I will spend this summer as an intern in the investment team at Graham Partners. Steve Graham (T’86) is the firm’s CEO and, after working at Goldman Sachs and a private equity firm early in his career, spent a decade building his family business before founding the highly successful middle-market PE firm, Graham Partners.
Bud Konheim (D’57), founder of Nicole Miller, spoke on campus last night about growing up around the fashion and apparel industry. He ran his parents’ apparel businesses before founding what has since become Nicole Miller.
In my experience, family businesses are sometimes spoken of disparagingly, in a similar tone to that used when talking about the public sector: idiosyncracy and inefficiency are perceived to be rife. Yet, for young smart executives determined to enter and build their family empire, it is hard to think of a more fulfilling and exciting career path.
I have enormous respect for family businesses and for those who drive them forward. For this post, I interviewed two current Tuckies (one T’11 and one T’12) who plan to enter their family businesses upon graduation, to understand what they hope to achieve, what attracted them to Tuck, and how the experience has been helpful. These are two pretty special guys. Shaun is tied (with my fellow blogger, Mr. Deese) for Tuck’s most stylish man; Dan is in a league of his own for Tuck’s most understadetly and hilariously witty person. Both have deep roots and tall ambitions. Here is what they had to say:
Q: Tell me about your background
Shaun Mehtani (T’11): I grew up in Morristown, New Jersey and went to boarding school at Blair Academy. After Blair I got my bachelors in science at NYU’s Stern School of Business. My family business was growing at a very rapid rate, and my parents needed me to be as close to home as possible. Throughout undergrad I worked for Dolce & Gabbana as well as The Ritz-Carlton New York, Battery Park while also spending a significant amount of time during the summers working with my family’s wedding planning/catering business.
Dan Mueller (T’12): I grew up in Antigo, Wisconsin – a small town of 8,000 in Northern Wisconsin. I went to university at Concorida University in St. Paul, Minnesota. After Concordia I worked for seven years with Cardinal Health and then their spin-off, CareFusion. Five of those years were in Paris, France and Geneva, Switzerland. For Cardinal/CareFusion I was the finance manager for their health-tech business.
Q: What is your family’s business?
SM: The first restaurant was opened in 1984 in New York City. Throughout the 1990s, my parents opened up an additional four restaurants and started a high-end wedding planning/catering business. From 2000-2009 (prior to my coming to Tuck), they opened up an additional banquet hall, adult day care center, and two restaurants. In 2007, I opened up two restaurants (Mehndi & Ming II) and a bar in healthy competition with my parents existing businesses. That year, we also sold off two restaurants and the wedding planning/catering business.
After graduation, I will regain control of my two restaurants and bar. Three months later, I will take over my parents remaining restaurants, and three months after that, I will take over the remaining Mehtani Restaurant Group. My long-term aspiration is to expand our collection of restaurants throughout the United States.. I’m not divulging any secrets here.
DM: Volm Companies was started in 1954 by my grandpa and grandma Volm. They started it as a general store and found that the local farmers were coming to them to place orders for packaging. Today Volm manufactures and distributes packaging and machinery for the agricultural industry (think mesh bags that you buy citrus in, plastic bags that you buy potatoes or bread in, and the machinery to weigh and package the agriculture). We have manufacturing in Idaho, Wisconsin, and The Netherlands and sales and distribution offices in other states throughout the US as well.
It’s a little unclear what my role will be, but we would like it to be customer-facing to learn more the sales aspect of the business. As such, it will probably be new-market development or new-product avenues. I would like to see Volm grow into a sort of full-solutions provider for the agriculture business or possibly a packaging company that continues to bring in products beyond the agricultural realm (where the majority of our business is driven).
Q: What did you hope to gain by coming to Tuck?
SM: I came to Tuck to focus on a general management degree as my undergraduate education at Stern was too quantitatively focused. Courses such as Entrepreneurship & Innovation Strategy, Corporate Communication, and Analysis for General Managers were exactly what I was looking for. That being said the quantitative offerings at Tuck are also really good.
DM: I’d like to learn a better sense of strategic vision and decision making.
Q: What have your learned at Tuck that will be most useful in your family business?
SM: As an entrepreneur prior to Tuck, there were many things I didn’t understand; for example, taxation and how it relates to business policy. With the knowledge that I had about running a business prior to getting my MBA, I knew where gaps existed, and I hope that I have filled many of these gaps. In Personal Leadership class, the process of gathering anonymous feedback from my managers, my staff members, and my parents’ right hand people provided me with invaluable and honest feedback to use to develop a personal leadership plan, which will guide how I lead my family business after graduation.
(Shaun is also alleged to have had a reasonably enjoyable time socially while at Tuck, such as hosting frequent dinner parties and an awesome wine tasting party with Christmas tree lights on Raether deck, having a Tuck pong table in his basement, and spending a term studying in Paris. Tuck’s role in helping him learn how to kick off a good party is less clear.)
DM: Tuck has been good at teaching me to look at business situations in a different light than I did previously; it has helped me to think differently. For example, the Corporate Strategy class helped me to think about the competitive pressures that come not only from rivalry, but also competitive pressures that arise from our suppliers and even our customers. Learning Game Theory has helped me better understand how and why price wars arise, which is a very real issue for those products of ours which are high-volume and low-margin.
The people I am meeting here at Tuck have proven to be extremely supportive of my goals and in working on projects related to the family business. I think the intimate Tuck network will prove to be valuable as I move into Volm Companies as I will have friends who can offer advice on specific countries for growth opportunities, ways to do financing, how to structure deals – you find so many areas of expertise here and people are very willing to help out.
Read the full article: Building family businesses