A new “FiRST” for us!

Summary

In our thirteenth episode Bryan, Karen, and Micah find themselves talking about…

• Our FIRST video podcast (which can be found at our Ben Lomand Connect YouTube Channel) and all things
• FiRST National Bank of Middle Tennessee with President Pieter van Vuuren.
• What is multi-Gig?
• Micah’s Show and Tell: What is a Firewall and what does it do?
• The latest at Channel 6, the Connection Magazine, and more!

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Bryan Kell: Welcome back into The BLC Connection Podcast. It is episode 13. New set, video now in play. We’ve got a lot in store for you. It’s our first 1 in 2024. Karen we’re talking multigigging.

Karen Wilson: We are. Just when we thought gig was enough, there’s more gig. So we’re going to talk with our expert Micah, and you’re going to weigh in on it too.

Bryan Kell: A little bit. A little bit. And speaking of Micah, we’ve got a new segment, a little show and tell.

Micah Lawrence: We do. We’re gonna take a look at a firewall.

Bryan Kell: A firewall for the southerners down here.

Micah Lawrence: Yeah. For everybody else, it’s a firewall.

Bryan Kell: Oh, okay. Gotcha. And then up next, we’ve got our first guest on The BLC Connection Podcast of 2024, president and CEO of First National Bank of Middle Tennessee. Pieter van Vuuren will join us. So, I’m Bryan Kell.

Karen Wilson: I’m Karen Wilson.

Bryan Kell: And I’m Micah Lawrence.

(All Hosts): Let’s get connected!

Bryan Kell: Thanks for staying with us here on The BLC Connection Podcast. Up first, small “i,” on this very first video BLC Connection Podcast we have with us president and CEO of First National Bank of Middle Tennessee, Pieter van Vuuren. Peter, welcome to the BLC Connection Podcast.

Pieter van Vuuren: Well, thanks, Bryan. It’s a privilege to be here and, you know, happy to sit around the table and talk to you all about First National and some of the stuff we’re doing and whatever you want to ask, I guess.

Bryan Kell: Well, and we’re going to be talking about 150 years of history, but this building is a part of that First National Bank history. It’s, what was it? Probably the first branch or second? Anyway, it used to be the First National Bank branch here that Channel Six now is housed out of.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. That’s right. I will have to fact check this, but I believe my wife was actually a teller in this building. So she probably worked that drive through over there that’s inoperable anymore.

Bryan Kell: Yes. Probably. Yes.

Karen Wilson: It’s just buried behind a wall now. Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Kell: You’ve got a very distinctive accent. I’m sure people tell you that from time to time. So tell us about how Pieter van Vuuren made it to middle Tennessee, both First National Bank and also just middle Tennessee in general.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s not Van Buren. You know, some people like Van Buren. It’s not Van Buren.

Bryan Kell: Not the county.

Pieter van Vuuren: It’s with a V, and it’s two u’s, and it’s Pieter with an “i”. So, I’ll tell you the short story. I grew up in South Africa. I was born there, and about three hours east of Cape Town. So I went to school in Cape Town just in a little town beside that Stellenbosch, but I’ll reference Cape Town. Graduated with an accounting degree at Stellenbosch and played rugby in South Africa. In South Africa, rugby is the big sport. Kind of like football is over here. Stellenbosch was a big rugby club. So folks from MTSU went over there and recruited a few rugby players.

Bryan Kell: A fine institution. Go ahead.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah, yeah it is. It is. 100% agree with you, known worldwide, even in South Africa.

Bryan Kell: Yes, yes.

Pieter van Vuuren: Right. So a couple of us came over at the same time playing rugby for MTSU. And the goal was never to stay over here. I had an accounting degree, so after my first three months in college, and I’ll say college very lightly, because I don’t necessarily think it was much attendance on my part. I applied for an accounting position in Nashville, and they hired me in Nashville with a firm called Maggart & Associates. They probably didn’t understand my resume. Neither did they understand and comprehend what grades I made in college. But they gave me a position and started working with the firm back in 2001. And Jennifer, my wife, worked the same accounting firm, and we met there. And, you know, the rest is kind of history. I worked with Maggar & Associates in accounting, specializing on community banks for ten years. Did the commute, did the tax season, and it was too much. And then, Kenny, Neal, I’m sure you all know Kenny. Kenny was the CFO at the time. Kenny retired, and it was just one of those that just, it was the right time. The right time for me, the right time for them. And we moved to McMinnville. I took the CFO position. Our CEO retired about 2 or 3 years later. Again, the right time, right place, I guess. Maybe they didn’t have any other candidates. But I took the position as the CEO and president and been with the bank now for 15 years. And it’s been it’s been wonderful. So that accent is different now. It’s not as distinct as it used to be.

Bryan Kell: Occasionally, a y’all. Will a y’all come out?

Pieter van Vuuren: Yes, I will do that. I will do that. And, I remember the first time I went into a bank, one of the first times, the guy asked me the first thing in the morning, he said, “How are you percolating?” And I just I couldn’t. I didn’t understand. So some of those southern sayings I’ve picked up over the time.

Karen Wilson: Well, 150 years of First National in Middle Tennessee. That is monumental. Tell us, I guess, how special that is, because there’s very few institutions that have been around that long in our area.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah, it’s special to me. When I started the bank in 2010, we were, let’s say, you know, it was 14 years ago, we were 136 years old. And I told myself, if I can make it to 150. I just want to see 150 at First National, and now we’re 150. But, Karen, it’s special. Really is. I have some notes, so I’m going to cheat on some dates, but back in the early 1800s, I don’t know if you all knew, but First National Bank of Middle Tennessee, of McMinnville back in the day, was the third Bank of McMinnville. So the first bank was a was called Kincannon’s Bank, and that failed a few years later. And then the next bank was Buck’s Bank. And Buck’s Bank didn’t make it either. But anyways, in 1838, the state of Tennessee had a banking organization that, I guess they had a state bank, that had branches in several different towns. And the residents of McMinnville wrote the state of Tennessee complaining about not having a bank in Warren County. The closest bank was in White County, and then they had some in Franklin County, some in Rutherford County, Williamson County and some adjacent counties to Nashville. So it’s awesome for us that back in that day, they referenced Williamson County, Rutherford County, Davidson County, and we’re in those markets now. So it’s special to look at that. And what the folks of McMinnville wanted back in the day that now we’ve achieved that.

