Good afternoon. I want to welcome everyone to Guaranty Bancshares 2021 annual shareholders meeting. I'm Ty Abston, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Guaranty Bancshares. With me today is Cappy Payne, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of our company, and Shalene Jacobson, Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer of our company. We appreciate everyone joining us today. We again did this meeting virtually, and I think, like I said last year, we plan to do this ongoing going forward because we just think it's a way to have more shareholders participate in our shareholders meeting. Next year, we'll likely be in person, but we're still going to live stream this meeting. The notice of annual shareholders meeting and proxy dated April 2nd, 2021, was delivered to all Guaranty Bancshares shareholders. I encourage anyone who has a question during this presentation to submit that. I believe there's a message icon. You can submit your question, and we'll answer those during the meeting. At this time, I want to appoint Shalene Jacobson to serve as election judge for the shareholders meeting. Shalene, please state the number of shares constituting a quorum and the number of shares voted for the total number of shares represented today. Thanks, Ty. The number of shares needed for a quorum is 6,026,799 shares, and the total shares represented are 9,407,589 shares or 78% of the total eligible shares. We do have a quorum. In accordance with our voting procedures, we are going to leave the voting open during the meeting. If you haven't voted yet, you can still do that online. In the interim, we have a presentation to talk to you about the company and present some of the results of the company this year and some of the things that we see in the coming year. Looking back on the year 2020, the year we just finished, I think all of us will agree that it was a year that was certainly different than any of us have experienced before. It was challenging in a lot of ways. Through this pandemic, like we said in our shareholders letter, our hearts go out to any family that was impacted from the pandemic because we know it impacted a lot of families. It also was a challenge just in running a company, as a lot of you know. One of the things we started out the year trying to kind of wrap our heads around is trying to figure out how to run this company when the majority of our team was remote, running 30 banks, running all the corporate departments. We were able to do that, and I can tell you that it was an opportunity that you really got to see our people and everyone in our company really shine because everyone really stepped up, and we just really did what we had to do to not only run the company, do it remotely, but also serve our customers through this period. Like I said in my letter, I thought it was one of our best moments as far as a company. You really, as all of you know, get to see how people really step up when there's a challenge. Our team, shareholders, you would all be proud to see kind of how our team handled that during this period. We did have a PowerPoint here. We have some points we want to show you. Related to that, one thing we focused on at the beginning of the year was the Paycheck Protection Program. We knew that that was an opportunity to really step up and help our customers through this pandemic and really keep a lot of them on their feet. That was a program that was designed to really get money out to businesses to keep people on the payroll. We mobilized our team, really people from across our company, and did over $300 million in this program, which was represented by over 3,000 loans. As you can see, the average loan is the size that we were helping small businesses and a lot of them. We think that ultimately that impacted around 35,000 jobs. That was one thing we did that was an unbelievable effort to do it, not only that many loans, but do it largely remotely. Again, it was just an opportunity to really see our team step up when they were needed. Our bank also had a good year from a financial standpoint. Our pre-tax and our core earnings this year were a little over $40 million, compared to $33 million in 2019. About a 20% increase over 2019. That was not only significant, but also kind of gives you a sense of our run rate in earnings in the company. Our net earnings were $27 million. Now, that was only $1 million above last year, but that includes a provision that we made during March, April of around $13 million in our loan loss provision. That was a provision that was not tied to specific losses we saw in the portfolio, but it was just on quantitative factors in our models that we use to kind of try to set aside money and a lot of money to really position us with the unknowns of a pandemic on the portfolio. I can tell you that through that period, we really had a lot of confidence in our bank's balance sheet, and I think that's shown to be true because as we've opened up and the economy's opened back up, we just really haven't seen the loan losses that a lot of people were anticipating. That $13 million ultimately is just kind of a savings account and will be brought back into earnings in 2021 and in future years. We were really proud to end the year with a net increase