Meyer Building has been putting up post frame buildings since 1968. If you have driven past a new machine shed, a shop, a commercial building going up along a county road within a couple of hours of the company's home base in Craigville, there is a reasonable chance the Gerber family had a hand in it.
The work is broader than the buildings themselves. On the commercial side, Meyer Building serves as a general contractor, which means the job can start well before the first post goes in the ground and continue long after the roof is on. Site work. Driveways. Concrete. Finishing out the inside. Electrical, plumbing, heating. As they describe it, those are all the things Meyer Building does, which is another way of saying the company carries responsibility for a lot of moving parts at once, on somebody else's timeline, in weather nobody controls.
That kind of business runs on trust in both directions. Customers trust the Gerbers to show up and finish. And the Gerbers, over more than five decades and now into a second generation, have had to decide who they trust to stand behind the work when conditions get difficult. Because in construction, conditions eventually get difficult.
Here's Gene, Jason, and Matthew Gerber of Meyer Building, in their own words:
The Downturn Test
Meyer Building had not been working with First Bank of Berne long when the economy turned. Construction tends to feel that kind of shift early. Projects that were penciled in get postponed. Owners who were ready to build decide to wait a year. The phone rings less, the bids get thinner, and the numbers on the financial statements start telling a story that is hard to argue with.
The Gerbers do not soften how that period felt. It was a tough time. They were struggling. And they are candid about what a lender looking at their paperwork would have reasonably concluded. In their words, "by the looks of our financial statements at that time, there would have been no reason for them to have made that risk and taken that risk, but they did."
There is a version of that story where the decision gets made somewhere else, by someone who has never seen a post frame building go up and does not know the family name. That is the practical difference in how a community bank makes a call. Someone who knows the operation, knows the market, and knows the people is in the room when the question comes up. The Gerbers credit God's grace and the bank's help for getting them through, and they are clear that both mattered.
What came out of that stretch was not a transaction. It was a relationship built on trust formed in the beginning and grown over the years through different experiences, which is how they put it, and which is a fair description of how most long relationships actually work. You do not know what a relationship is worth until something goes wrong in it.
Local, Because That Is What They Are
Ask the Gerbers why they chose First Bank of Berne and the answer starts with proximity, not pricing. They point to local presence, community involvement, and the ability to be there when assistance is needed. Then they get to the part that sounds simple and is not: it was important to go with a bank that was locally owned and locally managed, because that is what Meyer Building is. Locally owned, locally managed, and comfortable working with somebody who operates the same way.
The daily texture of it is unglamorous and, if you run a business, familiar. There are services they use on a daily and weekly basis and do not think much about, the ordinary account and financing tools that keep a construction company moving. And there is the phone. You pick it up and somebody is right there to answer. It makes things easy, which is not a small claim when you are trying to get an answer between a jobsite and a supplier and a customer who wants to know whether the concrete is getting poured this week.
More recently the questions have been about growth and transition. The business is moving from dad's ownership into the next generation, with Matthew and Jason coming alongside. Anyone who has been through a family business handoff knows those conversations are rarely just legal or financial. They involve timing, fairness, capacity, and a lot of unspoken history. The Gerbers describe the bank as helping them navigate the changes of growth and transition through that stretch.
Which brings them to the standard they hold their bank to, and it is a higher bar than most:
"I think a bank should provide the cash when you need it, of course. That's a minimum. And a bank that does that is probably just a bank. But a bank that can provide strategy and counsel and perspective of others in the industry or even locally, that's powerful. That's more than just a bank."
Fifty-plus years in, Meyer Building is still building. The Gerbers call the relationship vital to the success of the company and to its sustenance, a word that suggests something ongoing rather than something finished. If you are running a locally owned business and want a community bank that will pick up the phone and think alongside you, the business bankers at First Bank of Berne are worth a conversation.