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Small Business Spotlight: Modern Technology To Heirloom Gifts
We understand that being a small business owner is tough. That’s why we plan to spotlight a different business each month to help you learn about unique businesses in your own back yard.
Looking for a gift for that person who has everything? Look no further. Buckeye Designs and Engraving specializes in unique gifts. With inspiration from Uncle Wayne Barker’s experience in graphic design, Ben Barker used his project management skills to open Buckeye Designs and Engraving. Together they produce everything from personalized wine glasses for weddings to engraved watermelons for summer fairs. One of the most common requests they do is the personalization of people’s guns but they thrive on trying new ideas. They believe that the sky is the limit!
Buckeye Designs and Engraving uses advanced laser engraving technology to create personalized gifts and other items. Owner Ben Barker shows off the technology they use.
Using advanced laser engraving technology, Buckeye Designs and Engraving is able to create one of a kind personalized gifts for all occasions. Their American made Epilog Laser system is able to etch intricate designs into wood, acrylic, plastic, marble, and much more. Attached to a computer just like a printer, the system will cut designs created in graphic design software into the medium of your choice using a CO2 laser beam.
Wayne Barker poses with a display of items in the showroom.
Family photos etched into marble, granite or wood make fantastic gifts. Wood plaques imprinted with sports teams can be displayed to show team spirit and custom pet tags can help guide your pets home should they roam off. Priding themselves on competitive pricing, this veteran owned and operated business also completes more standard business requests like nametags, nameplates and awards. So they really are a one-stop shop!
You can visit the showroom at 486 South Paint Street in Chillicothe to see a variety of their work. Hours of operation are Monday through Friday 10 a.m. -7 p.m. and weekends by appointment.
Find them on Facebook Here or call 740.851.3851.
Family tree engraved on wood.
Transforming family photos into cherished keepsakes.
A watermelon for the Ross County Fair!
It’s Good Neighbor Day!
Get to know your neighbors! Host a block party, a backyard cookout or just a playdate for the kids next door.
Are you friendly with your neighbors? Do you even know who they are? There was once a time when folks commonly spent their evenings out on the porch, swapping stories and recipes across the fence. These days it’s almost uncommon to even know who lives next door.
Today is actually Good Neighbor Day, encouraging Americans to be, well…. good neighbors. But what does that mean? It means at least being respectful and considerate of the folks in your neighborhood. The best neighbors are the ones who are also thoughtful.
Need some inspiration?
Start out by talking to people. Say hello, ask how they are or just wave from a distance. If they’re new to the neighborhood, stop by and introduce yourself.
Once you know who they are consider doing something a little extra. Try organizing a neighborhood event like a yard sale, Christmas party, walking group or block party.
Take a look around and consider the folks around you. Is there a single mom who seems to be struggling? Invite her kids over for a play date so she can run to the store or finish chores. Is your neighbor elderly? Take their paper up to the house on bad weather days or offer to pick up something at the store when you go. Maybe they are a widower or a shut-in? Take them a home cooked meal once in a while. They might be really grateful for those leftovers you were about to throw in the fridge.
Keep an eye out for those who are sick or struggling. Take them soup or check in on them just to say hi and make sure they’re ok.
If the power goes out, make sure your neighbor has a way to stay warm or to cook until the electric comes back.
Want to make friends with someone or maybe just say thanks for being a good neighbor? Take them an unexpected gift. It need not be expensive – flowers from your garden or fresh cookies from the oven come to mind.
At minimum, being a good neighbor means respecting the people around you. Keep the noise down, especially between the hours of 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. No mowing, no hammering, no loud music when folks might be trying to sleep or just enjoy a quiet morning at home.
Respect their space. Don’t trespass or spy, gossip or meddle in their affairs. Be responsible for your pets, cleaning up after them and keeping them off your neighbor’s lawn.
Keep your home neat and well maintained. Keep your grass cut and trash picked up from your yard. Keep your sidewalk clean of snow, bicycles and other items that might make it difficult to walk. Shoveling your own sidewalk? Take a few minutes to do theirs as well.