of $1 million given that large provision we made as a company. We also took advantage of the market and some attractive pricing on our bank stock. As all of you know, the market overall took a big hit with the pandemic in March and April. Bank stocks, particularly because of the unknowns with asset quality, took a big hit too. We felt like that was a really good time to look at buying back stock at prices that we felt were very advantageous to our company and our shareholders. We repurchased in the March, April, May period, almost 6% of this company, 650,000 shares. That represented about $15 million in stock buybacks. We did that in a period of uncertainty because that's when the price was a good price to buy. We also did it because we had confidence in our bank's position and where we were as far as asset quality. Those shares today, 12 months later, have about a $12 million gain in them. That $12 million isn't gain that will actually go through the income statement, but it is $12 million in franchise value and intrinsic value of our company that will be accreted to our shareholders in the coming years. We felt like that was a significant transaction. We have not repurchased stock in the last couple of quarters. The valuations are improved, but we certainly are willing to step up when we see that it's a good long-term value for our shareholders. Some other things we did during the year, we really focused internally on some of the things we knew we could do to position this company for growth in the future. We weren't really in a position to go out and meet with customers as you would think, as you understand, because of the pandemic. We focused internally on some things we could do to position us as the economy and things open back up in the coming years. One thing we did is we expanded our deposit operations center in Pittsburg, Texas, adding 15,000 feet to that facility. That really positions us well for future growth. The current facility we're in, or we were in, we've been here for 20 years. I don't know the exact asset size that takes us to, but it's certainly much larger than the $3 billion in assets we had today. Another thing we did is we remodeled our technology center in Mount Pleasant. The same thing, it really set us up with growth opportunities for the future. It was something we could do during this year if we weren't as customer-focused on our calling efforts, and those were things we could do internally to position us for future growth while we had that downtime. We also grew our franchise and did several things in our footprint. We expanded with two new locations in the Austin market, and we also moved into a new facility in the Denton market. We're doing really well in both the Denton area and the Austin area, and so these expansions were part of continuing to use that momentum to continue growing our company. We also brought in new lenders and producers in our company throughout our footprint in all four regions. We really onboarded commercial lenders during this period. Again, during a time when it was something we could do to really tool ourselves up for the coming year and years and grow in this company. That's some of the things we did internally. We also, as a company, really focused on our digital banking platforms. That's something we've really been in tune with. Obviously during COVID, your ability to transact not only with your customers, but interact with each other digitally became more important. The good news is we were well prepared because from video conferencing to a lot of the digital banking channels we already had in place, we were already using. We did take the opportunity to really focus on additional investments we can make in this area, and we plan to stay in the lead and be a bank that really has everything that the large money center banks have to offer as far as digital banking channels, because we think that's part of our franchise in the future. We just announced we hired a new digital banking officer as part of those efforts. Just having someone that's totally focused on digital banking. Those are some of the highlights of things that we did during the year. It was a year that had many challenges, but it was also a year where you got to see a lot of really good things as people stepped up to help their neighbors and help their communities and help each other. We did all that, and we're able to position the bank, we think well for the future and also produce good financial and strong financial results for the company. I'm going to turn it over to Cappy Payne, and I'll go through a few slides for you. Thank you, Ty. Most of these numbers are in your annual report, some figures we like to show you, and we've done this year after year, to show you the trend lines of what's going on in our company, in our balance sheet, and our income statement. Not every year are the trend lines as positive as they are this year. You can see based on the chart we're showing you now, the growth of our total assets, total loans, total deposits, and then the core earnings Ty was alluding to. Again, in 2020, we had a really good year in growth. We ended the year at $2.7 billion in assets. Top left-hand corner there. That's up $420 million for the year. Even through the pandemic process, we were growing