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 This month…
4th
Annual Report on Family Business
Rock –solid Work ethic
By Marg. Pullishy
He left his native Sicily—the
climate, the culture and the cuisine—to come to Canada to carve out a new life
for himself. The one thing Santo Maiorana brought with him, and in his son’s
estimation, the most important trait, was his work ethic and an uncompromising
commitment to do the best job possible for every client. A master craftsman in
natural stonework, the senior Maiorana came to Edmonton and soon started his own
business.
“I was only about eight or nine
when I started coming to work with Dad, just mowing the lawn and doing little
things around the shop,” recalls the now 37 year-old Filippo Mairoana. “But I
learned a lot watching how hard Dad worked. He put everything including his
pride and integrity into every job. I liked the way my dad ran the business. He
had personal relationships with his customers; he wasn’t just doing a job, he
was building a business and building relationships in the community, and I try
to do the same thing today.”
The business, Metro Tile and
Marble, initially focused on home installations of tile and countertops; over
the years, it evolved, as did the ownership of the business, to include a wide
range of commercial projects featuring imported natural stone from Italy and
Sicily. Marble, granite, limestone, slate and a number of other natural products
are used in a wide range of commercial and residential applications, including
but not limited to flooring, countertops, entryways, roofing, and even
landscaping. “We’ve been purchasing stone from abroad for more than 20 years; we
bring in large slabs and fabricate it to meet the specific needs of our jobs,”
says Fil. He is an experienced journeyman tile setter and generally considered
an expert in the fabrication and installation of natural stone. Recognizing his
close ties—personally and commercially—with Italy, Fil recently became a member
of the Edmonton branch of the Italian Chamber of Commerce.
 While Metro Tile and Marble still
exists, a new company evolved as a result of the second-generation
reorganization. When Fil began the lengthy, oft-times complex, process of
purchasing the company’s assets, Real Stone Works emerged about five years ago.
A science graduate from the University of Alberta, he says the experience of
working in the business as a youngster ultimately had more influence in his
career choice than did his degree. Now the president of Real Stone Works, Fil
admits there were some areas of contention between father and son during the
transitional stage.
“It wasn’t a case of wanting to
change the company name, or changing what my dad had done, but a way of dealing
with some of the legalities associated with creating a separation for liability
reasons,” the younger Maiorana explains.
“I think the thing that I always
had to remember was that any of the conflict, and there really wasn’t a lot,
stemmed from our very different backgrounds and priorities. Dad left a war-torn
country to come here and build a business. I had the advantage of having been
born in Edmonton, with all the benefits associated with that.
“The other thing was I had the
luxury of coming into the business where my family had already achieved a fairly
high level of success. Dad worked hard and built his own reputation, and
established personal relationships with customers. Those are qualities worth
emulating, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I want to always honour the family
business by running it successfully.”
While Santo is essentially retired
today, he is still active in the business, though not on a day-to-day basis. He
likes to take on a special project every now and then, an arrangement that
clearly suits his only son.
Shape-shifting for long term
success
Shape-shifting for long term success
- Atlantic lessons for the Alberta edge
By
Gordon Pitts
At first glance, the family enterprises of Alberta and of
the Atlantic provinces have little in common. Alberta is on a roll, a province
overflowing in oil and gas, petrochemicals and service companies—an area with
vast labour shortages, unlike in Eastern Canada, where jobs are often hard to
find. Family business is a big part of the Alberta edge; indeed, Edmonton’s own
economy has been built on a strong family enterprise foundation. Yet the
province’s family businesses are relatively young, with many just entering the
second generation. It is still rare to find a third- or fourth-generation
company.
Contrast this with the Atlantic provinces which fall far
behind Alberta in per-capita income. The family companies that have lasted are
true survivors; they have had to endure a harsh business climate in a somewhat
isolated location. Yet many have histories reaching back 100 years or more. Like
their Alberta counterparts, they have relied heavily on natural resource wealth
but, with the exception of offshore energy, the resources are often depleted or
thinned out. Witness the decimation of the once powerful cod industry.
In my recent book, The Codfathers, Lessons from the
Atlantic Business Elite (Key Porter), I have documented the survival strategies
of Atlantic businesses—most of them family firms. Atlantic Canada is the
stronghold of great business families: the Irvings, McCains, Sobeys, Olands,
Dobbins and many others. And despite their contrasting business environments,
Alberta families can learn many lessons from these hardy perennials.
For one thing, the Atlantic companies offer reminders that
economic success, particularly built on non-renewable resource wealth, is an
ephemeral thing. It cannot last forever, and the successful survivors are those
that can adapt to new business conditions over the generations.