Do you have a good neighbor? We would love to hear about them! Tell us about your good neighbor or about ways you try to be a good neighbor in the comments section below.
VCNB Employees Talk Savings Goals
VCNB Rewards Checking has opened a new world of opportunity for our customers to earn points toward things they want! Gift cards, cash back, travel and other great rewards are available.
Ever wonder what other people are saving their UChoose Rewards® points for? We asked some of our employees to tell us about their savings goals!
Here are their answers. Click to enlarge:
What are you saving your UChoose® Rewards points for? Don’t have VCNB Rewards Checking? Learn more and open an account here!
Back to School Time With Popmoney®
Let’s face it. Back to School time is expensive and it’s busy. Between school functions, extracurricular sports and the flurry of other activities that occur in the fall, most of us are on the go all the time. While debit and credit card usage is on the rise, many of our customers find themselves without cash – sometimes when they need it most.
That’s where Popmoney® Personal Payment Service can come in handy. This service allows customers to send funds to other people using just their mobile phone number or email address.
That’s right. You don’t need their bank account information to send funds. You don’t have to stop at the bank or the ATM. Just login to your bank account via online banking or our mobile banking app to get started.
Just think how useful it could be if you are sharing a bill with someone or if you owe money to a friend. It’s Saturday night and you’re having pizza out with friends. Instead of making your poor waiter split the bill five ways, have one person pay and everyone else can just reimburse the buyer by sending the money via Popmoney!
Your neighbor is replacing their like new kitchen table and is offering you first dibs for a good price. You don’t have the cash on you but you can send them the money right from their living room with just a few clicks on your phone.
Your niece is away at college and is always desperate for spending money. You take pity on her and want to give her a little extra but want to do it more quickly than sending a check in the mail. If you send it via Popmoney she can have it before the leftover pizza is gone.
Whether you are sending or receiving money, Popmoney is easy to use. It does cost .50 per transaction to send money but it’s free to receive. If you have a Rewards Checking account with VCNB you can earn a few rewards points when you use Popmoney.
To get started with Popmoney, just sign in to your online or mobile bank account. Click on Online Bill Pay and look for the Popmoney tab.
Just For Fun: Fall Inspiration
Fall arrives in just a few days, bringing with it shorter days, cooler evenings and a lot of opportunity to enjoy seasonal fun. For families, there are countless things to do – both inside and out!
Ohio residents are fortunate to have countless state parks and forests as well as several community parks to enjoy. Take your family on a little hike through the woods to enjoy the fall colors, get some exercise and soak in your natural surroundings.
Take a Hike. There are tons of parks in Ohio.
Rake leaves and…. jump in them! Need we say more?
Pack a picnic and spend the day at the park.
Make art with fall leaves.
Plant an indoor herb garden.
Tell scary stories.
Visit a pick-your-own orchard and then make apple pie together!
Decorate a pumpkin.
Find a local corn maze, haunted house or fall festival. There are several in Ohio!
Explore the outdoors with a Nature Scavenger Hunt.
Toss a ball around your back yard.
Have a family photo shoot. With a digital camera or phone camera, it’s free to let everyone take turns snapping pictures.
Plant bulbs for spring flowers.
Tailgate at your local high school football game.
Load everyone in the car and leaf peep!
Write down or talk about what you’re grateful for every day.
Cozy up with popcorn, hot chocolate and a favorite movie. “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” comes to mind.
Does your family have a favorite fall tradition? We would love to hear about it! Tell us in the comments section below!
Earning Rewards With Rewards Checking
Lots of our customers are signing up for Rewards Checking and are excited to find ways to earn points with UChoose Rewards®. Here are a few ways points can be earned.
Swipe your card(s)
Receive one point for every $3 spent with your debit card. Have a VCNB Platinum Visa® Favor Credit Card? Earn one point for every dollar spent when you swipe this card.
Direct Deposit
You’re receiving a paycheck anyway. Now you can earn ten points for one direct deposit per monthly cycle.
Swipe your debit card more
Swipe your debit card 21 or more times during a monthly cycle and receive 200 bonus points! Earning points was never so easy.