the bank. A lot of this, as Ty's already alluded to, came from PPP, the Paycheck Protection Program. The deposits that it generated. Those growth numbers are still very positive, and we've already issued a quarterly report for 2021. Those numbers continued to grow. Actually, at the end of Q1 this year, that 2.7 is now $2.9 billion. Again, we're focused on how we're growing the company and in what areas. At the upper right-hand corner is our total loans. Again, you're looking at about a $1.9 billion total loans at the end of the year. They were up almost 10%, $163 million for the year. We were able to do some lending outside of the PPP program, in addition to the focus we had on that throughout the year. In the bottom left corner is our total deposits. Again, really good trends. We were up $330 million in deposits for the year. That's about a 17% growth in deposits. You can see the trend line for the last five years. Very positive. Through Q1, we're up to about $2.5 billion. Those are published reports. We continue to show good trends in that for 2021. We're optimistic in 2021 that we're going to continue good numbers throughout the year. Core earnings that Ty alluded to, $40 million, $40.3 million. That's pre-tax, pre-provision, and pre-PPP in this case, because that's an unusual transaction, unusual event during 2020. We look at just to be consistent with prior years. You see in 2016, we were $20 million. We've doubled our core earnings, and there's no indication that 2021 is going to be any different. We're positive with what's going on in that arena. Just to show you a 10-year history of our total assets. I think it's just a good trend line again. Not every year, not every segment or pieces of this 10 years looks the same, obviously. 10 years ago, we were $1 billion in total assets. Now we're approaching $3 billion in 2021. It's just a number that we like to throw out there and show you something we're very proud of as we're growing into different markets and looking at future growth too. We've told you in prior annual reports on how we look at our company. We really break it up in four different regions. The East Texas region that's listed there for you in the bottom right-hand corner. Actually, I guess that should be up in the top right-hand corner to reflect where it is. That's kind of the legacy market. Obviously, we've been there for a long time. That is a really good resource of deposits. That one region of our company has about 65% of our deposits. It's always been that way. It's a really good opportunity to garner some deposits. It's not as big of an opportunity to grow loans. That's what we figured out in 2013 and later years to grow in some different areas that we can enhance our company. We began to expand into Central Texas and then Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and then the Houston market in 2017, or 2018, I'm sorry. Those other three markets, which are really metroplex areas, have about 60% of our loans already. They're projected, as we see it going forward, to have some really good growth opportunities. All four of our regions are very important to our company. We see great opportunity in all of them going forward in 2021 and beyond. I know there's a lot of busyness on this slide, to kind of show you so you can determine the value of your stock that you own as a shareholder. It's really measured in a couple of different ways, multiples of book and multiples of earnings. The top section there shows what we've done with our tangible book value, which is the measuring multiple of book. You see where we've grown. That's a compound average growth rate per year of about 11% over the last five years. We started 2016 actually at $11 and some cents. We grew it to $12.45. Now we're approaching $20 at the end of 2020. Again, having reported our Q1 numbers for 2021, that tangible book is now a little over $20. Just to make easy math, if the multiple is 2x book, that's a $40 stock. That's just a measuring stick. We're close to that number today. At the bottom, we look at it as a multiple of earnings. What are we doing with our earnings per share? Again, you see good numbers over the last five years. We reported $2.25 last year. Again, as a multiple of earnings, if you took 17x that, you're going to get something close to $40. That's kind of what the investing world looks at. Again, those are good trend lines, and we're very optimistic again for 2021 to show more improvement. The last thing on this slide would be that green bar. We paid stock adjusted $0.70 a share last year. We're on track to pay $0.80 this year. Even at a $40 stock or something close to $40, that's a two plus% return on your investment just in a cash dividend. A lot of numbers on this page. I'm not going to go over all of them. Ty's already alluded to, I think the biggest or most important number on here is our net earnings. Again, you can see trend lines. Our net earnings there are kind of middle of that page. Our net core earnings, again, that we allude to is at $40.3 million. You can look back in 2016, we were at $20 million. We've made good strides to make improvements on the components of the income statement, the quality of the balance sheet, and we're seeing good results and that's something that the trend lines, again, as