"My dad is writing me letters now, and he says he's proud of me," John, now 18, reports. "But he has to realize that we're not just an unhappy customer, that we're more than a problem that had to be solved." Pausing for a moment, he adds, "I guess you could say, in this instance, actions will speak louder than words."
REAR A BUSINESS, RUIN A FAMILY?
Don't worry about all that time you need to spend at the business. It's OK. Your family can do without you for a while.
At least that's the rationalization that passes for reality in most entrepreneurial minds. There's only one catch, though. "It's just not true," warns Thomas Davidow, a family-business psychologist in Needham, Mass. "A family is a system just as complex as the business, and everyone has to play their part." In other words, your spouse can't fill in for you.
Which means, of course, that you have to make your entrepreneurial ambition mesh with domestic demands. But where do you start? Here, say a few experienced jugglers, are some first steps:
1. Create artificial boundaries -- and stick to them. It's a simple promise: you stop working on weekends, or you vow to take everybody out for dinner once a week. The only hard part is actually carrying through with it. "The demands of a growing business will always drive out the family if you let it," explains W. Gibb Dyer Jr., author of The Entrepreneurial Experience.
It's best, then, to make a promise that's not so tough to keep. For instance, Noall Knighton, president of Knighton Optical Inc., a $4.5-million chain of eyeglass retailers based in Ogden, Utah, coaches his son's soccer team. Most nights, Knighton can't promise his family exactly when he'll see them -- except, that is, on Tuesday. "Every Tuesday, no matter what's going on, I leave my desk by 5 p.m.," he says. According to Davidow, such routine commitments often work out well. "Give entrepreneurs a place to be and a goal to accomplish, and you're speaking their language," he says.
Every Sunday, Dixon Fleming, chairman and CEO of Factory Stores of America, in Smithfield, N.C., places himself at the family dinner table, where each member shares news. "No, it's not a place where anyone is likely to spill their guts," explains the 40-year-old father of three. "But it's a way to take the temperature."
2. Never tell your family what you gave up to be with them. Walking out of a meeting because you have to pick up your child at school isn't always easy, and it's never guilt-free. "You feel like you're the leader, so you should be there," confesses Merrily Orsini, the owner of $2.5-million Elder Care Solutions, in Louisville. But she cautions against making your kids aware of such trade-offs. "Being a parent is about sacrifices," says Orsini. "Kids need to know they're important -- not what you sacrificed to be with them."
3. Shorten the distance between work and home. If Merrily Orsini lived any closer to her business, her two boys would be bunking in a conference room. "When the boys reached 10 and 12, I wanted to see who they brought home from school, help them with their homework, and then go back to work," says the single mother. Which is why she cleared space for her home on the top two floors of Elder Care's headquarters, in the Highlands area of Louisville.
Eventually, Elder Care's expanding space needs forced Orsini and her family to find other digs -- but they didn't go far. They now live in a home behind her company.
4. Bring your kids to work. Noall Knighton has never forgotten the Saturdays he spent working at his dad's eyeglass company. "He'd let us work in the returns department or assembly. It was his way of sharing his world with us," says Knighton, who has since taken over the business. He says his dad made a point of giving him a real job to do -- "something that I could do and learn, not a make-believe job." And the tradition goes on. Today Knighton brings his 10-year-old to work and sets him to work at the mail machine.
As strange as it sounds, other company builders actually cart their kids along on business trips. Traveling for his consulting business nearly 75% of the time, Max Carey, owner of Corporate Resource Development, in Atlanta, invites each of his three children (ages 18, 15, and 13) to join him at least twice a year on a business trip. On a recent cross-country plane flight he introduced his 13-year-old son to the joys of crossword puzzles. "It's uninterrupted one-on-one time," he explains. "You end up doing or talking about things you never would at home."
5. Remember, you're building the business because you want to. "Kids know when you're lying to them," offers Max Carey. "If you try to pin your work habits on them, they'll resent the lie." Not long ago the father of three had just finished his now-famed monologue that begins, "I'm building the business to build a better life for my family," when his daughter stopped him cold. "Don't tell me you work this hard for me," she chided. "You do it for yourself; you'd do the same thing even if we weren't around." After a few feeble rebuttals, Carey admitted she was right. "It's hard to admit to my family how much I love the business -- it's my reason for being," he confesses. "Somehow it sounds less selfish, though, if you say you're working for the good of the family." Today Carey openly shares with his family the joys of closing a deal or exceeding projections.
