over. We’re not really soliciting any any new investment at this point. But for us, it really was a combination of the people, which I think had the biggest impact. And then secondly, the growth economy and people understanding the opportunity here in central Florida. And then third, you know, coming back to really the reason that that we saw the opportunity in the first place, which is the supply demand factor, which

speaker-0
You look at the supply and we talked about top heavy with four banks dominating the market. We have a lot of clients in town that are not getting what they need from those banks and they’re looking for alternatives that they weren’t getting. So our message really resonated. And then they looked at the community banking landscape and the fact that most of the folks that are investing have had great experiences with community banks over the years.

and they really felt like it’s time to bring in a new entry to make a difference here in the market.

speaker-1
So tell me about the name Portrait. I kind of see what you’re getting at there with when I think Portrait, I think vision and every company’s got to have a vision for where they’re going. Every bank needs to have a clear vision for why they exist and what they’re trying to accomplish. Was that name kind of in your mind before even starting the process or kind of walk me through the selection process?

speaker-0
It really came about, I would say in December during that same vacation where I was putting together the business plan. I was trying to have something that was a little bit fresh, a little unique, a little bit different. And, you know, I was mulling over various options and I ended up going on a walk with my daughter who was visiting in town. She’s out in Seattle getting her master’s degree right now, but she was in town and we were walking the dog.

And I was just telling her what we wanted, something different, but something that really represented our local community. And being that we’re starting in Winter Park, the first thing that comes to mind is art-centric. have Winter Park Art Festival, have Manila Museum, we have the Rollins Court College Art Programs. You go out further throughout central Florida, we’ve got Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center, we’ve got UCF.

There’s just a real abundance of arts here and all my kids were involved in the arts as well, whether it be band or chorus or theater. So, you we just started thinking about, you know, what resonates to this community. And my daughter actually came up with the name Portrait just while we were walking the dog. And I thought it hit on so many different levels. I liked it immediately.

I said, that’s what we’re going with as long as others feel the same way. I did want to get some other folks to take a look at it, but it did resonate with a lot of folks. We were easily able to come up with some good slogans with it, like helping you frame your financial future. Things of that nature just started popping out and we got really excited about the name. So we stuck with it and we’re glad we did. There’s really an endless supply of good things that we can do with that name.

speaker-1
Well, it’s interesting. I was at the Financial Brand Conference last week. We’re recording this in April. This will probably come out in May. But last week I was at the Financial Brand Conference in Vegas and I was at a session on AI and how to optimize your bank’s website for AI search. And the speaker is really good. I hope we can have him on the show at some point. But he said, a lot of y’all, your banks, you’re already, the deck’s already stacked against you because if you think about it, if I ask Claude or chat GPT,

Tell me about First National Community Bank. Which one? In Michigan? So I may be asking for the one in Tennessee and AI is going to tell me about the one in Michigan and I’m going to assume, they’re paying a great rate. need to tell you, you’re already creating so much confusion. And so he said, if you’re starting a bank, come up with a unique, fresh name and don’t follow the crowd. So kudos to you guys.

speaker-0
That’s true, that’s very true.

speaker-0
Thank you. I owe it to my daughter.

speaker-1
Yeah, that’s right. Good news to your daughter. That’s right. So we’ve talked about the investing process. Let’s move on to talking about how do you attract the right team members to join you? You’ve been in the industry a long time. I’m sure you know a lot of great bankers in the area. But again, it’s a little bit of a leap of faith even for somebody who maybe doesn’t have as much personal capital on the line. But there’s career.

know, paths on the line. So how do you sort of sell that story and attract the top-tier talent that you need to grow the bank?

speaker-0
Yeah, we’ve been very fortunate there. We, from an executive perspective, we were able to get top talent right out of the gate. had some folks who, similarly to myself, felt like there was a huge need in the market. Some of them had worked for larger banks and felt like they had lost their way a little bit relative to what our customer base was really looking for. So, you know, we started with our COO who came on board.

And he had been 25 years at a big bank previously. He’d been over a pretty large territory. And he was over Florida and Georgia for retail small business for this large bank. And he felt that this was his real opportunity at this point of his career to give back to the local community and really do something special to be part of the market that he lives in and his family lives and all of that.

For him, was a great decision to come on board and do something different and take his career in a different direction. We ended up bringing over some other executives who have community bank experience. In some cases, their community banks had sold and they felt like it was the best time of their life. While they were part of the de novo process in a previous life, it’s kind of the part of their career that they really…

look back on with a lot of fondness and a lot of love and to be able to get back into that environment in their home community was a really exciting thing for them. So from the executive perspective, we got really strong talent right out of the gate and then continued to build that. And that also helps when you’re out recruiting everybody else on the team, all of the relationship managers, the middle and back office.