Pieter van Vuuren: But it’s special for us. When we look at the history, the first president was W.H. Magnus, and his salary was a little bit north of what I’m making. He was making $300 a year now. The cashier was a person named P.H. Marbury, and he made $1,200 a year. So the cashier was making more than the president at that time. So fast forward to today. We’re in ten different locations, five different counties. $80 million in capital, where we started with $50,000. So it’s special in that way to see that progression over the years. But I think what’s been more special to us, and especially me as we plan for 150 and the events will have later on this year, is when you look through these pictures and you look through Facebook posts and you go downstairs into the dungeon at First National, you pull out minutes books. And we have the original set of minutes books, and it must have taken them five days to write one set of minutes, because you can’t mess up. So it’s special to look at that and how the employees just has embraced that. You know, all of this has been in all of our markets, they look at this and just 150 years, who makes it 150 years?

Karen Wilson: Well, you think about banking too, back in those early years, it was very volatile. There were banks, you know, that would take a stab at it and then ultimately not make it. And then you take such a shaky start for all banking in that banks in that time. And then your foundation just gets stronger and stronger to where, 150 years, i mean, that’s very solid.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. And I think we saw this last year through some of the bank failures that they had. You know, they had the Silicon Valley bank out in California that failed. And those are just not the type of banks that’s down Main Street, McMinnville or Main Street, Small Town, USA. So people, they want to see the shiny things, but they want to make sure that their money is safe. Right. So we’ve seen that that really matters, and even going on some of the other markets, people want to know that, hey, you’ve got staying power. So you know, one thing that’s just I mean, we’re one of the banks in town, but a community bank is so important to a town. If towns didn’t have community banks, I mean, I don’t think they would survive, honestly.

Micah Lawrence: So you talked about how, you know, as the bank grew and, you know, we understand technology has to come into play there. So tell us a little bit about how, you know, fiber broadband and some of that technology has helped you guys do what you do today.

Pieter van Vuuren: Absolutely. I don’t know how we could do it without high speed internet. I mean, I just don’t know how we can communicate in several different ways. But as you can imagine, we get large files every day that come in through thousands and thousands of checks and images and all of that kind of stuff in our operations area. So if our internet was slow and fiber wasn’t there to support us, who knows how efficient we would be? You know, one of the things that has changed our world, and I’m sure it has y’all’s, too, is Teams and Zoom calls. So just imagine our internet wasn’t fast enough to support that. I don’t think dial up and Zoom works. Doesn’t do that, does it?

Karen Wilson: I don’t think so.

Micah Lawrence: I think so.

Bryan Kell: From the technical expert here, no.

Micah Lawrence: Let’s say, let’s say no.

Pieter van Vuuren: You know, our core processor stores all of our documents. So for instance, say Bryan has a loan with a bank, and I want to look at Bryan’s loan, and I want to look at Bryan’s appraisal. Back in the day, we would have those appraisals printed out, and we would put in a filing cabinet downstairs. So I sit in my desk, and I’m not downstairs. I may be sitting upstairs, but I want to look at Bryan’s appraisal. Well, I got to get up, you know, get off my chair, walk downstairs, go in the filing cabinet, get that appraisal out, look at the appraisal or walk to my desk, maybe make a copy of it, go back to my desk, look at it. So that process now today with that being scanned into our core system, I can sit at my desk, I can click a button. And because of that speed of internet, you know, that appraisal is going to come up in a matter of five seconds. So that has I mean, that’s really what helped us from a from an internet speed perspective. And fiber has been instrumental. It’s been wonderful for us.

Bryan Kell: In going through your website some time back, we’ll throw a quick plug in on that FNBMT.com. Right?

Pieter van Vuuren: That’s right. Yeah.

Bryan Kell: So you can, but in going through that, I was struck by one particular tab in general. And I’m like what sports and entertainment division? I was like, you got to be kidding me. Tell us more about sports and entertainment.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. So that’s interesting. If you go into a certain line of business, you have to have the professionals to do it. So our sports and entertainment line of business. I’ll start with sports. And let me back up first. About in 2021, I guess that’s three years ago, we had the opportunity to hire some folks from two different banks that specializes in sports and entertainment. Obviously in Nashville, there’s a lot of music, a lot of entertainment. There’s sports too. So we hired these folks. They came over have many, many years working in the industry. So number one, they got to know what they’re doing because it’s different. So athletes when I’m talking about athletes or sports, it’s what we have would be professional basketball players, professional football players and then whoever supports them. So you might have an agent that supports them. So what you would do is you would have, our folks, would have those relationships with the agents and also the athletes.

Bryan Kell: Real quick, I want to mention too, now that college has gotten in with the whole NIL program, it’s not just professionals now too. You’ve got some college kids that probably need some help and some guidance, right?

