“My father never said much to me about it, although I know he wanted me to [assume leadership]. I needed the job so that’s why I started working at the bank during the summer,” Mitchell said.
He said while he has benefited financially from owning a successful bank, quality service and dedication to his customers continues to be his motivation. He’s also deeply engaged in the community, serving on several boards, including the DC Chamber of Commerce and the Sewell Music Conservatory.
“Our service and our staff are better because we sincerely care about our customers more than other banks do,” said Mitchell. “And that’s pretty obvious, given what happened in the economy in the last five years. Clearly mortgage bankers and a lot of other bankers took advantage of a lot of people. We simply don’t do that. We don’t have that culture in our banks.”
That culture was established by his grandfather, Jesse Mitchell, who earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Howard University in the early 1900s. He also earned an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Finance. The elder Mitchell went onto become the vice president of Industrial Savings Bank, which later became Industrial Bank.
Jesse Mitchell once said, “The simple duty of a banker is to stand between and draw together the man that needs and the man that has the funds. I have done my duty and no more. The bank has created better homes, better communities and better and more useful lives.”
Mitchell, the third generation banker, continues to carry on that legacy.
“When I saw that we could help, and I saw it from the very beginning, that we could help people. And I thought that we could do it in banking,” Doyle Mitchell said. “I’ve always enjoyed the people part of banking. The side where we help people.”
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