The survivors look at the family company as a pool of
capital and broad business expertise, not as a specific asset that must be clung
to like a life raft. Those companies that have been handed down over generations
have been able to shift their shapes over the years, rather than hanging on
desperately to a particular business or property, such as a lumber mill, fish
plant or agribusiness enterprise.
Consider the case of John Bragg, one of the region’s
redoubtable entrepreneurs, and a lumberman’s son from Oxford in northern Nova
Scotia. Bragg’s family witnessed the mass migration of small Nova Scotia farmers
off the land in the 20th century, many of them destined for Alberta and a chance
at a better way of life. John’s father saw an opportunity to buy up these pieces
of land for their woodlots.
As a young man home from university in the summer, John saw
these small farms, now owned by his father and no longer cropped, as an ideal
place to grow wild blueberries. The summer business took off, and he gave up his
career plans to be a schoolteacher. Over the years, his blueberry business
dwarfed the family’s lumber business. He created a multinational company, with
vast blueberry lands in the state of Maine and a huge export business, including
the pioneering sales of blueberries to Japan.
But John Bragg realized that the world was changing, and he
needed to diversify. His own children might not be able to live by blueberries
alone. So, in the 1970s, he invested in cable television franchises for northern
Nova Scotia, and ultimately his company, Eastlink, became the major cable
provider in the Halifax area. In the 1990s, Eastlink became a technology
pioneer, blazing the cable industry’s path into offering local telephone service
over its fibre-optic cable networks.
The blueberry king had made the transition to the
Blackberry era, and his four children are now heavily involved in both his food
and cable TV operations. For this business family, there are no closed
doors—there are only options on the future.
Consider too the Wilson family of Truro, Nova Scotia, which
is now in its eighth generation of family business survival—a record at which
Albertans can only marvel. As described in my book In the Blood, Battles to
Succeed in Canada’s Family Businesses, the Wilson holdings have nicely morphed
over the years since the 1700s, when the original ancestor journeyed to Nova
Scotia from New Hampshire. They have been merchants and chandlers, purveyors of
wood and coal, and now oil and gasoline vendors, as well as manufacturers and
ski hill operators. The common thread is that they have always been providers of
fuel, but they have continually adapted to changing times.
Another survival tactic is a willingness of ownership
families to cede day-to-day management to professional non-family executives. Of
course, professional management is embraced to varying degrees. The New
Brunswick energy and forestry titans—the Irvings, for example—are loath to
surrender total operational control. That is part of their culture and, really,
who can argue, given their success?
But there is an alternative role model in the Irvings’
friend and neighbour, Derek Oland, owner of Moosehead Beer of Saint John. As
standard-bearer for a five-generation beer-making family, he concluded a decade
ago that the company was not flourishing under his management. In a rare example
of executive humility, he reached outside Moosehead to recruit a veteran food
industry manager as his company president. It left Derek free to plot company
strategy and to groom two of his sons for leadership in the next generation.
They will carry on a fascinating legacy: With the potential sale of rival
Sleemans, Moosehead is poised to become the largest Canadian-owned beer company.
The Atlantic survivors have also been skilled at blending
deep local roots with a bold global outlook. No one did this better than
brothers Harrison and Wallace McCain, who built a global french-fry empire out
of Florenceville, New Brunswick… population 750. McCain Foods is the largest
commercial french fry maker in the world, producing more than 30 percent of the
planet’s fries. It recently put its first plant into China, taking aim at the
exploding fast-food market there.
 Despite a high-profile brotherly split and the 2004 death
of Harrison, the empire rolls on. Although McCain Foods’ non-family CEO is based
in Toronto, the nerve centre is still a rural New Brunswick community where the
family has grown potatoes for generations. In fact, the McCains have built their
global information technology centre in Florenceville, recruiting technical
people from all over the world.
Yet, despite the McCain’s aggressive sponsorship of new
Canadians, immigration is a huge challenge for the Atlantic economy. The region
desperately needs injections of new skills, ideas and entrepreneurial verve; but
new Canadians are more likely to gravitate to large cities like Toronto, or
high-growth economies such as Alberta’s.
That
is where Alberta can have a real edge—not just in the resources of the soil but
in the richness of human resources. In a sense, Alberta’s family companies can
gain from the Atlantic province’s relative loss, not only drawing immigrant
energy but also the skills of transplanted Newfoundlanders, Nova Scotians,
Prince Edward Islanders and New Brunswickers.
But Albertans should also see Atlantic Canada as more than
a farm team for talent and labour; its resilient family businesses also provide
a game plan for how to win the global business game, not just this year or next,
but for a hundred years.
Gordon Pitts is a senior writer for the Report on
Business of the Globe and Mail, the author of four Canadian business books, and
the 2006 executive professor in residence at the Alberta Business Family
Institute at University of Alberta’s School of Business.
