As transactions are completed, accounts opened and checks
cashed, the founder of Hollister’s most successful independent bank
has only one thing on his mind.
As transactions are completed, accounts opened and checks cashed, the founder of Hollister’s most successful independent bank has only one thing on his mind.
How his roses are fairing in the unusually hot spring day.
Ed Stephenson, the founding CEO of San Benito Bank, retired March 31 after 20 years of leading Hollister’s most successful independent bank.
Now, after almost a month of living the life of a retiree, Stephenson, 69, doesn’t regret taking the plunge out of the work force and into retirement. He even said he isn’t bored … yet.
“It’s been a very easy adjustment so far,” Stephenson said. “There’s a lot out there I haven’t seen.”
Stephenson, who was born and raised in Hollister, got into the banking business after attaining degrees from Stanford and Berkeley and serving in the Marines.
After working at Wells Fargo in Los Angeles and at an independent bank in Newport Beach during the 1960s and 1970s, a close childhood friend asked him to submit his name as the proposed chief executive officer of a new bank in his hometown in early 1983.
“I said ‘sure, why not?'” Stephenson said with a shrug.
Stephenson partnered with 11 other directors to start a small bank in an even smaller town, which was already the home of six large banks.
“It was crowded, but they weren’t taking care of the little guys. We kind of fit into that niche – which is what most little banks do,” he said. “Provide a high level of personal service – take care of people.”
By the end of their first year, Stephenson and his partners had amassed a profit of almost 10 times their initial capital and it grew fairly regularly after that, he said.
His proudest achievement over his tenure at San Benito Bank is what those profits did for community members.
“We did real well for a large number of people in this town,” he said.
The bank is in the formal process of finding someone to take Stephenson’s place, according to Jack Hance, vice president of the commercial banking group at San Benito Bank, but recruiting someone who can excel the way Stephenson did will be a challenge.
“He was the image of what a community independent banker should be,” Hance said. “He gave back to the community what it provided for him.”
Stephenson had been mulling over the idea of retirement for about a year before he decided there was more to life than being at the office, he said.
An avid community volunteer in countless nonprofit organizations over the years, he had a revelation in 1989 when he flew to Asia for an international Rotary convention.
“I had forgotten how big the world is,” he said. “You get kind of insular in your view of things. Here’s Hollister and this is the real world, but there’s a whole ‘nother world out there.”
Now that he’s retired, he plans to revisit that revelatory feeling with his wife, Michele, by traveling more. Less work and more play also gives them the opportunity to spend more time with their three adult children and a handful of grandkids.
Theresa Kiernan, executive director of the San Benito Chamber of Commerce, has worked with Stephenson many times over the years on boards and at charity events.
“San Benito Bank has always been involved with the community, and I truly believe it comes from the leadership,” she said. “And the man always has a smile on his face – at least every time I’ve caught him.”
Stephenson has kept active in the community, which has helped him acclimate to his new life.
Groups such as the Boy Scouts, the Hollister Rotary Club, the San Benito County Saddlehorse Association and the Regional Bank Board keep him busy when he’s not rearranging the landscape of his front yard or refilling the bird feeder that brings sprightly finches and canaries to the eaves of his roof.
“They always say you really have to have things planned so you don’t just turn into a mushroom,” he said. “That’s why I have to stay involved with community groups, because you can’t just get out of the way and watch the world go by.”