Online Bill Pay
Pay bills with VCNB Online Bill Pay to earn even more! Receive twenty points per transaction and receive up to 100 points per monthly cycle simply for paying your bills. Just remember, if you sign up for Bill Pay, you must make at least one payment during the calendar month or you will be assessed a $3 fee.
Popmoney ® Personal Payment Service
Send money to someone with Popmoney® and earn 50 points per transaction. You can earn up to 200 points just using this service you may already be using. At .50 per transaction to use Popmoney®, it’s cheaper than mailing a check!
New Savings Account
Receive a 1,000 point one-time bonus at the time of account opening when you open a new savings account.
One more thing. We will reward your loyalty to VCNB with 500 Anniversary rewards points. This will happen every year for the life of the account! Also be sure to check in with us periodically – we may offer future promotions for loan accounts.
Don’t have Rewards Checking? Learn more about this account here. Have an account but still need to sign up for UChoose Rewards? Click here to get started.
Banking Together For Generations: The McGlaughlin Family’s Rich History
After 148 years in business, you might expect VCNB to have a few longtime customers. But would you expect to see one family bank with us since the year we opened our doors? That’s the case with Laura McGlaughlin’s family.
Laura recently turned 95 years young and has a host of stories about local history, our bank and the family farm.
Laura McGlaughlin is pictured with her grandsons Devry McGlaughlin and Scott McGlaughlin. The family has banked with Vinton County National Bank since the bank opened in 1867.
The first McGlaughlin to come to Vinton County settled on forty acres while the Civil War was still raging in other parts of the country. Andrew Jackson McGlaughlin found forested land near Zaleski, constructed a log cabin and began a new life in 1863.
When Daniel Will opened the doors of the Vinton County National Bank in 1867, McGlaughlin was among our first customers – and the family has been loyal to VCNB ever since.
Laura moved to the McGlaughlin family farm in 1938 when she was an 18 year old newlywed and moving in with her husband Beryl’s family. The home she still lives in is the 1863 log cabin but with some additions and improvements. “I came here when I was 18 and I’ve never lived anywhere else since then,” she said. “It is beautiful and peaceful out here. I think God made me special for this place.”
Over those 77 years, she has witnessed much of the area’s rich history and has recorded many stories in notebooks – handwritten stories in a stack of notebooks that her grandson Devry called a “treasure trove.” There are numerous tales that remain unwritten, including that of one McGlaughlin ancestor who was an aide to General George Washington.
VCNB Retail Banking Officer Tom Oyer and Retail Accounts Officer Brenda Brooks visited Laura McGlaughlin in her home this summer.
McGlaughlin brothers Devry and Scott hold up a local paper from the sixties, one of many pieces of local memorabilia saved over the years.
A VCNB ad promoting loans for home appliances.
Laura McGlaughlin
She has a number of her own stories. The sweet natured woman was a popular Sunday School teacher for fifty years. She learned to drive in 1984, proving to everyone that 64 is still a good age to learn a new skill. Laura is the type of lady who knows everyone in the community and who everyone knows and loves.
Generations of the Will family have remained hands-on at the bank and Laura remembers doing businesses with many of them. She specifically remembers Bob Will, Sr. and his son Bob Will, Jr. We were thrilled to stop in for a visit at her home this summer so Laura could meet the next generation of Wills involved in the bank. Retail Banking Officer Tom Oyer is the grandson of Bob Will, Jr. and he enjoyed meeting this customer who could share some stories about his family.
Today the farm is 450 acres and her grandsons Scott and Devry help her care for the property and are even helping her look to the future. She is the Secretary for their new business Lookout Ridge Resources. They are working to obtain tree farm certification for the first time in more than thirty years and hope to bring back the farm’s once successful apple orchard.
Like most doting grandmothers, she makes no attempt to hide her affection for her grandsons. “I’m proud of them. They take good care of me,” she said of Scott and Devry. The pair are also enamored with farm and area history, happily sharing newspaper clippings and other documents from Vinton County history and even giving a guided walk to see an old one-room school house and a magnificent ridgetop view of Vinton County. “It’s beautiful and peaceful up here,” Laura said.
