Change - Part 2

I was raised the child (number 4 of 5) of a small business owner. Some of you know exactly what that means. For our family, life centered on the family business and survival. This is all pre-technology so we had two landlines – the family phone and the office phone (the Bat phone if you will). We could be in the middle of dinner and if the work phone rang in the other room, my dad would jump up to run to the phone. He would then come back to the table and proceed to discuss how he/we were going to address the latest needs of the customer. Our lives revolved around the family business.

This also meant that we didn’t spend a lot of time in youth sports or non-work-related activities. We almost always worked. My younger sister and I famously would spend our Saturdays at six years old packaging products for pennies a box and racing each other to be the first to finish. Then there were the times as we got older where we were at the shop at 10 PM on Sunday night after a heavy rain sweeping water off the shop floor, you get my point. Over the years I was trained in each part of the company, and with the learning of each new skill came uncertainty, fear, excitement, failure, success and growth.

So, when I was about to graduate from college with a communications and marketing degree, I was thrilled at the prospect of breaking free of the family business which my older brother, Chris (3 of 5), had already accomplished. Then the phone rang.

Dad was going to leave the business and start a nonprofit. Mom and my oldest brother asked Chris and I to join them in the family business and make a go of it – really take this thing to the next level. We agreed and we did.

It was natural for us to fall into our areas of comfort. Henry took production, Chris took sales, I took marketing and mom was the president. All good and extremely comfortable. Business was ok, but we had so much more potential.

Mom called us into her office and said that we need to change, ‘you’re our best reps – you need to go out and sell.’ With that we hired managers to replace us. It was frightening and uncomfortable. It took a lot of time and money to hire, train and frankly, change.

Within a couple of years our sales took off and the three of us were our top revenue producers. We were able to expand into new spaces/buildings three times, acquire new businesses and hire lots of new people. It was a blast, and it fostered close relationships that still exist today as well as creating a vehicle for our 75+ employees to buy houses, raise families, send their kids to college, donate to charity, on and on, and it started with change.

Signed,

Change (Let’s get it done)