And people just got really excited to rally around what we’re doing here. A lot of them have really been through a different type of culture in recent years. I’ve been through it. A lot of the bigger banks have gotten very centric around relationship management tools and things like that, which is great. But sometimes it can be taken so far that all the fun is lost in the job and everything is measured at such a level that

speaker-0
you feel like a robotic type of approach is done to your business. we just told people, listen, we’re gonna have a great time. We’re gonna go out there, we’re gonna build a business. we’ve always talked about, something that bankers talk about a lot is what I would do if I owned the bank or, and you’d always say, well, I don’t own the bank, I just work here.

And this was an opportunity for me to say, hey, how do you feel about actually owning a bank and making the decisions and making the rules and making, helping craft the policies and procedures? So all the things that you think don’t make sense where you’re currently at or, you know, those type of scenarios where you’ve always wondered how they came up with that, but that’s the way it’s always.

speaker-1
Hey, now you get to write it and you get to own it.

speaker-0
I say we can look at ourselves in the mirror. If we don’t like the way something’s working, we can look at ourselves in the mirror and say, well, who did that? Well, it was us, so let’s fix it. So anyway, it’s kind of a different mentality. And we’re finding that we’re really attracting a lot of high quality people who are ready to take on that next adventure in their career and build something and leave a legacy here for the community.

speaker-1
So you mentioned spending a week with each core provider that you were shopping. That is a marketing guy who loves banking, but the operations side, man, that sounds necessary as a necessary evil, I would say, at least in my brain. Hopefully there’s folks on your team that really got a kick out of that, like diving into that. I guess that’s a good sort of entree into

Tell me about how you’re thinking about technology. There’s been so much technological disruption and opportunity and it really does feel like there’s a leveling of the playing field for a smaller bank to compete with the larger institutions. Talk about how you guys are sort of fusing the relationship, know, legacy community banking idea with all these new technologies that are coming about.

speaker-0
Yeah, I agree with what you just said, Caleb. I mean, there’s never been a better time. I think there’s a lot of investment going on by the core providers. You’ve got, you know, AI integration that’s taking place within the core systems. You’ve got API capabilities so you can bring in the, you know, the best vendors, the best fintechs out in the marketplace and incorporate them into your core system. You’ve got, you know, real time payments and FedNow that, you know, are changing the game, you know, and really

put you ahead of where many community banks were in the past. So as I looked at this market, you know, I felt like, okay, you’ve got the big banks who generally do technology well. You can make the case at times, even though they’re spending a ton of money, that it’s not as smooth as it should be because there’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions and integration and multiple systems working within the banks. So sometimes it’s, despite all the money spent, the outcome isn’t exactly as

great as you might think, but nonetheless, they have a big budget to spend on technology. So you’re probably not going to have that type of wallet, but you know, you look at the service they’re providing and they’re, often don’t have the things that we’re talking about, the local decision making and the flexibility and the creativity and the things that we want to bring to the forefront. You look at the community banking space.

And many times they’ve gone a little bit cheaper on the technology piece and they’ve chosen very basic inputs. They really haven’t tried to make a difference there. you know, unfortunately you get great service, but maybe the technology isn’t quite up to par with what, some of your more sophisticated customers would expect. you know, customers typically stay with them and they’re happy because they love the people and they love what they represent.

You know, as I was doing a lot of interviewing of community bank clients, I’d hear over and over again how much they love their bank, how much they, you know, want to stay working with them, but how hard it was sometimes from a technological perspective. you know, oftentimes they would bring over partial relationships instead of full relationships because they didn’t have the treasury management capabilities. So we decided why not do them both? Why not spend a little bit more, get ourselves a really strong system that

speaker-0
can differentiate us from the community banks, can get some of the more sophisticated commercial borrowers that, and relationships that wanted to do business with us, make sure that we can service them properly, and also provide the level of service that people have grown accustomed to in community banks. So from the beginning, that’s been our value proposition. So when we went through the interview process, we were really looking on, you know, can we come up with a system that’s very easy to do business with?

that is very good from a digital perspective that gives people the opportunity to do business in a way that they wanna do it. And some people define great service as being able to walk into the branch, being able to talk to the CEO or the executive team to understand how decision-making is done and make sure that they’re getting their day in court, so to speak, when they’re talking through an opportunity.

