Positive Pay

<p>My name is Carl Schwartzentruber, I'm the owner of Green Acres Outdoor Living, Green Acres Home Furnishings, and Green Acres Fuel. We have two stores here in Lehigh Valley, PA, and one store in Marietta, GA. We have Outdoor Living products of all sorts for your home. We sell indoor furniture both hardwood and stuffed furniture. When the outdoor living slows down we shift our staff into fuel oil and heat people's homes throughout the Valley. We started the very first part of this business when I was 17 and we used to load wooden lawn furniture up on the back of a pickup truck. Three afternoons a week, we'd come park the truck, unload the furniture along the road, sell it, and go home again. And that was the beginnings of what today is Green Acres Outdoor Living. I was gone for a few years in the 90s and then came back in 1999 to take over full management. In 2017, my father fully retired and I bought out the last of his shares. So today we're working on the next generation. We have done home shows both here in Lehigh Valley and also in Georgia. About 15 years ago we started doing them in-house, so we have an expo every spring at our stores that we invite the public to and it's a really fun time. We do food, there's fun activities, and it's become a time when the community can come together and just visit and have a good time. It's the highlight of the year for us. Well, our relationship with New Tripoli Bank goes back over 20 years and I've really really appreciated the personal relationships that I've been able to build. Since the very beginning we've been using deposit services and that's been a core element that they have provided very, very well, but lending services also. The very first mortgage that we did on our Whitehall property, which was the first capital purchase that we made 20 years ago. For the last 15 years, probably, it's been Dave Sherwin, and he and I have been very close friends. He has always been there for me when I needed something. Many times when I thought I was facing a difficult challenge he made it look easy. One time in particular I remember I was buying two semi trucks to add to our fleet, and was planning to finance them through the manufacturer, and the manufacturer gave me an interest rate that I thought was ridiculous, and I made a call to Dave Sherwin. He said absolutely, we'd love to finance them and he beat the manufacturer's finance rate by about 3%. Dave Sherwin's been trying to get me to sign up for Positive Pay for months already. I resisted it because of the complexity and the cost. We had our first check washing incident about 3 weeks ago, we had a fairly large check that somebody just changed the name and address on and deposited, and when our vendor called us and was asking about payment we discovered what happened. Even though it was not the Bank's fault in any way at all, New Tripoli Bank was extremely helpful, as they always are, in getting that resolved, and we're signed up for Positive Pay with all of our deposit accounts, and I couldn't be happier with the way that service is working. As far as a banking partner goes, I couldn't be more grateful for the partnership of New Tripoli Bank. We couldn't do business the way we do it without good banking relationships and New Tripoli has proven to be a very capable and worthy partner over these years and I look forward to growing old with them.</p>