Family Trust
Of all the things that can happen to a person in life, being handed a thriving business would have to count in the plus column. Still, enough family businesses have blown up in the transition from one generation to another, raining fallout on the family itself, to give any sane person pause. Scott Hobbs knows as well as anyone the potential for disaster. But he admits no hesitation in taking over the family company when his father, Mike Hobbs, retired. The reason may be that Mike himself had handled the situation so well when he took over from his father. “The agreement he had with my grandfather was that when it was time for him to go he would actually have to leave,” Scott says. When it came time for Mike to hand off to Scott as CEO, he followed the same script. To mark the transition, Scott says, Mike took a long vacation. “He went away for a month. When he came back he took an office in the way back for three months, to finish up the projects he was involved with, and then he left.”
With a similar lack of drama, Ian Hobbs recalls no special trepidation on accepting his older brother’s invitation to join the company.“ In business school I had taken a bunch of classes, just by chance, on family business,” Ian says, but he was not concerned that working with his brother would rouse some deadly sibling rivalry. “It’s not a huge competitive relationship,” Ian says. “There’s a lot of respect between the two of us.” While both express their opinions freely, “We don’t shoot from the hip.” As CEO, Scott is the boss, but on important matters each brother wields an informal veto. “While I’m in charge,” Scott says, “I can’t imagine a situation where, if he were really opposed to something, that I’d push the company in that direction.” Perhaps most important, Ian says, both brothers fully appreciate the value of what they have come into. “It’s been a huge advantage for our company to have been around for 50 years.” Nobody’s about to let a little thing like family ruin that.