Pieter van Vuuren: It’s tough. It’s tough to understand that because with a professional athlete what you have, you know, we’ll just use Derrick Henry for example. Okay Derrick Henry has a contract, and it’s a multi-year contract. And then they also have a disability coverages on those, right? So if Derrick Henry comes, and he wants a home loan, you can look at that contract, and say Derrick Henry. Number one, I need to make this loan because he’s a big guy. But he’s got four years left on his contract. I know exactly what that’s going to look like. Well, with NIL, it’s different because those deals are normally one year deals. And these are folks in high school, I mean in college, and they don’t have disability. So it’s a brand new thing for us, and we are dabbling in it. It’s again, it comes down to where that agent is and whether that agent is somebody you trust. So when we when we look at NIL folks, you know, and we work with them in their specific needs. Obviously, we want to bank the comprehensive relationship. But then when we look at, we’ll just use a football player for example, you look at before they get to the draft. You know, we’ll look at where they’re going to fall in the draft, and then we’ll be able to, we’ve got a box they got to be in. You know, we got to make sure that’s where we want it to be. And then if they get out of the draft, and it’s based on, you know, what type of contract that athlete has. So there’s, so as you can imagine, somebody like me shouldn’t be doing that kind of business. It needs to be somebody with a relationship.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, that’s very different. I mean because we get loans and things like that based upon our salaries, but their salary structure is very fluid, at least, you know, between contracts and all of that. But they still have to buy homes and businesses and things like that too.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. And our athletes are not Titans. You know, just Titans. It might be a Titan, but its folks wherever, so that agent is out of Memphis or Nashville. If that agent is one of his athletes is in San Diego, you know, so it’s all over. And Karen like to your point, those athletes, they may be traded. You know, basketball players, football players not as much, but basketball players can be traded just easy. So you just, you know, for an example help somebody buy a house in Washington DC, then they get traded to Phoenix. Well, now they got to sell that house and go to Phoenix. Probably buy a house there. So it is different than what the normal community bank does. But you know, we felt like it was a great opportunity for us to kind of set us apart from some of the other folks and a line of business that not everybody gets in. Entertainment in Nashville is I mean, music in Nashville is easy.

Bryan Kell: That was what I was going to say. You went in depth on the sports side of things. Entertainment, very similar when it comes down to contracts, album sales, or how does that work on the entertainment side?

Pieter van Vuuren: Entertainment. It’s is again, it’s kind of look, you’re going to look at the business manager, is what kind of what kind of relationship they have with the longevity of that artist. You know, just if it’s a fly by night person, you probably don’t want to do too much business with them. But sometimes it’s some of the younger folks coming up into the industry, and especially in today’s time, i mean, it’s not just the Garth Brooks’s and the, you know, those kind of folks, Martina McBrides. But it’s folks that I haven’t heard of that’s coming out, and they may be coming up through YouTube or whatever, and now all of a sudden they they made it big time. So I don’t even know, it’s not a contract to it. And you got to kind of just look at, you know, what their history has been and what their upside has been. So that’s definitely, that’s definitely a tougher one. Just an athlete where you just pull out a contract and looking at it.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, I could imagine. Because as you said you know it’s all about it. There’s so many different pathways to stardom these days. And it’s people that, my children know people that I’ve never heard of before, but they’re big out there. So, you know, we’ve been through a brand and a logo change at Ben Lomand. Talk about the process First National Bank went through to make your changes.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah, yeah I get a lot of questions about that.

Bryan Kell: Karen’s bought like two t-shirts going through the brand change here at Ben Lomand. So I mean she’s got the scars and the tshirts, and all that stuff, right?

Karen Wilson: Oh yes. The love and the hate. It’s all together.

Pieter van Vuuren: You know, I asked the marketing firm that helped us. I asked, how often do companies rebrand? And they said every seven years.

Karen Wilson: Yeah.

Pieter van Vuuren: So you’ve probably experienced about two not enough, probably two more, right?

Karen Wilson: Well, right. And then you get pushback. Did you get pushback, you know, from the community, from employees, from board members thinking, “Whoa, wait a minute. This is our solid First National Bank.” You know, just talk to us about it.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. So we, really this process started with us trying to develop a brand standards. So because we have folks in different markets. We have newer employees, folks that’s been with the bank for 45 years, you know, Mary Jane Bales, Ben Fosters, those folks. They know what we do every single day. But then you’re in other markets like Nashville and Franklin and Murfreesboro, and you got to get those. You got to make sure everybody knows what First National Bank stands for. So we engaged a firm out of Chattanooga to come help us. And they sat around the table with about ten of us and just talked, tell us who you are. And so they developed this brand standards for us that we give to new employees when they walk in the first day and say, “Hey, this is who we are. This is our DNA.” And we give that to everybody in our markets and say, this is what we do. But now they kind of understand, okay, you know, this is how we operate. This is how we want customers to see us. So that was the first part. And then we said, okay, let’s start looking at our branches. So as you all probably know, we’re renovating some of our branches. So we started looking at branches and technology and delivery methods. And so we said, okay, well that’s going to be great, but we’re going to have a logo that probably needs to be refreshed a little bit. And it was a great opportunity for us at 150 to say, okay, let’s do 152.0. And this is kind of where we are. Let’s flip the switch. And so we brought the same firm in, and they looked at a few logos for us. And I think they probably, I mean the marketing genius. They give you like one logo you really like, and then two you don’t like. So I’m going to ask you which one you want.

Karen Wilson: Pointing to the one they want you to take. Yes.

Pieter van Vuuren: And it’s always the one in the middle, right?

Pieter van Vuuren: So they showed us the logo. And you know, it’s plain. It’s not too modern. It’s really the way logos go i think these days, just to be kind of simple. It’s vibrant, not stale anymore. So we selected this logo, and we really haven’t had really, I haven’t had too much kickback or negative feedback on it. It’s really our board has liked it. The first time you see it, it’s kind of like, okay. And then it’s like, okay, I get it. I get it. So a lot of good comments about it lately, and I think it’s really energized some of our employees, you know, to again, just the color scheme is a little bit different. That gold was really hard to, especially on a marketing side. It’s that gold, or is it like a brown? So this yellow they actually gave us like, you know, stuff that I didn’t know is that’s a Pantone, blah, blah blah.

Karen Wilson: Yes.

Pieter van Vuuren: I’ve never heard that word. So we got five Pantones now.

