Work Daze

As a person who grew up behind the counter of Syd’s Camera Shop in White
Plains, New York, I can attest to the positive effects of working in a
family business. No Ivy League business school could ever provide a manager
with a similar sense of how work can affect your life at home. That’s
because in a family business, work and home are one and the same. The only
difference is that at work you get treated with more respect, and unless the
family business is a restaurant, you usually don’t have to wash the dishes.

If your only experience with a family business is The Sopranos, your view of
this unique work style may be somewhat askew. In the Mafia, family members
who have conflicts at work simply shoot each other, putting a permanent and
quick end to disagreements. In most other forms of family business,
arguments tend to go on for decades, if not for generations. And there’s no
time off for holidays or vacations. A flare up at work can mean a permanent
unwelcome sign going up when family members gather, turning even the most
joyous family occasions into angry shareholder meetings. Except at a
birthday or a bris, the disgruntled shareholders don’t vote proxies; they
throw cheese puffs.

Despite the fact that family businesses represent almost 80% of all new job
creation and about 60% of the nation’s employment, there are few resources
that specialize in the business affairs of family businesses. But there is
one such operation – the Family Business Center at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison.

Do family businesses require such high-level attention? Apparently so.

According to Ann Kinkade, the director of the Center, only 3 out of 10
family businesses are successfully passed to the second generation, and just
1 in 10 makes it to the third. Which would explain why a rising star,
fast-tracking his way to the top of the org chart at Syd’s Camera Shop,
found a pink slip packed between the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in
his Star Wars lunch box.

If you are part of a family business, the Wisconsin Family Business Center
offers a wealth of advice to help you make your company grow as big and last
as long as Ford, Annheuser-Busch, or the Genovese mob. For example, the
Center encourages business owners to “introduce their children to the
workings of the family company with simple little projects – like putting
stamps on envelopes – as early as age 3.”

[Even at my advanced age, I’d be tickled pink if my company allowed me this
level of responsibility. I guess that’s the difference between being a
3-year old and thinking like a 3-year old.]

Another interesting factor in a family business is the effect of family
problems on the business. Says director Kinkade, “Sibling rivalry, divorce,
alcohol and drug abuse, relationship conflicts with in-laws or across
generations – any of the things that happen in a family are magnified when
they happen in a family business.”

Frankly, I don’t know how Ms. Kinkade learned so much about my family, but
I’m here to say – I was completely cured of my addiction to Fig Newtons by
the age of 37, and I really doubt that our family business suffered in any
way due to my abuse of Flintstone Vitamins.

Another resource for the family business is a new book, “When Your Parents
Sign the Paychecks,” by Greg McCann. Mr. McCann points to a failure to
include the family in developing a succession plan as the #1 reason family
businesses fail. Businesses that take the “Father Knows Best” approach to
strategic planning, says McCann, can suffer by ignoring or even alienating
the kids. Probably true, say I. Despite his obvious aptitude for the sales
process, I highly doubt either Wally or the Beaver took over their father’s
booming insurance business. In fact, I happen to know that Ward sold out to
Lumpy, but that’s another story.

If you are one of the younger family members, your goal is to build
credibility according to this author. One way to build the credibility you
need to get ahead in the family business is to go to work for another
business. Ideally, I suppose, you go to work for a competitor, bringing
with you sufficient family secrets to crush the home team and drive them
into bankruptcy. At which point you buy up the family business for peanuts,
fire your father, and outsource your mother.

I don’t know about your family, but in my family, that’s what we call
success.