LEXINGTON, Va. (WDBJ7)– It’s not typically you see the president of a financial institution doing primary loan purposes.
“We have you know probably in the neighborhood of fifty loans we’re trying to key in,” said Steve Grist, the President of Cornerstone Bank, as he worked at his computer. “And we have eight people keying at the same time on different loans. We’ve assigned people different loans. And it’s first come, first served in this program.”
And in a time when the primary SBA effort ran out of cash in days, they wished to start out early.
“Actually before 10:30 we tried to get on to key in the information,” Grist said. “But we knew we couldn’t hit the submit button until 10:30.”
He was attempting to get in for patrons like College Florist, the place proprietor Carolyn Tolley was heartbroken to let her workers go.
“The hardest part was not being able to pay the people, some of them as many as ten years have worked here,” Tolley said. “And have given me the best of themselves every time they walked in the door.”
She was fortunate sufficient to be first within the queue at Cornerstone Financial institution this morning.
“He called me Saturday morning and said: we want to let you know that you are going to be, we’re going to put you in first thing,” she said. “It opens at 10:30.”
“Early on, we got four right out of the gate, right about 10:30,” Grist explained. Tolley was one of them. “And we were thinking, we’re on the East Coast, the poor California bankers are still asleep. But then the volume got to be so much that we have been able to get in only one or two in the last couple of hours.”
Leaving the pc display exhibiting, as Grist calls it, the unhappy face.
“We’re planning to be right here 24/7 till we get all of our loans enter or the cash runs out,” he stated.
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