Karen Wilson: Yes, yes. Well, and I was going to say, you know, kudos to the to you all for the, you know, unveiling of it. You had the signs, the mystery, everybody. It was kind of a buzz around like, what are these, black and gold or, you know, yellow signs up? And the ones out, I guess, in Newtown area and then billboards. So you had created quite a buzz.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. Yeah, that was good. And you know, the little “i”, people ask me what the little “i” stands for. You know, the little eye is just, we’re not first. Our community is first. Our customers are first. So I’m not going to say we’re second, but we want to make sure that everybody else is first. And that’s I mean, you could see it. And then the next thing we did is, we looked at our slogan. And that was pretty easy for them to come up with. They because as community bankers, we just try to show up, be everywhere. To us, it’s not, i mean, we have to write the check too, but it’s not about just writing the check. It’s about being there, you know, and that’s what we try to do with our folks. Give your time being be involved in the community. And the slogan is just so easy. I mean, just we show up.

Karen Wilson: Well, if you think about it too, how many life events that bankers are a part of, from home ownership to business, sometimes, you know, sending your kids to college and things like that, there’s a lot of firsts that you all are showing up at.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And funny story that signs at Newtown out there going towards Woodbury, I think I told you about this, but maybe I haven’t. I was sitting with a customer one day and the customer said, whoever is doing those signs out of Newtown, they’re doing a great job. And I said, really? And I mean, I didn’t say it was us. And they said, isn’t Ben Lomand 150 years old?

Karen Wilson: Thank you. We’ll take that.

Bryan Kell: Yeah. We do have yellow in our logo. We just don’t have black or that [inaudible]. Yeah, that’s pretty good. So we’re only at 70.

Karen Wilson: We hope to get there.

Bryan Kell: We got 80 more years to get –.

Pieter van Vuuren: By the time 80 rolls around, none of us will be around. But it’d be a great marketing technique, so write that down.

Karen Wilson: Okay. Okay.

Bryan Kell: We’ll put it in a file, moving forward.

Micah Lawrence: So, Pieter, you know, apps are a big thing. You know, everybody’s got to have an app. Talk about the first app, what you can do on it, how it’s good for your customers.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. That’s something we spend a lot of time with is developing our infrastructure, and an app is one of them. And about three years ago, we redid our retail app, which is just our consumer app. We’re still, the commercial app is probably not where we want it to be. But on on the retail app, it’s got a ton of functionality. You can when you go in there, you can organize your dashboard whichever way you want. You can link all of your accounts at the bank to it. You can transfer between accounts, you know, so you don’t you don’t have to necessarily go to your PC to do that. You can make deposits on your phone, you know. So if you’re one of the lucky ones that still get a check for something, you can sign the check on the back and say for deposit only for FMBNT. So you can take a picture of it, deposit it right there. You can toss the check, you know, once that deposit has been made. So you can do that from anywhere. You can pay your bills. You can pay people. You can chat with our customer service just on your phone and your app.

Bryan Kell: That’s good.

Pieter van Vuuren: A couple of things that I really like. You know, also, you can look at your statements, activity. You can probably look at your activity. A couple of things that I really like, but I probably should do, but I don’t, you can manage your debit card. So if you’ve misplaced your debit card, you can just go in there and lock it. You know, and then unlock it if you find it. You can manage the merchants you want to block, you know? So if you want to block a certain retailer for your spouse that they can shop there, you can block. You can manage that card!

Karen Wilson: That’s tough. I don’t know about that one.

Bryan Kell: Shane Wilson, take note.

Pieter van Vuuren: But on the other side, your spouse can also block you.

Bryan Kell: Yes, that’s very true.

Pieter van Vuuren: All right. So you can manage your debit card. You can manage the types of transactions. So you can say, you know, I don’t want these type of transactions. Maybe you’ve had some fraud on your on your card before, so you can manage those type of transactions. Especially with kids, you know, you can manage certain things if you want to. You can manage spending limits, something that you may want to say, hey, I don’t want to spend more than $1,000 a month on a certain category, so you can manage it that way. And then you can have balance alerts. So if you can have them alert you through a text message if your balance drops below $100. You can pick the number. So it’s got a ton of functionality in your app.

Micah Lawrence: That’s cool. I like it.

Bryan Kell: I want to encourage folks to go to FNBMT.com. because my next question has to do with what’s next at First National, but just there’s a timeline on your website that’s just fascinating to go back down and look at all the accomplishments and the things that have been done over 150 years. But I’ll go back to what I just mentioned briefly is, what’s next for first?

Pieter van Vuuren: So what’s next is 150. You know we’re going to turn 150 on October the 30th this year. So we’ll have a big event in downtown McMinnville. And then we’ll have some other events in other communities too. But we want to thank this community for supporting us for 150 years. So we are going to, like I tell folks, I won’t be here for the 200th anniversary, so let’s just blow it out at 150. So we’ll have something. We’re thinking about it downtown, probably, and we’ll invite the entire community to be there. So that’s one of the things on our list. But so first thing, other than that, is remodel Smithville Highway. That remodeling will start on Monday. So we’ll start with the drive through area, and then we’ll go upstairs from there. We’re excited about that because we’re totally changing that interior of that lobby. It’s not just, we’re not just putting some paint on it and put a new roof on it. So we’re totally taking, opening that concept up. And a couple of things that I like on that is we’re going to try with all of our branches to have a different concept. Because now when you walk into a branch of any bank, really, you know, it’s a teller line, and you have separation. So we want to make sure that the bank is not – that’s a place that nobody wants to go.

Pieter van Vuuren: So we want to open it up. We’re going to take out our teller lines. We’re going to have pods where a banker, when you walk in, can bypass that pod, can come in and greet you and say, “Hey Karen, how can I help you?” And if you want to cash a check, you can walk over to the pod, and they can cash the check for you. If you say, hey, I want to open an account or I want to add somebody to my account, they can say, I can help you with that too. So it’s going to be a one stop shop when you walk in. So it’s going to be some training on our end so that the interior of the branches are going to be a little different. They’re going to be much lighter. They’re going to be some aspects in the branch that people are going to be like, wow, that is really cool. So we’re trying to tie in our longevity with some technology. Right. And one thing in McMinnville at Smithville Highway, we are going to have something that I think McMinnville dearly needs. That’s a conference room that’s going to be available with audio and visual for the community to access after business hours. So if a 501(c)(3) needs an eight person office, a eight person conference room where they need audio visual, they can use it after hours, you know.

