“I never wanted to be an entrepreneur,” says Rick Saunders, 66. “It was not part of my life’s ambition to be a bank CEO. I was perfectly fine being a banker to the community.”

Saunders is co-founder and CEO of Florence-based First Reliance Bank and its holding company First Reliance Bancshares Inc. On June 24, First Reliance and Colony Bankcorp Inc. announced the latter would acquire 100% of First Reliance shares in a stock-and-cash transaction worth about $163 million.

First Reliance Bank has nine locations in South Carolina, including two in Florence, as well as a digital banking branch.

Colony — based in Fitzgerald, GA — operates 31 full-service branches in Georgia; two full-service branches and loan production offices in Tallahassee and Jacksonville, FL; and a loan production office in Alabama, according to an email from Colony Communications Manager Brantley Collins.

Saunders said in a phone interview that even though, legally, the transaction is an acquisition, he feels it’s more like a merger.

“I grew up in Timmonsville,” Saunders said, adding he had spent most of his childhood in Timmonsville and most of his adult life in Florence.

“I became a banker in the 80s,” he said. By 1983-1987 he had entered the trajectory of a career banker with Pee Dee State Bank, that is, until it was sold to a larger bank with which it was “not aligned from a value and culture perspective.”

He said he, along with brother Paul and colleague Dale Porter, had decided to start up a bank in 1998. They began formulating the concept of First Reliance and opened it for business in 1999. “All we wanted to do was get our old community bank back in our neighborhood,” he said.

Saunders related how, between 1998 and 2003, a thousand banks had been founded in the United States. “It was a very robust period to be in the banking business,” he said. “You could not find a better environment for three young guys to start a bank.”

Saunders said, “About six months ago, we had decided to look for a partner. We wanted to find someone who viewed us as a partner not a buyer.

“The economic environment was perfect and the political environment was perfect to open up these conversations. The world is making it so that these kinds of conversations can be had now.

“I was very intentional about finding the right partner in this deal ... I wanted to make sure the associate, customer and shareholder would benefit from this in my discussions.”

He had come up with a laundry list of qualities the bank looked for in a partner, and the points were “pretty much non-negotiable.”

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