Business First Bancshares, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to the Business First Bank Shares Q3 2022 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, again, press the star one. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Matthew Seeley. SVP, Director of Corporate Strategy, and FP&A. Mr. Seeley, please go ahead.

Thank you, Jack, and thank you all for joining. Yesterday afternoon, we issued our third quarter 2022 earnings press release, a copy of which is available on our website, along with the slide presentation that we will refer to during today's call. Please refer to slide three of our presentation, which includes our safe harbor statements regarding forward-looking statements and needs of non-gas financial measures. Those of you joining by phone, please note the slide presentation is available on our website at www.v1bank.com. Please also note our Safe Harbor statements are available on page 8 of our earnings press release that we have filed with the SEC yesterday. All comments made during today's call are subject to the Safe Harbor statements in our slide presentation and earnings release. I'm joined this afternoon by Business First Bank Chair's President and CEO, Jude Melville, and Chief Financial Officer, Greg Robertson. After the presentation, we'll be happy to address any questions you may have. I'll now call, turn the call over to you. Okay, thanks, Matt, and welcome everybody.

Excited to be here for our first public call. We're also joined by Phillip Jordan, who is our Chief Banking Officer. I'll give you a quick overview. Some of you may not be that familiar with our story. We'll go into a Q&A session and look forward to that. B1 Bank, a 16-year-old bank in Louisiana. headquartered in Louisiana, but also a presence in Texas. We're focused on small businesses as our primary clientele. We're the number one bank headquartered in Louisiana as measured by Louisiana deposits. We have about a third of our assets in Dallas and Houston. We also have about $6 billion under management and an RIA called SSW. A couple years ago, we started on a five-year plan, our most recent five-year plan, and had three major components. One is growth. We were about $3.7 billion, and at the end of the five years, we wanted to be about $7.5 billion. The second component of the five-year plan was asset diversity. So we were a little under 10% outside of the state of Louisiana, and by the end of the five-year plan, we wanted to be about 50%. And then finally, earnings. We were under one ROA at the end of the five years. We want to be at 1.25 as an ongoing run rate for ROA. And it's reported that we're ahead of schedule on all three legs of our five-year plan. Growth-wise, we finished the quarter at about 5.8 billion in assets. From a diversity standpoint, we're up to about 34% of our assets in Texas. And the earnings standpoint, we're at a 115 ROA, so pleased with the progress. Specifically, the third quarter really highlighted payoff in the number of investments that we've made over the past few years, including M&A and de novo and organic growth. We finished the third quarter with record profit. It's also our seventh quarter in a row with over 20% annualized growth for loans. And we're actually at 30% for the second quarter in a row on loan growth. About 60% of that loan growth is in the Dallas and Houston areas. Most importantly, we also finished the quarter with solid asset quality. What I'm really excited about is that these investments are beginning to pay off, but we feel like you're still lots of capacity to continue on the journey that we embarked upon a couple years ago. And part of that is that we've hired about 25 anchors over the past six quarters and believe that although their production has certainly kicked in, they'll have room to go there. And even outside the production officers, we've been able to add quite a bit of talent to our staff and excited about the people portion of our of our list of assets and proud to announce that this year we again won Banker Magazine, American Banker Magazine, one of the best places to work for our institution. So excited about that. I'm not going to go into great detail in the intro call or the intro portion of the call, partly because with our capital raise a couple weeks ago, we had a chance to talk to many of you and put our information out there. So I really would be open to turning it over now to Q&A for anybody that has any questions.