Karen Wilson: That’s a great service.

Pieter van Vuuren: That’s important for us to involve the community. Then our Franklin office, we just opened a mortgage office in Franklin, but our Franklin office construction will probably start within the next 2 or 3 weeks. So we will be in the Meridian development in Franklin and Cool Springs area. And then after that, we’ll start renovating all of our branches. So one thing that we want to accomplish is when you walk into a First National Bank branch, you know you are at a First National Bank branch. As you can imagine, with being around for 150 years, you have a different look and feel in every single office. One was built in 2015. One was built in 1923. So they look different. We’re not going to paint the main office, you know, a different color. So we want to preserve that, but it’s going to be a challenge. But we want to make sure that, again, that when you walk in, there are certain things in an office in McMinnville and Murfreesboro, Shelbyville, Williamson County and Nashville that it’s like, okay, I know where I am.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, I’m comfortable here.

Pieter van Vuuren: Yeah. So we’ve got a lot of stuff going on. Two other things in our branches, we’re going to have Taylor capture recyclers, which is going to help our tellers. And then we’re going to have interactive teller machines, which is ATMs. And we’re going to extend our business hours once those are fully operational from 7 to 7.

Karen Wilson: Awesome.

Bryan Kell: Very nice.

Karen Wilson: One thing that we’re excited about, you know, last year you all took on the 4th of July celebration in McMinnville that Dr. Pepper sponsored for years. But as they back away from that, you all took that on. And then Ben Lomand gets to be your partner this year on that. And in the future, you know, tell us, I guess about about that. And what made you decide to jump in to that opportunity?

Pieter van Vuuren: Well, as you know, Doug Milner was on our board forever, and Doug was a big supporter of it. He’s always done it right. So it was just, it was natural for us to do it once Doug said, hey, we’re not going to do it anymore. And then we did it last year, and we did it in partnership with Dr. Pepper. And this year we’re going to do it in partnership with y’all. And I’m looking forward to it. Our planning is, and I hope y’all’s plan is the same, I think it is, is to make it just a big, big community event.

Karen Wilson: Yes.

Pieter van Vuuren: Right. I mean, just I want to see everybody there. So it’s going to be great. I know y’all are working on it.

Karen Wilson: I know. We’ve talked with Anne and Hunter. Your your team. The food trucks and activities for kids and just wonderful things going to be happening and all that’ll be coming out even more details soon.

Bryan Kell: Absolutely. Definitely what 4th of July, make plans to be at the Milner Recreation Center on the back side. So more information to come on that, right? Pieter Van Vuuren, president CEO of First National Bank. I can say two things. You were the first guest here on our video portion of the BLC Connection Podcast. And just like your slogan, you showed up. So we thank you so much.

Pieter van Vuuren: Thank y’all. Thanks for having me.

Karen Wilson: Thank you. Great

Bryan Kell: We’re back with more of the BLC Connection podcast right after this.

Karen Wilson: Hey, welcome back to The BLC Connection Podcast. I am back with Bryan Kell and Micah Lawrence, and we are going to talk about multigigging. Which fascinates me, we’re not talking about multiple frog gigs right?
Bryan Kell: No, I don’t think frogs have anything to do with this.

Karen Wilson: No, because we are a technology company

Speaker5: So unless Micah has got a frog in his pocket and he’s like, “Hey! Here’s a frog!”

Micah Lawrence: I’m not good at that, so it’s definitely, definitely not that.

Karen Wilson: Well, let’s just shoot to right that, right away. What is multigigging?

Bryan Kell: So I guess to talk about multigigging, we got to talk about what a gig is first. And so in 2022, we kicked off our one speed, one price at Ben Lomand Connect. A synchronous gig up, or 1000mbps up, and then also 1000mbps down, for our special price. And so it was like, hey, you know, if you’ve got fiber in your area, you’re getting a gig up and a gig down, and we’re only going to do one speed and one price. Well, in 2023 at our annual meeting, some might remember that Greg Smartt teased, hey multigigging is coming. And so didn’t really feel it a whole lot more than hey, we’re going to be starting to offer now multiple gigs to homes and businesses. And then this past year at our annual meeting that was in March, right? Okay. In March, Greg went into a little bit more discussion on that. And if you were at our annual meeting, you heard him talk about that. And so we are now a multigig company, meaning we’re not just offering a gig, but we are now offering multiple gigs to homes and businesses. And so if it’s needed, then we have got a two gig, and up to ten gig speed that I’m sure we’ll talk more about, but that’s multigig. In other words, it’s more than a gig.

Karen Wilson: Right, and you’re talking, it’s all about speed really. And how much you’re uploading and downloading and how many devices you have.

Bryan Kell: Yeah, you want to kick in any more on that, or is that pretty much got it?

Micah Lawrence: Yeah. I mean, that’s when we talk about multigig, we’re saying, hey, it’s going to be more than a gig. You know, and we’ve made the choice to do two gigs and ten gigs, which is really a huge step up compared to some, you know, kind of where the standard has been over the last few years. So, we think this will be great for customers and, you know, work really well.

Karen Wilson: So what kind of equipment is needed for this type of service, for the multigig?

Micah Lawrence: So we’ve got the here on on the table here. So there’s really two different options. Option number one is probably going to be more for businesses or those techies that have their own routers that they want to support at home. That’s this guy right here, he’s a GigaPoint. It’s kind of like when we referred to an ONT at someone’s house, that’s where it takes an –.

