Colony Bankcorp, Inc. (NASDAQ:CBAN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

David Bishop: Got it. And then one more question, I’ll hop back into the queue. Heath, as you look out, the budget for OpEx probably a slowdown you guys will probably be pretty aggressive in expanding this year and hopefully to get the revenue benefits down the line. Do you have a target in mind either efficiency or a growth rate? Should we see that decline from the teens to be low-to-mid or high single-digits? Just curious if you have any sort of sense for expense targets are? Thanks.

Heath Fountain: Yes, that’s a good question. And we have, as I talked about, invested significantly and we’ve got to now ensure we get the, kind of, returns out of those investments, we won’t. So we are focused internally on a lot of projects to reduce operating expenses and certainly to basically hiring freeze that isn’t strategic in market type hires. And so I think you’ll see a little bit of a creep up from our fourth quarter run rate just from the standpoint of things we’ve done in the fourth quarter. But I think as we get into the second and third quarter, we have an opportunity to start to reduce our current run rate. And then from a revenue generation standpoint, as mortgage revenue comes back and as these other lines of business get profitable, we’ll be able to sort of grow into that run rate that’s a little bit lower than where we are right now.

David Bishop: Got it. Thanks.

Operator: And our next question today is from the line of Feddie Strickland of Janney. Feddie, your line is now open.

Feddie Strickland: Hey, good morning. Apologize if I missed this in the opening remarks, but I was just curious what drove the rise in FTE headcount in the fourth quarter? And is there a timeline for these new hires to generate earnings if they’re producers?

Heath Fountain: Yes. So there’s really two things driving that. Number one, is that the fourth quarter was really the first quarter really since some of the aftermath of COVID that we’ve been able to get our retail staffing. Back to the level that we need to efficiently and service our customers well in our branch network. So that was a good bit of what you saw in Q4. And so those are on the lower end of the pay there. And then we did have a number of mortgage hires and some of those were throughout the year, as we had the opportunity to pick up some production. I mentioned, I think we mentioned either on the call or in the earnings release that we picked up a team in Birmingham, for example, in the fourth quarter. And generally on those type hires, we’re dealing with a three-month tight guarantee.

I think as we roll into January on the mortgage side, we have rolled all our new producers are out of their guarantee period. And so they’ll be in the commission world is how we compensate all our MLOs. And then obviously we had, as D mentioned, some of the Alabama team that came in, in the third and fourth quarter. And those are a detailed about, you know, how — where we are in loans and that group and where we expect them to get. And so we think that’ll be profitable really soon.

Feddie Strickland: Got it. Should we think about, I guess, trying to think about the retail investment that we think about that as an investment in deposit gathering effectively on the retail side. I mean, I know it’s kind of filling position that you’ve had vacant for a little bit, but I guess my thinking is, if you have more folks on the retail side, it’s probably a little easier to retain some of those deposits particularly in the more rural part of the footprint?