Six Secrets of successful family
business
By James Lea
One of the common characteristics of those who want to do
well in business without working very hard is a conviction that success is just
a matter of learning the right “secrets.” Some people make a lot of money
reinforcing that notion by hawking “secret strategies for solving every
company’s 10 worst management problems” and “big time CEOs secrets for getting
to the top and staying there.” There are secrets for sale to help with
everything form beating expansion capital out of your banker to changing lead
into gold.
I checked with a few well-run, profitable family-owned
businesses to see if I could pry loose some secrets of success to sell at
conventions and thus ensure the comfort of my old age. At first I encountered
suspicion and snide retorts, but then the secrets really started to flow. Let me
try out a few on you.
• Secret #1: Work 12-hour days at every opportunity: This
might take some explaining, because most people would hesitate to describe a
12-hour workday as an opportunity. But most families who succeed in business
would agree with Thomas Edison that success is a mix of “10 percent inspiration
and 90 percent perspiration.” The secret of building a solid, enduring family
business is that everyone who’s seriously involved in it has to work and work
hard.
• Secret #2: Don’t take other family members for granted:
The glue that holds most successful family companies together is compounded of
mutual affection and admiration, shared goals and complementary skills. The
“secret” is that the family members working together treat one another with at
least as much respect and courtesy as they show non-family co-workers. The
special capabilities and value of the family members you work with should be
reflected in your behavior toward them.
• Secret #3: Keep two hats on the hat rack at all times: It
is written in Lea’s Laws that you don’t have to love everyone you do business
with, and you don’t have to do business with everyone you love. The people in
charge of successful family businesses wear two big, tight-fitting hats. They’re
good family members, but they also take seriously the responsibility of leading
and maintaining discipline in their companies. You can love your son (the sales
manager) even as you chew out the sales manager (your son). It’s a matter of
keeping both hats close at hand and switching them at the right times.
• Secret #4: Don’t adopt business practices that clash with
basic family values: It’s important to sort out and disentangle business
realities from family preferences, but it’s foolish to ignore the
interdependency of the two. Pushing suppliers into a corner, for example, by
driving their prices below the break-even point may give you a couple of extra
bucks in profit. But if it’s inconsistent with the family’s values and ethical
standards, the practice can create more friction and fragmentation than it’s
worth. Consistency between the family’s funda-mental principles and the way it
does business is a key component of success.
• Secret #5: Take some time off and some time away: A
potential problem for families in business is the pressure of being constantly
with the same people. It can be especially tough on spouses in business who are
literally together 24 hours a day. But even parents and children or brothers and
sisters who work and live or socialize together can get tired of on another.
Successful family businesses deal with that risk by admitting that it’s a risk.
They schedule time away from one another, and some even adopt a policy of
spending holidays apart.
• Secret #6: Be proud of your company and your family and
let the world know it: If that’s your name on the door, you have a doubly
important role both inside and outside the business. Customers, suppliers and
others you deal with tend to think of you as The Company, regardless of your
title. Employees expect you to take a genuine interest in the productivity,
their problems and the quality of their outputs. Your pride in the company, in
the work it does and in the family that stands behind it can have an immense
management and marketing value. Family members involved in successful family
businesses really let that pride shine.
Now that everyone knows some of the secrets of success in
family owned business, we should all go forth and prosper. Just don’t forget
that Secret #1 is hard work.
James Lea is a professor at the University of North
Carolina and a well-known family business speaker, author and advisor. Reprinted
from bizjournals.
 From
the Publisher:
Also in the September 2006 edition of Edmontonians is a
piece from new executive professor in residence at the University of Alberta
Gordon Pitts. He’s from Toronto and the Report on Business at the Globe and
Mail but he’s in Edmonton because he likes the city. Pitts compares family
business characteristics in Alberta to those in the Atlantic provinces; don’t
miss his insightful piece extracted from his recent book The Codfathers,
Lessons from the Atlantic Business Elite (Key Porter)
Plus! Buy a ticket to help celebrate Phil Kleins’ 89
birthday…in Muggsy Forbes; read Nizar Somji’s views on harnessing the
potential of star employees; see John Chomiak’s party at the farm with
Alberta’s Lieutenant Governor Normie Kwong; learn how Award Windows made an
appearance on ABC’s Extreme Makeover and in Linda Bodo’s column: North
to Alaska.
6,000 visitors and over 96,000 hits!
We do it in print…and we do it On-Line. National
tech reporter and local guru Gregory Michetti kicked up the electronic
style of Edmontonians—and presto. The magazine saw 6,000 visitors and over
96,000 hits in August. And we’ve just started. This means you can catch your
favourite magazine wherever your mobile technology roams plus stay tuned to
updates and extras that don’t make it into print.
Edmontonians—your favourite
magazine in print and On-Line! | 