Bryan Kell: “Optical network terminal.”

Micah Lawrence: Hey. All right. And, so when we take that fiber that comes into your home, we have to convert it into something, you know, is used as a standard inside of a home or a business, and it converts it to copper. So, you know, you could see on the back of this, we’ll come in fiber, come out, copper, to your device of some sort. Now, the next device that we have is going to be probably more on the residential or your small business side. This is our new GigaSpire for this specific deployment. What it gives you is it gives you four one gig ports, and then 110 gig port. It also supports the new Wi-Fi 6E to help you achieve those better speeds and better results from your wireless, but works just like kind of the GigaSpires we have today, just basically supports the ten gig.

Bryan Kell: I want to say something real quick, too, is that you mentioned Wi-Fi 6E. While we don’t necessarily want to go into that right now, future podcasts, that’d be very good for us to touch on. What is Wi-Fi 6E?

Micah Lawrence: Sure, sure. And there’s not a huge difference between 6 and 6E, but the new standard that’s kind of coming I would say within the next year because technology never stops is we got Wi-Fi 7. So there’s some other things there too. So technology is great.

Karen Wilson: So why would people need a synchronous two or up to ten gig connection?

Bryan Kell: Yeah. So, business is probably the easiest application of first of all, to start talking about. And I always seem to say this when we’re talking about technology, Micah can always fill in the blanks on this because he deals with businesses on a day in, day out basis. But if you’re moving large files, we just had Pieter van Vuuren and banking, you know, there’s a lot of data that can be going on at banking institutions, hospitals. You could have, like I said, lots of large traffic that’s coming in or going out. And so while maybe some work from home situations, you could have some of that going on this could be perfect for many customers out there that just find themselves needing more due to having tons of people working there, Zoom. Micah, right, I mean, that’s kind of the definition of all that.

Micah Lawrence: I mean, when we talk about needing more bandwidth, you know, I remember when my father brought home a new computer that had a one gig hard drive. I’m like one gig hard drive. Who’s going to fill that thing up? And now we’ve got phones that are in our pockets that are, you know, 128, 256, you know, whatever it might be. As technology progresses, as time passes on, our demands for what we need grows. And so, you know, where one gig yesterday seemed like that was fast enough for us is now not as fast as we could possibly or potentially need. And, you know, yes, we see it more on the business side of needing this demand. But there could be that residential side where you’ve got people working from home, could be, you know, large medical files that could be going across there. There’s so many different things that that could affect this. You know, we today, you know, by default are streaming 4K on everything. So, you know, 4K brings in a lot of bandwidth. And then we you know, I’m sure the next thing will probably be 8k. You know we’re looking at large bandwidth hogs if you want to call it that. And so we’ve got to have a network that supports that amount of bandwidth. And when we look at two gig and ten gig, that’s just the start I think, you know, we’ll see it grow as time goes along.

Karen Wilson: Well, how do we know I guess you know, people know whether in our home or business that we are needing higher speeds?

Micah Lawrence: Well, this is a big change for us. And let me explain why is most of the modern day devices that are coming out, they will go up to a gig. You know, that’s kind of been the standard for quite some time. Well to say, okay, I need to go to two gig or and ten gig, most people do not realize that the equipment that they have will not support that. And so when we look at this, this is a game changer to where when you come in you say, hey, you know what? I’m kind of interested in multigig. I’d like to go a little bit faster. What would it take? Well, that’s where we want to be able to ask you the right questions, make sure that you have the right hardware. So the reason why we supply the hardware to possibly do this as well. From the business perspective, you know, on the managed IT side, we’ll be more than glad to come out and do a free walkthrough and assessment with you to make sure that the equipment that you have will support it. If not, you know, we can provide you with that equipment that will support it. So, you know, it is a game changer. You got to be very careful about the equipment that you have today because multigig routers and firewalls and things like that, are just now kind of flooding the market. And so we want to make sure that you’ve got the right equipment.

Bryan Kell: I want to make sure that folks out there that are watching this, heard that correctly, is that basically if – and we’re going to talk about where this might be available – but if somebody is interested, and they are a business, you all are willing to do, the big word that everybody loves, free. You know, just to make sure that that is going to be a literally a good connection between the two, right?

Micah Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. And when we went to a gig, this was kind of a struggle too. You know, I’ve went out to multiple businesses where, you know, they’re paying for a gig, have been for quite some time, but their firewall would never go over a hundred meg. And so, you know, I hate to see that, you know, you’re paying for something that you’re not getting. And all it would take would be to replace the hardware. And so when we look at this, you know, we’d love to be able to come out and say, hey, you know, this is what you need to do for your network to make it, you know, utilize what you’re paying for.

Karen Wilson: So is this available everywhere, or how can people get info about it?

Bryan Kell: So it is not available everywhere that’s very key to this. In that if we probably had to put a percentage on this and talking with Clent Kesey, our network operations supervisor, just the other day, you know, it might be that that 30% of our customers today MIGHT have the ability to do that. Micah, you’ve kind of also been a little bit around this, too, in that I think it’s basically, I’d almost say that if you received fiber in your area over the past maybe two years, you’ve probably got a good chance to get it. If it’s been longer than that, that fiber has been available to you and our service area. Probably not yet. So it’s going to take some time. Equipment, you know, you talked about the changes in technology that happens on our end, too, not just on the customer customer side as well, so there’s equipment changes that have to go on with that. And so the beautiful part about it is, is even though it might not be available today to somebody, let us put you on a list. Make sure that we’ve got you that there’s some interest there, and then once it’s available, we can have our folks be able to reach out and get with you. Anymore, you’d want to kick in on that.

