The key, Michelle Rousseff Kemp found, is to bar your kids from the family business.
A first-generation american, half Polish and half Macedonian, Michelle Rousseff grew up on a 160-acre cattle and grain farm in Fort Wayne, Ind., went to college, and married another Macedonian, John Markoff, who owned a tavern. She had a baby, then two more: Jonathon in 1971, Katrina in 1973, and Natalie in 1976. Shortly after Natalie was born, Michelle's marriage collapsed. "I have three children. What am I going to do?” she wondered, but she didn't waste time brooding. She was from tough stock; she coped. To help ends meet, she worked a paper route. At the age of 29, she was getting up at dawn and flinging newspapers at people's houses from her Ford Country Sedan.
It took Michelle a while to tell her father about the divorce. But he had already guessed that there was trouble. "What took you so long?” he asked. Then he gave her a job at the janitorial supplies company he owned. At night, Michelle changed the paper dispensers in bathrooms; by day, she sold degreasers and chemical solvents. Sales was thought to be a man's world, but Michelle excelled. She liked winning customers and clients.
Then, another shock: Her father had a heart attack and briefly became an invalid. Without him running the operation, the bank threatened to call a loan and take over the business. Even worse, it initially refused to let Michelle run the company. But she was determined to keep control, so she recruited Patrick Kemp, a salesman who worked for a rival company, to be her partner. The bank backed down. And over time Patrick and Michelle fell in love and got married. The kids nicknamed their stepfather "Kemper.”
It was the late '70s and the government had begun putting pressure on companies to dispose of hazardous waste properly. This affected many of Michelle's customers, many of them industry and factories that were buying serious solvents and storing them on-site. So she and Patrick figured: Why not dispose of the very chemicals their company sold? Their new business, Kemark, became the first outside sales force in the region to broker the disposal of industrial waste. It secured a comfortable future for the family, if not a fortune.
And it led to the kinds of questions that almost every entrepreneur with children grapples with at some point. Should the kids be groomed to think like their parents, big and ambitious? Or is it okay to let them pursue their own passions, however quirky? And if they do pursue their own passions, what will become of the company?
Like many business owners, Michelle, who is now 55 years old, wanted her children to understand what it meant for her to be an entrepreneur. "I made sure my children saw me not only as a parent but also as a working parent,” she says. "They grew up with us talking about business at breakfast.”
But, again like many business owners, Michelle also turned out to be an indulgent mom. When Jonathon graduated from high school, she chartered a sailboat for him and six friends to explore the Caribbean. She thought all six families would split the bill, but when the other parents balked at the cost, she wound up paying for the trip herself. "I guess I learned a lesson,” she says with a laugh.
Michelle spent as freely with her second child, Katrina, who had been riding horses since the age of 10, competing in shows from California to Maryland. Michelle paid for air fare or for a car to follow the trailered horse. Later, after Katrina graduated from Vanderbilt University with a double major in chemistry and psychology, and then hinted that she'd like to try cooking, Michelle packed her off to Paris and Le Cordon Bleu. "Until I turned 18,” says Jonathon, "I never knew that my mother wasn't wealthy.”
The whole family indulged the youngest sibling, Natalie. At the age of five, she loved to "do business,” so her grandfather set up a pretend office in the house, complete with bank deposit slips. When Katrina began showing horses as a teenager, Natalie handled the details of her travel. As Natalie grew older, she developed an interest in fashion. She majored in marketing and Italian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, dreaming of a career in Milan. While still a student, she took a job working for a catalog marketing company owned by her cousin. After she graduated, she moved to New York City, where she started working at a Ralph Lauren store as a cashier.
As Michelle's children began their careers, the inevitable questions began to arise. Would any of the kids come to work for Kemark? Would none of them? John Ward, professor of family enterprises at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Chicago, notes that it's common for siblings to pursue career ambitions that take them in opposite directions and that "in a business family, that impulse is exacerbated” as each child tries to create a unique identity. And despite the popular notion that children of a business owner tend to follow their parents into the family business, Ward says that it is quite common today for children of entrepreneurs to start their own companies. From a young age, Ward says, "they see they can survive on their own. They recognize that self-reliance is feasible.”
From the start, it was pretty clear Katrina had no interest in hazardous waste disposal. After a year and a half at Le Cordon Bleu, she roamed the top kitchens in Europe. For a time, she apprenticed in Spain at El Bulli, the acclaimed restaurant run by wild man chef Ferran Adria. But before long, she decided that restaurant work was too confining.
So she headed east on a vagabond odyssey, from Europe to India, Asia, and then Australia. In Venice she slept in the garden of a gondolier; in Thailand she hung out with a family that showed her the art of fruit carving. She surfed the Pacific. She had no idea what she wanted to do for a living. Though her grandfather and her parents had been hard-working business owners, she didn't seem to carry the entrepreneurial gene. "I had no idea where she'd end up,” Jonathon says. "She is such a dreamer.”
He, on the other hand, was eager to join Kemark and learn the business from his mom and stepfather. At the time, the company was grossing $8 million to $10 million a year. Patrick didn't want Jonathon to join the staff, however, and Michelle agreed. In effect, she was denying her son the same opportunity her father had offered her (under admittedly different circumstances). What was she thinking? "If children go into business from the get-go,” Michelle says, "they don't appreciate what they have, and they don't take risks. I don't believe in nepotism. It doesn't create the hunger, it stifles the discovery. I told him, I'll give you all my contacts, I'll help you all the way, but I'm not going into business with you.”
