In the company of family

In a downturn, more family members seem to work together. But how do they keep their personal relationships out of the business, and the business out of their personal lives?

WHEN PETER Cullen and his eldest child Richard found themselves out of a job in 1997 after the confectionary company they had been working for was put into receivership, they decided to stick together in the business they knew best.

“We had this notion about the jelly bean business,” explains Peter. “It was a concept I had developed a couple of years before and I wanted to take it back on again and grow it.”

Grow it they certainly did – and it is still growing, even during these difficult times. As joint managing directors of Aran Candy, they have built up The Jelly Bean Factory brand, producing 10 million chewy, flavoured sweets every day in Blanchardstown, west Dublin, almost all of which are exported.

Peter (66) handles the production side and Richard (44) looks after sales and marketing for a company that now employs 48 people and last year won the overall small business award from the Small Firms Association.

Their roles as equal business partners are clearly defined but what about the emotion-laden relationship of father and son? When a parent is working with a grown-up child, is the blood tie an invigorating influence or baggage to be carried? At times of stress, is there a tendency to revert to the roles of authoritarian parent and petulant child?

Research shows that at times of economic downturn more family members end up working together, for two main reasons. Firstly, a career in the family business can be more attractive when there is a lack of job opportunities elsewhere. Secondly, emerging entrepreneurs of either generation look to family for support.

Dr Linda Murphy, a lecturer in management at UCC’s Department of Management and Marketing, explains: “I think we will see a lot of people setting up their own businesses and the first people they turn to for help are family members.

“We might have a lot of entrepreneurs now that may grow into family businesses.”

Peter, who has two other grown-up children, says that at work he largely puts it out of his mind that he is Richard’s father. However, “when there is a bit of a blow-up it can be quite lively”, he admits. “One says things to one’s children and they say things to you that you wouldn’t say to any other staff member. You have to try to deal with that.

“But I don’t think we have ever wanted not to work together,” he says. “I enjoy working with him. He can be trying, but I am sure he says exactly the same about me!”

Richard stresses that they have never disagreed on strategic thinking for the business, but they may occasionally take comments personally.

However, “tetchy stuff” was more common at the beginning when it was just the two of them sharing a room in the back office of Peter’s house, Richard working off the garden table, his father at the desk, with one computer and one fax machine between them.

What the Cullens single out as the big advantage of working together is a shared passion and unspoken sense of trust – points echoed by everybody interviewed for this article.

“The word trust is just there,” explains Richard, who is also a father of three. “You don’t even have to question it. We both eat, drink, live, sleep the business.”

But with that comes a downside – they are inclined to talk of little else. “There are times when you need to shut down,” he says. Yet, even if they are out sailing or playing golf together at the weekends, they are likely to end up thinking about and discussing work.

Sarah Gough knows exactly what he means. She returned home to Co Kilkenny two years ago to work in Mileeven Fine Foods, which is owned by her mother, Éilis, and now, whether it is Sunday lunch, a birthday dinner or Christmas, “nearly all we talk about is work”, she says with a laugh.

Éilis started the business more than 20 years ago “by default”, after a good summer left her with excess honey to sell from their bees in the garden. The venture grew slowly as initially she combined it with raising Sarah and her older sister Sinéad. Still run from their family home overlooking the village of Owning, the business has expanded into preserves and Christmas fare, and now employs eight people.

After leaving school, Sarah (26) did a degree in international business in Carlow IT and then went to work in Dublin and Bray, Co Wicklow, but “deep down” she always thought she would end up working for Mileeven one day. In contrast, her sister went to the other side of the world, to work as a chef in Shanghai.

When Sarah first declared her interest to Éilis, her mother was adamant that the two of them needed to sit down in a formal meeting with her husband Joe, a non-executive director of the company, to discuss the prospect. And this meeting had to take place away from the family home.

“I purposely wanted a place that was a public forum, so that you would have constraints on the manner in which the whole discussion could take place,” explains Éilis. “You don’t want emotions in it. It was a decision on her part to commit to something and it was a decision on my part to accept that.”

So the three of them went off for Sunday lunch at Nicky Mosse’s restaurant in Bennettsbridge, and agreed a job description. Éilis made it clear to her daughter that she would not be coming in because she was a member of the family but because of her talent and skills, and that she would have a trial period like any other new employee.

Using the same recruitment criteria for family and non- family members within a business is crucial, says Murphy. And when parents and children are working together, clearly defined roles are very important.

“A lot of family businesses here in Ireland are quite small and it can be quite difficult to have those more formalised, separate roles – whereas in the larger organisations they would more naturally have these systems in place – but there is no reason that they can’t.”

She believes a parent and adult child working together can surmount their personal relationship, and that there are plenty of successful family businesses to prove that. “We have a lot of fifth generation businesses in Ireland and they have obviously managed that very well.”

Sarah has been in Mileeven for two years and says she is only now getting her head around everything. “Even though I might think I have great ideas,” she explains, “I have to realise that she has run the company for 21 years and knows a lot about what’s going on.”