Micah Lawrence: I think that’s exactly right. You know, I get asked a lot of questions. When’s fiber going to be down this road or that road and, you know, things like that. So I always recommend give us a call because it does two things. One, it allows us to take your address and say, okay, is it available, you know, multigig or fiber whatever. And then number two is, is if it’s not available, that allows us to put your name on a list so that when it does become available, because they’re changing out the equipment on a daily basis. We’re trying to get it out there as fast as possible. Obviously, you know, it’s a struggle sometimes. But you know, we want that to be available, but the best thing you can do is call, ask, put your name on the list, whatever you need to do.

Bryan Kell: And I will say this, this is key too. It is a two gig offering that offering is $99.95, and then an up to ten gig offering. This is synchronous up and down, up to ten, up to ten, and a two gig / two gig. The up to ten gig one $199.95. You can find out more information about this on our website at BenLomandConnect.com.

Karen Wilson: Thank you Bryan and Micah for talking to us about multigigging, and we’ll be right back with more of The BLC Connection Podcast.

Micah Lawrence: So welcome back to The BLC Podcast. We’re going to try to start a new segment here.

Bryan Kell: Uh-oh.

Micah Lawrence: Yeah. And so, I want it to be kind of a show and tell. Could be anything from hardware to software to apps, you name it. So, one of the things I wanted to talk about today that I get asked occasionally is, what is a firewall? And so and, you know, why do I need one? So I’ve brought one here. This is one of the firewalls that we sell. This one is made by Cisco. And you guys say, well, why do I need a firewall? Well, what we are used to hearing is we’re used to hear and say, you know what? You need a router at your house. Well, a firewall is basically a router with security features built in. You say, well, why would I care? Well, in today’s modern world, you have a lot of issues of outside attackers trying to come in, right? This has, you know, smarts in it that says, okay, I don’t like what you’re doing. So I want to not talk to you anymore. You know, it says, okay, you’re, you know, we call it unsolicited information. So, like, when you get a call on your cell phone because we all know about our car warranty, right? It’s unsolicited. You know, if you had some way to magically hit a button and stop those phone calls, that’s kind of the idea of what a firewall does, is it stops that unsolicited traffic from coming in to help protect your network. So, you know, when we go out to a business, we take a look and say, okay, business. What are your primary functions here? Is it something where we got this thing called, PII, personal identifiable information.

Bryan Kell: Easy for you to say.

Micah Lawrence: Yeah, yeah, it’s very easy for me to say. And, so when we have to protect this data, we got to make sure that they’ve got security mechanisms in place that prevent this from being extracted. Because what I tell a lot of our customers at one time when let’s say a breach happened, they would charge you about $75 per record that was extracted. And so when I think about some of the businesses that we have here in our serving territory, you know, that could make or break a business.

Bryan Kell: How many records, when you say a record, can you explain what that term is?

Micah Lawrence: So let’s just say one record would be, you know, Bryan Kell. Here’s his Social Security number. Here’s his information. That’s one record.

Bryan Kell: Gotcha.

Micah Lawrence: And so if you think if you’re, when we talk about health care, we talk about the dentist, we talk about, you know, telephone cooperative, electric cooperative, electric companies and all these other places that that have all this identifiable information, you’re at risk if you’re not protecting yourself. And so when we look at $75, if you have, you know, 2,000 or 3,000 customers, you know, that can start adding up really fast. So, you know, I want to make sure that people, you know, they hear this word firewall that say, why do I need it? This is why.

Karen Wilson: Does this device, is this, like, for just business, or is this residential?

Micah Lawrence: So I’ll be honest with you, price wise, this is probably not for residential. Just because it is a little more expensive than what most residential people want to pay for. Now, here’s what I will do is I will put a plug in for our GigaSpire where we have IQ Protect.

Bryan Kell: ProtectIQ.

Micah Lawrence: ProtectIQ.

Bryan Kell: There’s my question right there.

Micah Lawrence: So there’s protectIQ. So, all that is, is those are firewall functions. And so when we look at that for the residential side, it’s $3 a month. That’s worth every penny to kind of help protect you from these. And even with ProtectIQ, it’ll alert you when these events happen so that you know, what’s kind of going on too. This one in particular is probably more for your small to medium businesses. We’ve got some that are even larger for bigger businesses. So you know what I would encourage kind of as a marketing plug is, you know, if there’s any businesses out there listening that says, hey, you know what? I don’t know that I have what I need for this. That’s where we want to come in and say, hey, you need a firewall. Here’s why, and let’s get you the best thing in there.

Bryan Kell: You know, this may be over mine and Karen’s heads, but it could be that somebody out there is watching on the backside of this, any explanation as far as kind of what’s going on based on outputs and inputs on the backside?

Micah Lawrence: Sure. So I mean, in this case, it’s just regular Cat5 interfaces. What I love about this model is there’s two ports on here that have power over Ethernet, which the old way of doing cameras and access point, wireless access points is you had to put them kind of close to where a power plug is. The great thing is now we can power that device across the Ethernet cable. Great thing for this. So this is a great box for stuff like that because it’s your modem router, firewall switch, everything all built into one. It also allows you to do VPNs back into the business. So if you’ve got some companies that are working that have people that work from home. I’ll tell you, during Covid, we were putting these out everywhere just because people needed to work from home. And so that’s what’s great about what these devices do, is they not only allow you to function that way, but they also provide you the security that you need. Because, you know, I have talked to people and they’re like, well, why do I even need security? I don’t have anything that’s worth losing. I don’t think they realize you do. And so when we talk about protection, you know, you do need to take it to heart because you need to make sure your data and your business is protected. Because like I said, when you look at these records being stolen, and you having to pay for that, that’s a make or break business for you sometimes. So very, very important that you have this.

Karen Wilson: Well, and I’m here to dumb it down because that’s what I have to do. Trying to understand this or for the audience too, it’s like, okay, I’m granny. I’ll be Granny Shirley, and I’m typing my email to my sister Loretta, who lives in Wisconsin and stuff. And little do I know is Granny Shirley that there’s all these conversations going on with my laptop that I don’t even know. Like they’re trying to grab information and things like that. So this firewall you think of like a literal firewall, it’s keeping these nefarious people and businesses and things like that from getting access to my computer and grabbing things. Is that?