What’s more important than the beauty of this rural farm or stories from the past? According to Laura, the answer is love. “I try to be kind to people. The McGlaughlins have always been about helping people and I always try to be kind and helpful,” she said. “Love is the most important thing.”
Retail Accounts Officer Brenda Brooks has been serving Laura and her family since she came to work at the bank 36 years ago. “Laura is such a sweetheart. She’s been my customer for years and years and I just love her,” Brooks said. “And now I get to work with her grandsons! Imagine having that many generations of one family bank with you,” she said.
Through the last 148 years the McGlaughlins have remained loyal customers, seeing the bank through three different centuries, economic change and several wars. As the bank has grown from one office to seventeen and as modern advancements have replaced pen and paper with typewriters and typewriters with computers, the McGlaughlin family has been with us for the entire journey.
Banking has changed much over the years since Daniel Will hung out his shingle in McArthur in 1867 but as a community bank, some things never change. We love our communities and value the people in them. Knowing our customers and being their bankers for not just a lifetime but for generations is what it’s all about.
We thank Laura McGlaughlin, her grandsons and all those who came before them for banking with us then and now. Here’s to another 148 great years!
Earn Gift Cards With Rewards Checking
Last year VCNB partnered with UChoose Rewards® to offer a new and improved program for earning rewards points using the VCNB Visa® Platinum credit card. This month we introduced a new product called Rewards Checking that allows our customers to earn rewards points on debit card transactions and other banking behaviors. Customers can link their Rewards Checking and Visa Platinum cards on one UChoose Rewards® account to accumulate points more quickly.
We have been elated with customer response to Rewards Checking and the new opportunities to earn points. We’ve told you about how to earn points but we haven’t talked about all the ways you can redeem those points.
Cash back, gift cards, event tickets and travel expenses are among the things customers can receive when they redeem points. Today we’re talking about some of the gift cards that are available at this time.
Gift cards are available for a large variety of restaurants, retail stores, gas stations, entertainment, electronics and travel. Here are just a few:
Phew! What a list! If you’re a Rewards Checking or VCNB Visa® Platinum customer, be sure to log in to the UChoose Rewards website and take a look at the rewards you can earn. The number of points necessary to redeem for a gift card varies depending on the value and type of card. For example, a $25 Applebee’s or Kohls gift card will each cost 2884 rewards points while a $50 Walmart card will cost 5974 points.
Visit us online or in your local office to open an account or to learn full account details. Already have a Rewards Checking account but need help registering for UChoose Rewards? Call our customer service department at 1.800.542.5004 or contact your local office.
Have You Heard About Rewards Checking?
This is a big day here at VCNB. That’s because we have released a new product to our customers and frankly, we couldn’t be happier.
This week marks the debut of VCNB Rewards Checking. With Rewards Checking you can earn UChoose Rewards® points just doing what you always do – buying things with your debit or Platinum Visa® card and by using bank products.
We’ll give you points for having direct deposit, for automatic loan payments and for some other things you may already be doing with us. The more you use your card and the more VCNB products you use, the more points you will earn.
Points can be redeemed through UChoose for cash back, gift cards, travel, concert tickets and all sorts of other great things! Essentially, we’re rewarding you for your loyal business with VCNB!
Many of our employees have been testing Rewards Checking this summer and are thrilled with their points earnings. To reward you even more, we are offering 5,000 bonus points if you sign up for Rewards Checking before December 31, 2015.
There is a monthly service charge of $7 which will be imposed each statement cycle. However, you can receive a $7 credit to your account each statement cycle by either completing fifteen or more debit card transactions per statement cycle or by maintaining a combined monthly total deposit relationship of $5,000.
Want to sign up? It’s easy! If you are an existing VCNB customer, just contact an account representative and ask to switch. If you’re a new customer, you can sign up either online or at any of our seventeen bank locations. Once you have signed up for Rewards Checking, you will need to take just a few minutes to login to the UChoose Rewards website to register your debit card before you will begin earning points.
You can learn more about Rewards Checking and the 5,000 point promotion by clicking http://www.vintoncountybank.com/rewardschecking/.
What are you waiting for? Rewards Checking is HERE! Sign up today!
VCNB Family 