I am a big fan of “Kitchen Nightmares” with Gordon Ramsey and one common issue is peoples children and grandchildren taking over a successful family restaurant and when they do, it flops.
I think part of it is people just need to admit that they do not have the same skills as the family member who WAS good at being a chef or restaurant manager.
This is also true of other businesses where the one person has this special talent and gets the business going and then it falls apart under the children. I have a relative who’s father was a successful real estate broker. The man just had this dynamic personality who could negotiate with anyone. His sons though, were quiet introverts who just didnt have it.
The smart thing to do is realize your shortcomings and sell off the business rather than drive it into the ground. But its hard to let a family business go.
Does anyone else have a real life example of this?
My mother had two children and managed to climb her way up the corporate ladder all the way to VP. She did this in the 80s when women folk were still trying to shatter that glass ceiling. And she also did this sans a college degree.
She founded a women’s initiative program that focused on helping young, career minded women make their way through the corporate world.
And when she retired, she founded one of the largest pet rescue shelters in southern Louisiana.
I could never come close to doing what she has done with her life.
It’s also very difficult to have one of those driven, highly successful people as a parent, and it’s not unusual for the kids to go off and do something completely different A lot of times it skips a generation, or the spouses are the drivers
Really successful people are thin on the ground. No surprise that they’d be thin in families, too.
Many successful people had to fight for every inch, this develops a different outlook and personality than being handed a company
I question the premise. I feel it’s a lot more difficult to create a business, get it up and running, and make it stable and successful than it is to take over an established business and keep it going. So the second generation doesn’t need to be as skilled as the first generation.
Totalitarian government leaders (often founders) who rule with ruthless but more-or-less effective iron hand, whose children eventually take over and are total fuck-ups.
Ex.: Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his good-for-less-than-nothing son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier.
Possibly Li’l Kim of North Korea, but that story is still in progress.
Any number of royal dynasties started by a strong king, followed by weak successors. One might even go back to strong kings David and Solomon, followed by schism and a succession of weak heirs in one or both kingdoms.
But it becomes a difficult dynamic in a family business where the original owner has worked so hard building it up with the hope someday their kids will take it over. Those kids then have a tremendous burden over them to keep their family name running when in truth, they would be better off selling the business or hiring outside management.
I’m thinking of Oral Roberts University. It was a highly respected university in the mid-70s. Oral’s son, Richard, led it into such a pit that the people who bailed it out insisted that it was with the proviso that none of the Roberts family have anything to do with running it.
Of course, Oral cracked up in either 76 or 77, after his daughter died, and the City of Faith was the immediate result, so, that boondoggle may have started a chain of events which gradually crippled the University, so, who can say?
In general, tho, I think that the main problem isn’t a lack of talent, or personality, but, a different vision, and a whole lot of laziness/entitlement. As Little Nemo points out, it’s harder to create and make something successful than to maintain.
The kids were either in the family business, and may have been forced to help when they wanted to party with their friends, and are resentful, which leads to not taking proper actions to insure that the business thrives until they see that the golden goose is gone, but then, it’s too late. Or else, they are a bunch of spoiled prigs who are too lazy to put in the hours, having had the parents cater to their whims, rather than been properly trained in doing what is necessary.
I think it’s something you more frequently see in businesses where the children don’t have involvement in the business until later in life. In the trades it’s fairly common for the children have worked as apprentices and then journeymen and be able successfully carry on the family business. It’s also fairly common for children of tradesmen to know exactly what a life in the business is like and opt to move onto something else.
I’m the third generation running my company. While my fathers only been gone 3 years, the business shows no sign of foundering. I work with plenty of other trades with second generation owners who’s work is consistent with their fathers.
Anheuser-Busch. although a public company, had pretty much always been run by the Busch family. August Busch, Jr. made it into the largest brewery in the U.S. and August III was equally successful, although sometimes criticized for not being a visionary like his father. Unfortunately, August IV - to put it charitably - was not suited to run a major corporation, and saw the company get sold to InBev.
John Miller Tire in Little Rock had five or six locations in the metro area during the 80’s and 90’s. He’s down to one now. His son works there but hasn’t taken it over. Miller is pushing 80 now and I’m not sure the last store will remain open after he retires. Its a big operation that does car repairs, front end work, and tires.
The son is a hard worker and a nice guy. But running a chain of several Tire stores may have been more than he could handle.
Running a restaurant is a lot of work and takes a number of specialized skills. It’s not rocket surgery, but you definitely need to know a lot of things about bookeeping, ingredients, staff, and more. A lot of times on shows like that the kids don’t have any experience running a restaurant. In some cases they had another job and think running a restaurant should be easy, but don’t actually undersstand how to run a small business generally or a restaurant specifically. in other cases they did some basic kitchen or server work when younger but weren’t involved in trying to run the thing, and don’t realize all that they need to do.
I also think that a lot of times the problem is not the skill set but the motivation. Running a restaurant, for example, is not a 40-hour a week job, it takes a lot of time in what would be prime social time if you weren’t running a restaurant, which is a pretty big drawback. A lot of times the parent’s business was their passion, so they poured their life into it. If the kid doesn’t like real estate or running a diner as much as the parent did, they may want to have it as a job but not as the focus of their entire life. I think a lot of people overlook that the kid may just want to work an office job and leave work at work instead of dedicating his life to the family business, but the ‘ITS FAMILY’ argument makes them feel like they have to try, so everyone ends up worse off.
That was another “Kitchen Nightmares” episode where their was this family run restaurant where all the kids were running the place (4 of them I think). Yet nobody actually had a dedicated job and most important, outside of working the restaurant, they had no formal training in restaurant management or cooking. One of the young men said after spending an afternoon getting trained by Ramsey “I’ve learned more in 3 hours than I’ve learned my whole life”.LINK It was episode 9 on season 6.
Thing was also like you said, the kids resented being “forced” to run the restaurant. They were all in their teens and 20’s and had missed out on so many things because every night of their lives was spent at the restaurant. Which as you might guess, lead to many arguments, and finger pointing as to why the restaurant was failing.
I’ve seen a couple of Asian restaurants like this where the kids had their own booth and when they were not working, had their schoolbooks out. I’ve wondered how they must feel about this?
So my point is the kids should go thru the education and training route before taking the reins. Also parents should realize their kids just might not want to be in that business.
I’ll take issue with this; IIRC, it had a pretty good name. I checked it in the mid 70s, and it was well rated, and, nobody scorned it, other than for the religious aspect. I’ll need some proof before I can agree with you. Watcha got?
My dad was a hell of an operating engineer
I was a great operating engineer
My oldest son can hardly operate a screw drive
My middle son could be a good operating engineer.
If my youngest son had the training that I did he would be twice the engineer that I am.