we see it, are still very positive for 2021. You measure it on what kind of return are we getting on our average assets and our capital. Again, you see this is obviously going to reflect the same trend lines, but our goal is certainly to keep that up, the ROA on the left-hand side, to keep that up over 1%. We were meeting with investors this week and talking about where that's headed. We're optimistic that we can keep it over 1%, probably 1.2%, 1.25%. That's again, where the trend line's heading and where we're seeing it. You see a dip in 2020. We had more earnings, as I alluded to, but we had a lot more assets too. You spread that over more assets, a little bit lower return on average assets. Again, the trend line that we're seeing, we're projecting that to continue to grow. Same thing with stockholders' equity, how well we leverage our capital, and we're certainly looking at double-digit return on stockholders' equity going forward. Shalene's going to come and talk a little bit about some of the balance sheet and the credit. Good afternoon, Guaranty shareholders, and thank you for joining us today. We're happy to be here at our 2021 annual meeting. There's a few things I want to point out on this loan and deposit composition slide or highlight on here. The first is going to be on the left side of the screen, our loan composition. What this represents is the percentage of our portfolio in key loan types, and it really helps illustrate the diversity that we have in the different loan types and that the largest that we have is commercial real estate, about 32%, followed by C&I at about 24%, and that includes a lot of our PPP loans. In third, we've got our one-to-four family residential at about 21%. Within these pieces of the pie or loan composition, management has the ability to really peel back the onions and further understand some of the concentrations and try and manage those to keep the risk profile of our bank in check. We've done that, and the results of those frequent reviews that we do show that we do have a diverse loan portfolio, not just by these key loan types, but also by geography and by the industries that we loan to. The next thing I want to talk about is on the right side of the slide, and that would be the deposit composition. What this represents is the percentage of depositors by key deposit account types. Our bank has a very strong, very healthy core deposit franchise. It has its roots in East Texas where our bank started, and it's doing really well and progressing in the other three regions of our bank. You can see by looking at the brown and the blue triangles in this pie, that those are demand deposit accounts, which are definitely considered to be core accounts, followed by the gold triangle or slice of the pie. It's about 30% in money market accounts. Again, it's great that we have this core deposit base that really helps us grow our bank at a lower cost of funds than we might have to if we use alternative funds. Underneath the loan composition chart is on the interest margin. Net interest margin is calculated as you know. It is our net interest income for the year divided by our interest earning assets for the year. The higher the number, the more interest we're earning compared to our assets. It's good to see those trends going up. The number that we had in 2020 is very good, and for the past few years, we've been really trending above peers, both in Texas and nationally in this number. We're doing a good job really trying to manage the net interest margin. In 2020, that number does reflect PPP origination income, which will start to trail off probably in 2021. We expect a little bit of contraction if any, in future years, but hopefully not a lot. Just to the right of that is our cost of deposits, which also show good trends. You saw that the cost went up in 2019 when Fed funds went up and back down in 2020 when Fed funds went down as a result of COVID-19. We ended the year at a total cost of deposits at about 54 basis points. I'm going to talk about our credit and risk culture. I love this slide. I think this is a great slide. It really shows what the meat and potatoes of our bank when it comes to loans and it's our credit risk and culture around that. This chart shows a historical view for the past 13 years, which we went about 13 years because it shows you really our last significant credit cycle that happened from 2007 to 2012. It shows you our net charge-offs to our average assets. With this ratio, the lower the number, the better, because it shows that you charge off fewer loans compared to your total assets. Guaranty on this chart represents the green line down at the bottom. We've got Guaranty green there. You can see for the past 13 years, we've had very low% of net charge-offs to average assets. It's a really great number. Even in 2019, we had more recoveries than we actually had charge-offs. Very proud of that, and it speaks to our disciplined credit culture and the strong underwriting practices that we have in place. On this chart, the orange line represents our national peer banks, and the yellow line represents our Texas peer banks. We've historically performed much better in terms of our credit risk. While I'm talking about this, I want to just briefly touch on the allowance for