Richwood Bank has been in the village for more than 150 years, shown here in its first location at 116 N. Franklin Street. The business moved to its current address at 28 N. Franklin St. in 1906.
(Photo submitted)
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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of stories celebrating multi-generational family-owned businesses in the community. The stories will run each Thursday leading up to an Aug. 1 special edition highlighting the Marysville Journal-Tribune’s 175th anniversary.
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The Richwood Banking Company has helped customers in three different centuries navigate world wars, a depression and rapidly changing times. So, what keeps it thriving in Union County and beyond?
For Chad Hoffman, the third generation president, that success could be chalked up to one idea: Richwood Bank is a community bank.
“We’re not owners, we’re owned by the community,” he said. “We don’t have any institutional stockholders. They’re all farmers, business people and residents of the communities we serve.”
He said for a bank this size, that’s “extremely rare.”
In its more than 155-year history, the Richwood Banking Company has expanded to nine locations and exceeded a billion dollars in financial assets but at its core, Hoffman said he wants customers to still feel like it’s the same small town bank they’ve always known.
History and succession
While the start of the bank dates back to just after the Civil War, Hoffman’s lineage dates back to the roaring 20s. His grandfather, Kenneth Kyle, known as K.D. or Kenny, started at the bank in 1925, serving a total of 52 years, eventually working his way up to president in the mid-1950s, before retiring in the mid-1970s.
That’s when Hoffman’s uncle Dan Kyle took over.
Dan wasn’t Kenny’s only child working at the bank, however. Nancy Hoffman, Chad’s mother, also worked at Richwood and when Dan passed away unexpectedly in December of 1993, she took the role as president.
Not long after that, her son joined the team.
“I started in ’94, I started a month after my uncle passed away,” Hoffman said. “At that time, we were about $68 million in assets and we had 24 employees.”
Those employees were spread across two locations, one in Richwood and one in Plain City, and now there are branches in Springfield, Huntsville, Bellefontaine, Delaware, Marysville and LaRue.
After more than a decade working, Hoffman was appointed to succeeded his mother as president in 2007, saying she taught him everything he knows about banking.
Embracing changes
In his 30-year career, Hoffman said the biggest changes have been in technology, regulation, fraud and interfacing with the public.
“Probably the biggest complaint I get is that it’s always new faces at the counter. It probably always will be,” he said. “People are coming in with a career in mind, not just a job.”
He said he understands that may not be the answer a customer likes to hear but from his perspective, it allows him to do right by his employees.
“When we have an opportunity come open, I don’t want to just hire people from outside so that everyone else stays in the position they’re in. That’s not fair, that’s not even smart,” he said. “Usually when I have that conversation with the customers, they understand it.”
Also, gone are the days of masked men holding up the bank with a gun. Criminals have gotten a bit more sophisticated.
“The amount of fraud today compared to fraud 10, 20 years ago is not even close,” Hoffman said. “Because of that, we can’t just trust somebody like we used to. When you’re talking to someone on the phone, you have to confirm who you’re talking to because the fraudsters may be pretending to be somebody else. And 20 years ago, that never happened.”
Much of the change the customer sees has to do with changing regulations and changing times.
“There were 300 banks and savings and loans in Ohio in 2000. Today, there is 165; in 20 years. For me, that’s not a great indicator of the model,” he said. “I’m a capitalist at heart. I don’t like a business model that can’t stand on its own. It needs to change, it needs to evolve.”
“Worth the difference”
Hoffman said he’s always trying to stay ahead of the curve. In keeping with being a community business, he wants customers to want to bank at Richwood. The company’s policies, work with customers and even aesthetics when entering their buildings reflect that.
“We’re trying to draw the place up and…not only (do) our offices look good, but our cybersecurity stuff is strong as well,” Hoffman said. “We provide a service level that’s above (and) I want to be able to price it. I want to be able to be worth the difference.”
Since 2014, he’s worked to stay true to that ethos, diversifying the company by starting Richwood Marketing or Richwood Payroll, services, he said, other banks don’t do.
“I can’t fight Chase (Bank) toe-to-toe, they’ve got resources I will never have,” he said. “Huntington, PNC, 5/3rd, whatever you want to say, these larger institutions in the area, I can’t go toe-to-toe with them, so I’ve got to just be in a completely different place than they are.”
He said he started thinking about how to invest in the company and work with his team to bring in new features and ideas.
Perhaps the most obvious byproduct of those discussions is Richwood Coffee.
“We were going to be investing in things that weren’t immediately going to have a return on. But I had promised the board that we wouldn’t open another coffee shop unless I could prove the first one worked in Richwood in 2015,” Hoffman said. “We were able to prove that not only was it good for the community, it was good for the bank.”
Richwood now has six coffee shop branches.
The coffee is free to anyone who comes in because the company pays for it, treating it as a marketing expense, Hoffman said.
Richwood partners with Crimson Cup to get the coffee and is able to rebrand it because it’s offered for free.
“We’re not going to be the traditional community bank that everybody thinks of because I fear for its future,” he said. “We’re trying to create something different.”
Looking forward
Hoffman said the company is planning for the future and trying to make sure it sticks around. He said the plan is to always stay in downtown Richwood and the company is finishing up new work on the village’s headquarters building.
“We love operating in Richwood. I mean, we love operating in Union County, but Richwood’s nice,” he said. “The village has just (always) worked with us, they bend over backward to do anything.”
He said success is never guaranteed but whatever keeps the company doing well comes down to making the community and the customer happy.
“You can pick out winners and losers across the board in business, but the biggest thing is I don’t think any business is guaranteed their model,” he said. “You’ve got to continue to evolve, look what the customers need and how to stay ahead of them.”