Micah Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that a lot of people don’t realize because you don’t see it, is people from domestically and not domestically are always scanning through IP addresses, trying to find any vulnerabilities. They do it on a constant basis, and you never see it. And so this is sitting there waiting for those events to happen and saying, No, you’re not coming through. And that’s the protection that you want, is you want something constantly sitting there monitoring your network to make sure that nothing bad is actually happening. So it does happen. I mean, it happens a lot.

Bryan Kell: So if we’ve got a business person out there watching, and I’m almost scared to ask this question, but I dare say there’s probably different grades or levels of these. And the price range can probably run get up there pretty good. Can you give us more information on just how big, small, how robust they can be?

Micah Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, like, for example, this device here, this one will do up to, basically up to a gig. Okay. And so when we were talking multigig earlier, there are firewalls that can do up to ten gig, but then we’re talking some dollars. But I mean, if that’s what your business needs, you know, we have that and provide it. You know, we just installed one for ourselves at Ben Lomand and, you know, it functions great. Gives us the speeds that we need or that we are demanding today while still trying to give you that protection. Of course, a lot of the new stuff that you hear nowadays with AI and artificial intelligence and stuff like that are being built into the newer firewalls to help even protect further and beyond that. So, you know, they they range anything from the small like, you know, most of the time when it’s, I’d say less than 50 employees, I could probably do this guy right here. If it’s more than that or more speed demand, we can go up a little bit bigger than that. Then you also have the occasion of if you have a critical business that you know what, my internet cannot be down. We can actually stack these and have them redundant. That way, if anything hardware wise fails on this one, the other one picks up. So when we took it, these are commercial type situations that we have to deal with. And, you know, we have to have the hardware that has the smarts to do that.

Bryan Kell: So if household people are watching, and they want more information on how they can get protected, they can go to our website and type in the search bar, “protect IQ.” Get all the information on that side of things. If you’re a business person out there, if there’s a business person out there watching, how can they get more information on this and more stuff like this?

Micah Lawrence: So they can contact the office and ask for Managed IT. We’ll be more than glad to have a conversation with you. Go on site and do a walkthrough if we need to, just to make sure that you’ve got what you need.

Karen Wilson: Awesome.

Bryan Kell: I know more about firewalls.

Karen Wilson: I do. Me too.

Bryan Kell: Well, we’ve come to the end of our first video podcast. But Karen, as we wrap things up, what’s happening at Channel Six, which we’re in right now, and also The Connection Magazine?

Karen Wilson: We are so thrilled to have the podcast here and to be providing it for our viewers now. We’re also gearing up for back to the strip. We’re going to be filming that live this Friday night as this probably airs, that will have taken place, but it’ll be airing throughout the month of May. And, then it’s graduation season. So White County and Van Buren County will be airing both of their graduations live. I’m sure Warren County School TV will also be airing theirs live as well.

Bryan Kell: Channel 180 and 181 on the BLTV platform, I guess I should say.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, that’s been you know, that addition has been great for these people that cannot get out and attend graduations. Or if it’s rainy or yucky or whatever’s going on.

Bryan Kell: It’s always there for you, that’s for sure. Micah, how can folks get in touch with us on ideas or feedback, all that good stuff?

Micah Lawrence: You can check us out on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or actually it’s X.

Bryan Kell: X, yes.

Micah Lawrence: LinkedIn. We’re all over these places. You can send us an email at blcpodcast@benlomand.net. You can hear this podcast on basically Spotify, Apple, basically all of them.

Bryan Kell: Stuff we’ve never heard of.

Micah Lawrence: Stuff we’ve never heard of. Absolutely. And now, for the first time, you can see us on BLTV Channel Six. You can see us on YouTube. So we’re super excited about being able to do this.

Bryan Kell: Yeah, absolutely. This is going to be fun. First of many to come. You can also Karen, if folks have missed some past episodes of the many episodes that you’ve been doing now for I think two years, they can catch those now on YouTube as well.

Karen Wilson: Yeah, we’ve uploaded probably about half of those to YouTube. So they are, there’s a podcast section on our Ben Lomand Connect YouTube page, so they can go there. They also reside, all of them, right now reside on our website too, the Ben Lomand Connect website. So we’ve had some great businesses come on and lots of good conversations. So if you missed one of those, you can always listen again.

Bryan Kell: I’m glad you mentioned the website. Also too, if you do find yourself going to the Ben Lomand Connect YouTube channel, be sure to subscribe to that. If you’ve got a YouTube account and also ring the bell, because when you’ve got situations like new episodes that Tammy Vincent’s putting on there, or we go live and all the different events that you’ve talked about, you get that notification on your phone. You go, oh, I want to catch that, you know, so be sure and do that if you come across our YouTube channel, Ben Lomand Connect one. Next episode, gang, we don’t know what that’s going to be yet, right? And you’re working on many episodes for future stuff.

Karen Wilson: I am. I am. And usually I like to to pick a small business and talk about some of the great things that they’re doing so other businesses can learn from that. So I’m working on that.

Bryan Kell: Yeah.

Micah Lawrence: But you know, here’s a way for our users to tell us who to have next.

Bryan Kell: Absolutely.

Micah Lawrence: Or what to have next. You know, send us an email, send us a message, let us know what you think, and we’ll see what we can do.

Bryan Kell: Ben Lomand Connect is a feedback industry, a feedback business. This podcast is no different. Tell us what you like. Don’t like we want to hear from you. So, let’s put this one in the books. Right?

Karen Wilson: Okay.

Bryan Kell: All right, here we go. So, I want to thank everybody for listening. I want to thank Tammy Vincent, Kelvin Bond for helping us pull this thing off and more episodes to come. So, I guess, as we always said on the audio one, thanks for listening, stay safe, and definitely stay connected. Thanks so much for joining us.