loan losses. Excuse me. During 2020, there were really two significant events that affected the allowance for loan losses. The first was that on January 1st, 2020, we adopted a new credit policy that one, changed the name from allowance for loan losses to allowance for credit losses, which we as bankers have a tough time with. Two, it also allowed us to increase our allowance for credit losses by about $4.5 million. The reason for that increase was because the new accounting standard asks us to estimate the potential losses for our loans over the life of the loan instead of at that point in time, which is what was historically measured. Excuse me. The second event that happened in 2020 was, of course, COVID-19 and the $13 million provision that Ty discussed earlier. Yeah, we've got a great disciplined credit and risk culture, and we ended 2020 with an allowance for credit losses to loan ratio of about 1.9%. We're in a great position in terms of our reserves. I will turn it back over to Ty to let him discuss the rest of 2021. Thanks. In talking about this current year we're in, we put up several bullet points here, but I'll just say that as all of you know, as you've watched your stock price, the valuations for bank stocks have definitely improved, which is obviously good to see. It also gives us a better currency as we look at the acquisition and M&A environment. We are looking at that like we always do. We're actually looking at all four of our regions at the opportunities. We will continue to be disciplined in how we approach M&A. Like we've always done in the past, if it's a transaction that we think makes sense for our shareholders, that the economics make sense, that it's a win-win for both shareholder groups, then that's something we'll look at and look at moving forward with. We don't chase acquisitions or do acquisitions just for the sake of doing them. Because at the end of the day, this company is an organic growth company, and the majority of our growth through our history has been organic growth, and that's our model, and that's what we wake up and focus on every day. Acquisition opportunities that come up, and there are a lot of them probably that will come up in the coming years, do represent a way to really enhance the shareholder value of this company. We're active in that area. Again, we're looking really across our footprint. We have strong earnings projected for this year. Like I mentioned, kind of our run rate of earnings went into 2021, came out of 2020 in a really strong position. You never try to predict the future, but we're very optimistic about the company's prospects for the coming year and coming couple of years, hopefully, with the economy opening back up. The Texas economy is really strong. As the economy opens back up, we're seeing real strength. Again, in every region we're in. Even our East Texas region, we're seeing strength in that region that I haven't seen in 30 years. We're seeing people relocate from the metro areas to some of the smaller markets. We're seeing people relocate from around the country to some of the smaller markets. They're not just going to the larger metro markets. We're very optimistic about really all four of our regions that we're in and just think there's a lot of opportunities. We think this company is really well-positioned in the way we've set this company up strategically to be in the right places at the right time. We're pretty excited about the prospects we see for our company in 2021 and the coming years. We continue to have a very diversified and building income stream outside traditional channels, be it through trust and wealth management, through mortgage lending, and through mortgage warehouse. Those areas continue to grow and do well and add to this company. The last thing is just our continued focus on technology and digital banking. Our thoughts are, like I mentioned earlier, is that that's just the future of banking. If you don't invest in that and think about that, you can easily wake up and be left behind. That's something we've always been focused on, that operational side and strategic side of technology, and we plan to continue doing that to make sure that we're competitive in offering the same products and services that larger banks can offer as a community bank. That's what we do today, and we plan to stay in that position. That concludes our presentation. Right now, we'll handle the business portion of the meeting, and then we will open it up for questions if you have any questions. The reason for the shareholders meeting as stated in the proxy is to elect four Class 3 directors to our board, to ratify the appointment of Whitley Penn as our independent auditor and accounting firm for the year 2021, and to transact any other business that properly comes before this group. Since there's no other business to be brought before the shareholders meeting, and we've had no advance notice of other items to be discussed, let me give you a brief description of the voting items on the agenda today. Item number one on the proxy notice is election of directors. The following directors have been nominated for re-election to serve on the board of the holding company, Guaranty Bancshares. That's James Bunch, Molly Curl, Chris Elliott, and Bill Priefert. They've