The “mother-and-daughter thing” never comes into play in the workplace, according to Sarah. “That is a credit to her as well; it would be easy for her to act as the mother as well as the boss.”

Although Éilis concedes: “It would be unreal to say you totally close yourself off from the fact that I’m her mother and she’s my daughter. It’s not possible to completely put it away. What you do is consciously decide that is not part of the discussion.”

They both agree that they do things quite differently – and that their disagreements can be good for the business.

Éilis explains: “I would tend to be more conservative in how I make decisions. I might be slower to make them, which drives her bonkers. You have that push and pull; you need that tension – it is actually quite creative.”

Sarah agrees she would be more opinionated than the other employees. “I have the added incentive that, technically, I am an employee, but if Éilis was to retire, it would be on my shoulders,” she points out.

For both of them, their unity of purpose is the big advantage of working together. “You have two people who are seriously driven towards the same goal,” says Sarah. While for Éilis, her daughter’s personal energy and commitment to the business “is something you don’t buy”.

“If there is a disadvantage,” adds Éilis, “it’s just the energy you have to put in to making sure you don’t cross over the personal relationship. That for me would be the worst thing that could happen: that it would fracture the relationship we always had. That would be a price I wouldn’t be prepared to pay.”

'Trust. You know that things are going to be done'

After a decade of high-powered work in financial services all over the world, two redundancies within two years was a lucky break for Clare Conway – and also for her mother, Mary Heseltine.

For the past 10 months they have been working together in ESPRI, a company that analyses market research data (such as the JNLR figures on radio listenership), run by Mary and her second husband, Walter.

“I had kind of ended up in financial services because it was lucrative and there were great opportunities but it wasn’t really where my heart was,” says Clare (33), who worked for GE investments and then the Irish spread-betting company Delta Index. “I took six months off, thinking about what I really wanted to do.”

She devoted time to her passion for photography and did a FÁS start-your-own-business course with a view to setting up a software company, but not in the current financial climate.

That is when Mary approached her with the idea of working for ESPRI, where they are looking at smarter ways of doing business with rapidly evolving technology.

They are working on a new way of collecting market research data, which makes it instantly accessible to clients, Mary explains.

Clare is “brilliantly placed to make that work. It is one thing to have the idea, but you have to have somebody to implement the idea,” she says. “I really felt that Clare was going to be the right person technically, before she’s my daughter.”

For her part, Clare was “excited and flattered” by the offer. As a Trinity graduate in management science and information systems, her degree in statistics is “a very natural fit” with data analysis.

“I have realised that family business is really where it’s at because we are all in it together,” she explains, sitting in the Dún Laoghaire home of Mary, Walter and their two teenage daughters, which doubles up as the office. “My brother works with my dad in a totally separate business. I really feel that all of our futures are tied in together.”

It is quite different from her time in corporate finance – for a start, granny sometimes drops in for tea! Clare says she now takes a much longer-term view of work and life.

“When you are working to make sure your parents have a pension fund, it’s a different level of responsibility,” she remarks.

Mary and Clare say they have a similar way of thinking and visualising problems, which makes it very easy to work as a team. There is unspoken communication and confidence between them.

“There is an implicit sort of trust in how things will proceed and you don’t have to watch your back,” says Mary. For her there is the added bonus of now having a member of the next generation to share her vision.

“Originally I would have expected to get to 60, maybe 65 at a push, and at that point be pulling down the shutters. It would have never occurred to me that I would have wanted to hand something on. But I can see now it really will be worth maintaining its strength so that at some point Clare will have something that she can maintain for herself.”

Emma Clarke says she can’t see her father, Paddy, ever retiring from his photography business in Dundalk, which she joined in 2000. Like her three siblings, she had helped out as a child, but she was the only one who wanted to go into the business a year after leaving school.

Paddy trained her in film photography for three years before she was allowed to take any commissions. Then they settled into their separate roles – he does the weddings and she looks after the portrait photography.

A loving, father-daughter bond infuses all their comments about working together. “I talk to a lot of parents and they can’t understand how we get on so well together,” says Paddy. “We just have a very good relationship.”

For Emma (28), the advantages are: “I get what I want! It is very easy-going here; there are never any fights. It is probably less stressful than working for somebody else.”

The downside is: “We’re both fairly stubborn. If there is an issue, it might take a while to work out.”

Paddy strives to avoid taking a fatherly approach: “I try to give her a free rein; I don’t believe in stifling people.” He sums up the advantages in one word: “Trust. You know that things are going to be done.”

The disadvantage of working with his daughter, he says, is: “Sometimes you feel a bit guilty asking her to do too much. That is the father thing. Asking her to work on a Sunday or on a bank holiday or after six , which she doesn’t get paid for.”

But it is all about keeping the business going, he adds. “You have to make the effort. It is her business as much as mine.”

• swayman@irishtimes.com