Business First Bancshares, Inc. (NASDAQ:BFST) Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call October 27, 2022 3:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Matthew Sealy - SVP, SVP, Director of Corporate Strategy and FP&A

David Melville - President and CEO

Greg Robertson - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Matt Olney - Stephens

Freddie Strickland - Janney

Kevin Fitzsimmons - D.A. Davidson

Brett Rabatin - Hovde Group

Operator

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Business First Bancshares Q3 2022 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Matthew Sealy, SVP, Director of Corporate Strategy and FP&A. Mr. Sealy, please go ahead.

Matthew Sealy

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 3 of our presentation, which includes our safe harbor statements regarding forward-looking statements, and these are non-GAAP financial measures. Those of you joining by phone, please note the slide presentation is available on our website at www.b1bank.com. Please also note that 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 Bancshares 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 will now turn the call over to you.

David Melville

Okay. Thanks, Matt, and welcome, everybody. Excited to be here for our first public call. We're also joined by Philip Jordan, who is our Chief Banking Officer. Just I'll give you a quick overview. Some of you may not be that familiar with our story, and we'll go into a Q&A session, and I look forward to that. b1BANK, a 16-year-old bank in Louisiana, headquartered in Louisiana, but also presence in Texas.

We're focused on small businesses as our primary clientele. We're the #1 bank headquartered in Louisiana as measured by Louisiana deposits, and we have about one third of our assets in Dallas and Houston. We also have about $6 billion under management and an RIA called SSW.

A couple of years ago, we started on a 5-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. Second component of the five-year plan was asset diversity.