Patty at Taste of Lake Country.

Branch manager Patty Muehl is busier than ever at our Pewaukee office, where she began her North Shore Bank career 20 years ago this month. But while that may be par for the course, she says, some things have changed.

“When I first started, they had a position called ‘PB-2,’ and it was really just doing consumer loans,” she says. That was her first job title here. “And we were doing a lot more loans back then. I remember there was one month when I only had 10 loans, and that was the worst month I ever had. Now if we have 10 loans in a month, phew!”

The economy was different then, Patty recalls. “A special interest rate back then was around 6.99 percent APR. That was not a bad rate.” Today, of course, customers expect to hear something closer to 4 or 5 percent for a home equity line of credit or similar loan. Regardless, she says, “We did a huge volume in loans back then.”

Patty became a PB-2 at Pewaukee after Marge Welch, a co-worker and friend from another financial institution, got hired at the branch as a teller supervisor in August 1998 and lovingly pestered her to come to North Shore Bank too.

“She called me on a weekly basis — well, probably not weekly,” Patty says. “But we’d worked together for a few years, and we enjoyed working with each other, so she was just like, ‘You have to come here! You have to come here!'” She pauses, and then jokes, “I mean, I hope it wasn’t just for her to get the referral incentive!”

As one of just a few PB-2s across the bank, Patty did substantially more with loans than branch employees generally do these days. “We were not just taking them in and closing them. We really did the processing part of it, as well.” But as the economy shifted — among other things, the dotcom crash took place in 2000 — the consumer loan market slowed down. And around early 2002, Pewaukee’s branch manager transferred to another location.

“So they had an opening here, so Lyneen Fischer, who was our district manager at the time, said, ‘What do you think you want to do?'” Patty says.

And Patty was ready for a little more variety. “Some people say it’s nice to just have to do one thing. But I like to do more than one thing.”

One thing she really enjoys about the Pewaukee branch is how community-oriented it is. North Shore Bank is the headline sponsor of the town’s biggest annual event, Taste of Lake Country, and sponsors the nonprofit Positively Pewaukee as well as many other local happenings. “It’s more of a casual way to talk to people without always being in the branch,” Patty says.

As for the folks in the branch, she notes that although she has no children, “I feel like after working at North Shore Bank for so many years, my co-workers are part of my family.” Marge Welch retired in 2016, and with banking services being more automated, there are fewer branch employees now — but that can make the relationships stronger, Patty says.

“We’ve got to find activities to stay busy,” she says, and then pauses again. “Although I’ve never had that problem!”