Some people would rather never talk to a human being and we wanted to give those people every bit as good of a customer service. So we spent a lot of time and effort around that and we think we came up with an absolute great technology package for our clients from the basics all the way through the sophisticated client base in central Florida.

speaker-1
Well, you make a great point that everybody defines customer service a little bit differently. And when you’re a community bank, your customers range from the 15-year-old kid getting his first checking account to the 95-year-old grandma cashing a check to the small business owner and the local dentist. I mean, you have a lot of different people to serve in a lot of different capacities. And so it’s cool to hear that you’ve got the flexibility to meet people where they’re at. Which core did you guys go with instead of curiosity?

speaker-0
Yeah, we went with Jack Henry.

speaker-1
Okay, fantastic, fantastic.

speaker-0
Silver Lake, very happy with it. They’ve been fantastic. It wasn’t an easy decision. I’ll tell you, after meeting with a lot of the core providers, what we realized is how tough a decision it was because everyone’s progressed in such leaps and bounds and the technology was really good with all of them. So it was by an edge and a gut feel ultimately at the end of the day.

really just our preference in terms of kind of the way that the systems work together. know, every one of them had certain pros and certain cons, but you know, we’re very, very happy with the decision that we made. We think it’s, they’re going to be great partners going forward and they’ve worked very hard to be a great partner as we’re working through the de novo setup and the organizational period. So, but we’ve got just to put it in perspective and I’m sure it’s the same with every core provider. We’ve got

I think 52 workstreams going right now. So, you know, when you talk about customization and building a core system, you know, it is not an easy thing to do. And we’ve now got 16 people full time working through this. We started with three for most of our time.

And it got to the point where we just had to start rapidly adding to staff in order to meet the time expectations and the amount of work going into each of these work streams. But so far they’ve been really great to work with.

speaker-1
Well, we had Jack Henry CEO Greg Adelson on this show back in the fall. So it was cool to connect with him and hear about what they’re up to at Jack Henry. one kind of question related to this too is you mentioned you’re a small team. Who sort of owns the build out of the tech stack at the bank? I’m sure you’re involved, but you’ve got so many different hats that you’re wearing and so many things you’re touching. Who do you sort of commission to say, I need you to own the tech stack build out for us?

speaker-0
Yeah, it’s been a combination. We’ve had like a three headed monster with this for most of the times it was our COO and our director of marketing. The two of them worked very closely together. The marketing to really make sure that we always kept the customer experience in mind, know, especially as we’re building out the website and digital platform and making sure that that part is really well talked, you know, well understood and always in the conversation. Our COO did a lot of

the technology side from a, know, what do we need to support our clients and, you know, how do we, you know, there’s a lot of deep conversations relative to where you have to really know the IT side of the business and the technology side of it. And he’s very good with that. We also brought over a CFO who was in charge of technology at his previous bank and he’s had added a whole nother level. So I call it the three headed monster and the three of them work very closely together.

on all aspects of our technology stack.

speaker-1
It’s cool to hear you have marketing involved. We like to say around here, it’s a quote we borrowed from Donald Miller. He likes to say that people don’t buy the best products, they buy the products that are communicated the clearest. So your competitor can have an inferior product, but if they’re a better communicator about that product, then they’re probably going to beat you. So if you confuse, you lose, as he likes to say. So that’s cool to hear that you’re always keeping the customer front of mind. Eric, this has been great. As we wrap up,

There’s a lot of community bankers that listen to this show. guess any final words of encouragement to them and maybe if there’s even a few out there that are not in the Orlando area, but maybe in another state that are thinking about launching a DeNovo of their own, I guess any final words of encouragement for those folks.

speaker-0
Yeah, I think the thing that surprised me most in this process is just the overwhelming support by the community. I think a lot of people are reticent to get started. They don’t know where to go or how to do it. And there’s a lot of resources out for you. There’s people who have been through this. You can pick up the phone. What I found is it’s a very close knit community banking network. People are always happy to talk about their experience, lend support.

There’s Florida Bankers Association or American Bankers Association. They’re only a phone call away and they’ve set up work groups for us and things like that to help us think through ideas and get involved with other people who have done this before. And, you know, don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. Our famous saying here is, we’ll figure it out. We say that, we must say that 10 times a day. We’ll figure it out because there’s so many that you’re

So many things that you’re learning for the first time, that you’re experiencing for the first time, but there’s nothing that you can’t do if you just set your mind to it and decide that you’re gonna move forward with it. I absolutely guarantee that once you start building the momentum forward, that there’ll be plenty of people around to help you take it all the way.

speaker-1
Well, there were, I don’t know how many thousands, 18, 20,000, I don’t know, don’t quote me, but there were lot of banks back in the 1980s and now we’re coming down to close to 4,000, I think. So it’s encouraging to see that there’s people out there that still believe in small community banks and de novo banks. And we wish you all the success over the next several years and thanks for coming on to tell your story.

speaker-0
Caleb, really appreciate it. Thanks for the time today and look forward to connecting again soon.