I pictured the company as a 20-man shop in a little industrial park, with parking, shurbs in front, and lots of windows. We're already 10 people, and we're looking to move to an industrial park. So things are going like we wrote in our plan. Except we were going to be more profitable.
Eileen: Before we started the business, I thought he was much more aggressive than I am. But that's not what I found out. I always saw myself as kind of placid, but I'm not, at least not at work. I have a lot more opinions than I realized and I'm more assertive.
Francis: She's just not as loud as me.
Eileen: In fact, I think I'm probably tougher than he is. It's a good thing, because we're at a bad spot now. These past couple of weeks, we've been buried with work. It's exciting, and it's what we want, but it's overwhelming, too. It's taking too much out of both of us, 'cause we're too small to have a foreman. Francis has to be out there supervising the shop, helping in here quoting, and I'm in here all the time quoting, or working on the books. So we need to either go smaller, so that there's less of that, or get bigger.
Francis: If we were smaller, I'd have to go back to running the shop. But I wouldn't want to get much bigger than, say, a couple of dozen people. Then you have to start hiring a general manager, and doing this and that.
Eileen: This business gives me a sense of being alive. I don't knit and I don't sew. I don't have any creative ability -- except this. It's creative. It's taking a puzzle, putting it together, making it work, and seeing it grow.
"My father would say, 'He doesn't know anything, he just went to work with his father, that's all he could do." -- David Kay
Son of a Patterson, N.J., silk weaver, 66-year-old Andrew Kay founded Non-Linear Systems Inc. in 1952; today, thanks to the personal computer explosion, that company has metamorphosed into Kaypro Inc. Kay's 40-year-old son, David, started an electronics company and a windmill company, then worked as a contractor before he joined the family business as sales manager in 1980. He is now a vice-president.
Andrew: My own father was always trying to get out of the silk mill. First it was automobiles; he'd take an automobile apart and put it back together every weekend.Then he got into radios. Then sound on film. Not that he made any money, but every time something new would come up, he was into it.
The germ of the idea to have my own business came from him. It was the middle 1930s, the Depression.I was trying to decide what I was going to study, and I went to see Prudential in Newark to see what an actuary's life would be like. I said, "Pffft, that's not what I want to be doing the rest of my life." But I'll never forget what my father said when I told him about the salaries that actuaries made -- $15,000 a year. My father never had any money in his life; he was making $700 a year at that time. But he said, "That isn't so much." I was stunned.
I tried to start a business in several different ways, four or five things on the side, but each time things didn't seem to work out. My brother marveled at how I could just drop one thing with no regrets, forget the money, and go on to something new. My father was my model. I had always seen that no matter what happened, my father would always make out.
I've tried to spend time with my children through the years. I made a decision a long time ago that if it came right down to the wire, the business or them, I would take them. IBM was a family business once, too. I've taken them around the country on a business trip, seven weeks, went around the country, saw all my customers. All of them piled into a station wagon. We just took off. I nearly lost the business that time because of the guy I left in charge.
David has had to do things differently from me. His job is a lot harder. Before he came, there was essentially no sales department -- just 5 people. After he came in, it burgeoned up to 150 or 200, all with no background or tradition in the company.
David will hire people in, try them out, and if they don't work, let them go. I hesitate for a long time before hiring anybody in a position where he's leaving a good job; three weeks later he might be out looking for a new job. I don't like to do that. It really bugs me.
David: My parents always said, "You really ought to go work for somebody else, or do something and then come into the family business later." I remember if my father was dealing with somebody he wasn't happy with, he'd say, "He doesn't know anything, he just went to work for his father, that's all he could do." That made me want to be independent, outside the family for a while.
School was not that easy for me. I wasn't a testpasser type. So I've had to work harder than my father, and I'm more disciplined than he is. I'm also more at ease saying "I can't do everything," and having a management team do things for me.
I think it's because I don't have the aptitudes he does. He's had so much experience that he can almost always think of a better way to do something than the person doing it. But that falls apart when you have a company this size. Even though he can do it better, he has to accept their way. Otherwise, he won't have the time to do anything well himself. I miss being able to do things my way, though. I could do things more efficiently when I had my own business. And I miss the freedom. I'm very tied down here.
The funny thing is, a lot of people that've worked out here have had their own companies, but they wanted to be part of something bigger. That's what happened to me. My father's business was sort of sliding and he wanted me to come in and help him. This was 80 people when I came here, and my business only had 10 people. Today it's 550.
"Everything I did when I started my company, I now know you can't do." -- Barbara Gardner Proctor
Barbara Gardner Proctor founded Proctor & Gardner Advertising Inc. in Chicago in 1970. Today, the company has $7 million in annual billings.
