Shauna Curphey - Writing

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Some Entrepreneurs Get To Boss Their Parents Around

Tacoma Business Examiner, June 11, 2001

By Shauna Curphey

It’s not unusual for teenagers to dream of being able to boss their parents around, but until now, few of them have grown up to see that dream come true.

“In a sense, yes, I do work for Lars,” Elsa Wulff says of her relationship with her son, the CEO of the family business, Mud Bay Granary. It may seem to some like role reversal; it makes little difference to mother and son.

“We don’t consider ourselves either one having authority over the other,” says Elsa. “We don’t have any kind of authority problem in this family. Actually, we never have.”

In 1988, Elsa got into the feed business as an investor when oldest daughter, Yolanka, acquired the store. A year later, Yolanka decided she wanted to go to law school, a decision Elsa supported even though it meant she’d have to take over the store. With annual sales of $200,000 and little profit to speak of, Elsa turned to the most high-powered consultant she knew--her son.

Today, with Lars at the helm and his younger sister Marisa serving as CFO, the store on Olympia’s Mud Bay Road is packed with pet food and specialty items: vegetarian dog biscuits, organic catnip and Animals Apawthecary herbal remedies. Elsa trains employees on customer service and product knowledge.

These roles seem to work. Marisa estimates that sales from the cozy gray and white wooden store will reach $1.4 million for 2001. With the purchase last fall of the Bosley’s pet food chain, the family business has eight stores in Seattle and Tacoma, with combined annual sales projected to reach $4.7 million by the end of this year.

Though Mud Bay’s success is family-powered, experts warn that entrepreneurs should be wary about signing up siblings, parents, sons or daughters.

“A recipe for disaster in a family business is when there is job welfare for incompetent or non-producing family members,” says Catherine Pritt, director of the Family Enterprise Institute at Pacific Lutheran University.

The Wulffs say they instinctively recognized the hazard.

“No one resents the authority that me, Marisa and my mom have,” says Lars, “primarily because we work like maniacs.”

So far, he says, the work has been a lot of fun. And while relish for shoptalk can sometimes overwhelm family gatherings, they’ve managed to avoid serious snags in the family fiber.

At Mac-O-Rama, it was the parents who came to the rescue. In 1997, sisters Allycia, Alissa and Michele Lindsay, along with Allycia’s fiancé Jason Dietrich, launched an Internet site at the family home at the end of a dirt road in Puyallup to sell MacIntosh computers software.

The site grew rapidly, selling more than $1 million worth of products in the first 18 months. The Lindsay sisters had a hard time finding employees who earned their confidence. So they turned to the people they knew they could count on--their parents.

“It was kind of a natural transition,” says Allycia of her decision to hire her parents. “We’d already been working together as a household.”

Since their family finances were already intertwined, deciding on compensation was easy.

“I think if either of them had a big ego about being the number one breadwinner, it would be a struggle,” says Allycia.

Their mom was the first to join the staff, she says. She left her job driving a bus for the Bethel School District to help in the company. Her husband followed after the Puyallup Matsushita plant where he worked closed down.

Now the senior Lindsays oversee order fulfillment, talking to customers, taking orders and packing shipments. In addition, Allycia relies on her mom’s past experience in human resources and insurance sales to help with payroll, taxes and insurance decisions.

The company, and the family, moved to Nevada last February to escape the infamous Puget Sound rain but still operate out of a shared family home.

Ira Bryck, director of the Family Business Center at University of Massachusetts in Amherst, says that before hiring mom or dad, entrepreneurs should ask themselves, “What is the function of the parent?” and consider the potential for unwanted advice or added pressure.

“I think that’s a parent thing,” says Allycia of the unsolicited guidance she sometimes receives. She’s quick to add that the company operates democratically. They can discuss differences of opinion without stepping on familial feelings.