ST. CLAIRSVILLE – Nick Hunter – CEO of Fiber Capital Partners, a fund management business that brings in private capital investment to build infrastructure in communities that lack it – said a commitment to the places where they operate businesses has been a guiding principle of his family for centuries, hearkening back to the family office group’s name of Sycamore Legacy.

“When our family moved out to Warren County, Ohio, in 1797 they actually lived in a hollowed-out sycamore tree while they were clearing out their farmland,” he said.

Things are a bit different for Hunter and his clan today.

“I represent a family group of businesses based out of southwestern Ohio,” he said.

The group’s company, Belmont County GIG, is working to lay fiber cable through the county to bring high-quality internet access to underserved areas. Prior to working with fiber, Hunter worked for 10 years as a public accountant in Cleveland.

“In 2018 I joined the family group of businesses with the intent of bringing together private capital to really match and accelerate the projects we’ve got going on with family money,” Hunter said. “My purview quickly became revolving around essentially helping … to bring fiber to the homes, internet to underserved and rural communities across Ohio.”

Hunter said they started close to home, near the family property in Warren County. He said while they saw potential for many projects, the lack of internet access remained the chief obstacle.

“We were looking to bring various improvements to our community, whether that was rebuilding the 100-year-old elementary school or bringing in high-quality manufacturing jobs. We could do neither because the internet was so insufficient in the area that it did not make sense to invest in those projects until the internet issue was solved,” Hunter said.

“We’re an Ohio family that understood the problems we had in our own community, and we built a model that could be replicated to help other communities,” he said. “We want to be part of the community. We have friends in Belmont now. We have amazing connections to the community.”

Hunter said the company settled on fiber lines as the best method to bring fast internet to underserved rural areas that often work with technology 20 years out of date.

Hunter said they launched the fiber business, Little Miami GIG, in 2019 and carried on during the COVID-19 pandemic

“To that day, that business continues to accelerate and grow at an ever-increasing pace,” he said, adding they have gained loyal and satisfied customers.

From there, they would expand to Belmont County, seeing an area that has similar needs.

“We are well on our way to having our first customers here in the next month or two,” he said, adding they have continued the practice of focusing on building local support and quality service.

“Our family first and foremost operates with community in mind. One of our mantras is building businesses one community and one company at a time,” he said. “We’re really interested in propagating what we consider community anchor companies.”

Hunter said transparency and collaboration with the communities are his company’s watchwords.

“Really focusing on grassroots, ground-up self-sustaining companies,” he said. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and build a business, but do it with the right reasons in mind.

“There’s large swaths of these underserved communities across the eastern side and the southwestern side of the state that continue to have sub-par everything, so it really boils down to: can you build communities one family and one business at a time, and can you do it with their future in mind?” he said.

“We always start from: if your family was going to put our 200-year reputation and capital on the line at Warren County … we were only going to do it with the best solution possible. We were not going to some half-baked idea that would fail or wouldn’t bring the best of the best to somebody. We were going to do it right first and do it right once, and that’s the way we approach all of our businesses.”

One practice is to seek feedback from the communities and not simply build where people already are.

“It’s going to Belmont County and saying … ‘Where do you guys have problems? Where do you want us to start?” he said, adding that as part of the policy of transparency, the company provides regular updates to the county.

Hunter said he expects their work to begin bearing fruit this year.

“We are really excited about this first quarter. We should start signing people up by the first quarter of 2022. We would have liked to have gone faster, but we wanted to make sure we had a location for our data centers done,” Hunter said.

“I think we’re in a great spot. We’re very excited and we should be able to provide people … some unbelievable internet that they could have only dreamed of,” he said.

He said there are now five employees with Belmont County GIG, all hired locally. Hunter said the contractor is also local.

“All this money that we’re bringing in is being spent here,” he said.

“We spent a lot of time building relationships in Belmont,” he said. “We want people to be proud of the business we’re building. We want them to see Belmont County GIG and know that their dollars are being reinvested right here in Belmont, they’re not being taken off to some high-density place to make money elsewhere. It is truly meant to be a community anchor business, seeking to serve people for years and years to come.”