been nominated as Class 3 directors to serve a three-year term in the company until our 2024 annual shareholders' meeting. There are complete bios on these directors and all of our directors in our proxy statement. Related to that motion, I hereby move to nominate these four individuals as Class 3 directors. Do I have a second to that motion? Ty, you've received a second electronically from Craig Roberts. Okay, we have a motion and a second on that motion. We will now close that motion, having received a motion and a second. The next item as stated is to ratify the appointment of Whitley Penn to serve as our independent auditor and accounting firm for the company for the coming year 2021. This will be the seventh year that they've served in this capacity. I hereby move to ratify the appointment of Whitley Penn to serve as our auditor and independent accounting firm for the coming year. Do I have a second on this motion? Ty, you've received a second electronically from Kirkley. Okay. We have a motion and a second on that motion. The motion is now closed. I believe all the votes by now have been tabulated. Shalene, will you please report the tabulation of the votes? Sure. Based on the voting of shareholder proxies received prior to the meeting, plus the tabulation of votes received prior to the closure of polls just a minute ago, I am pleased to report the following results. Each of the four Class 3 director nominees has been elected by a majority of the votes cast at this meeting, and the appointment of Whitley Penn as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ended December 31st, 2021, has been ratified by a majority of the shares cast at the meeting. The final results for, abstained, against each voting request will be available via Form 8-K that we will file with the SEC tomorrow morning. Those two motions pass, so that concludes the business portion of our meeting. Now we will open it up to any questions that have been submitted online and try to address those. Ty, we have a couple of questions. The first is directed towards you. Where do we see Guaranty's future growth in the company coming from? Like I said to me in my comments, we see our growth coming really in all four of our regions. We see opportunities really in all four regions we're in, and more in some of the regions than we've seen in the past. We're going to continue to focus on organic growth and M&A. At the same token, we will also look at other opportunities to grow this company like we have in the past. I think we strategically have positioned our company really well to be in the regions of the state that are going to see majority of the growth in Texas in the next 20 years. If you really look at the four regions we're in, that's kind of what we've done and positioned ourselves there intentionally. We're not looking to go in other parts of Texas or even out of state. When you get out into West Texas, you have more energy exposure, and so we're really going to stay in these four regions. We think that's a really good model. We think we know those regions, and we think there's a lot of growth opportunities for us, both organic and acquired growth opportunities for us in the future within those four regions. Again, those four regions are going to represent the majority of the growth the state probably sees in the coming years. It puts us in the right places. Great. Thank you. Cappy, I think this next question is probably directed more towards you, where do you see net interest margin trends going in the near future? I kind of laugh at that. I don't think we have any of our analysts in the meeting with us today. When we talk to analysts and to investors, this is one of the biggest questions they focus on. Our net interest margin, our NIM, is the biggest part of our income statement. It is the biggest component, and we're focused on it each and every year. The slide that Shalene talked about a while ago showed an improving NIM, improving net interest margin year-over-year for the last four years. In 2020 was no different. As she alluded to, it was supported a little bit by PPP fee income. As rates have really kind of hit the floor in 2020, it's been a challenge in our net interest margin to maintain that. We did in 2020. In 2021, there'll be some headwinds. There'll be a little bit more of a challenge to maintain that NIM. It is a strong engine cycle that we've been able to build up with the balance sheet and the income stream that it creates. We got a good stream of earnings. I think we're going to be able to maintain that NIM. It probably decreased a little bit in 2021, but after the PPP rolls out, it should stabilize. Of course, it depends on what interest rates do long term. What we're seeing is we're well positioned with a strong balance sheet to continue growing our NIM in the next coming years. Thanks, Cappy. There are no further questions in the queue. Since there are no further questions and since there was no advance notice given by shareholders pertaining to board action to be discussed here at this meeting, I will now declare this meeting adjourned. I want to thank everyone for your continued support and confidence in Guaranty Bancshares and Guaranty Bank & Trust. We really appreciate it, and thanks for attending today.
Loading workspace