Family-Owned Agencies: Learning to Find the Right Balance

When Miami travel agency owners Norman and Cathy Pieters come home at night, they are careful to leave all talk of Karell’s African Dream Vacations behind.

Norman said he believes that separation of home life and work life is the key to both a happy marriage and a successful family business. So while a quick business question at the dinner table is okay, all talk of important issues – especially those involving disagreements – is forbidden.

Like the Pieters, every family that runs a business together has its own rules, its own way of separating work from love and marriage, and business hours from private time.

Flexible approach
At Royal Travel in Maryville, Tenn., Robbie Phillips and her husband Mike are more flexible about taking the office home, as their three-person office includes just the two of them and their daughter.

In a business that small, Phillips said, the goal is more to find ways to let each person shine and not step on one another’s toes.

“You need to know what each person’s strengths are and let them take care of what they do best,” she said. “I’m a sales personality and he is a business personality, and we migrated to our strengths really quickly.”

Filling in strengths gaps
When their 31-year-old daughter, Kali Hanson, came on board after a stint in Corporate America, her strengths in IT and marketing meshed perfectly with the agency’s needs. Today Hanson is marketing director and handles all social media.

“We found the areas where we are weakest and she has a lot of strength,” Robbie said. “She likes to say she has brought us to the 21st century; she’s doing things I really haven’t even cared to do.”

Interfering can be OK
Alice Klingerman Stickney agreed that having separate roles and being mindful of boundaries is the way to go in a family business. Stickney owns Klingerman Travel, East Lyme, Conn., with her sister and her 91-year-old dad.

“I do what I do and my sister does what she does and I don’t interfere,” she said. That keeps things moving smoothly between the siblings, but Dad is of another mind.

“My dad interferes constantly,” she said with a laugh. “If we can’t find a bookkeeping error, he will look over our shoulder and find it in five minutes. He’s still involved in many things; basically he just does whatever he wants.”

Division of labor
Not surprisingly, at larger agencies a stricter division of labor is more the norm.

At Montrose Travel, for example, siblings Andi, Joe and Julie fell naturally into separate roles based on their individual expertise when they bought the agency from their parents in 1990.

“We all try to split responsibilities to ensure coverage throughout the organization,” said Andi McClure-Mysza of the Montrose, Calif.-based agency, which is a member of Ensemble.

Joe McClure is president; Julie McClure, chief financial officer, and McClure-Mysza is co-president of Montrose Travel and president of MTravel, the firm’s host agency division.

Clearly McClure-Mysza and her siblings have found their footing. In the years since they assumed leadership of the agency, they’ve grown annual revenues from $6 million to $235 million.

Next time: Advice from business experts on how to succeed in a family business.