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This month, Bank of Stockton employees will gather at Brookside Golf and Country Club for the company’s annual service awards, when the long-standing institution honors its long-tenured employees. Twenty employees will celebrate their 20 or more years working for the bank, for a combined 555 years of tenure. That includes three employees who’ve worked for the bank for more than four decades. 

CEO Doug Eberhardt II says his bank’s “very entrenched culture” of quality customer service and helping local communities can be attributed partly to this deep employee history for a bank that has existed for 157 years. “We have a lot of long-term employees that have been here for a long time, and that helps to preserve the culture of the bank,” Eberhardt says.

This longevity and continuity in serving communities with Bank of Stockton branches — as of November, there will be 21 locations throughout the Central Valley — sets this family business apart, Eberhardt says. Founded in 1867, Bank of Stockton is the oldest bank in California still operating under its original charter.

Eberhardt started working for the business during his high school summer vacations with a stint in the mail room and later the proof department. He attended college at University of the Pacific as a business major with a finance concentration, and after graduating took a job working for the Bank of New York, going through its management training program. After a few years on the East Coast, he got the phone call to come back to the Bank of Stockton. They needed him home. 

Although he had the occasional pull throughout his youth to take a different career path, he says he ultimately felt it was a natural progression to work for the business: It has always been integral to his life.

“Banking seems kind of boring when you’re a teenager and in college. And when you’re younger, you don’t know what you want to do,” he says. “But my family’s been involved with the Bank of Stockton since the ’20s, starting with my grandfather. I grew up around the bank. I used to come downtown when my dad was going to banking school and he was writing papers, and I would play in the lobby, hide-and-seek with my friends.”

Returning to Stockton in 1994, Eberhardt worked as a loan officer, then in other capacities, eventually becoming president in 2015; his dad, Douglass Eberhardt Sr., was still CEO and chairman. He says it could be tough working for his father, who held him to especially high standards.

When Eberhardt’s father died in 2018, the board elected the son to be the bank’s ninth president — and the fourth of the Eberhardt men to assume the role since his grandfather took over as top leadership of the bank in 1949.

Several other family members remain involved today, including Eberhardt’s aunt who sits on the board (she’s in her 90s), a cousin who serves as vice chairwoman and runs the retail banking division, two nephews who are loan officers, and another cousin who works part-time in the marketing department. But no family member is given a free pass. And the person who will succeed Eberhardt as CEO someday will be “the person who can do the best job, whether it’s family or non-family,” he says.

“There’s no free lunch,” Eberhardt says. “It’s harder for family members. You’re held to a different standard than normal employees. We make them go work someplace else and figure out if it’s what they want to do. If they like it when they get an education someplace else, then we’ll bring them back and educate them on how we do business.”

While family dynamics can be challenging, along with a tough regulatory environment and unforeseen circumstances like a global pandemic, Eberhardt says the Bank of Stockton’s general approach is: “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”

Their goal is to stay consistent with how they do business, while embracing new technology and maintaining a focus on how they serve their communities. “The ship doesn’t turn that fast,” Eberhardt says, which brings dependability for their customers. That approach and an open-door policy gives the sense of a welcoming family business, rather than a big bureaucracy like some other banks.

“Anybody can walk in here, call me up — ‘I want a minute talk to you’ — and then come in and tell me a new idea, or complain, or tell me something’s broke. Employees or customers,” Eberhardt says.  

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