Family business is central to Irish economic life, as indicated by research from DCU National Centre for Family Business published in April of this year which found that family-run firms account for 64% of Irish businesses, with 12,300 SME family businesses employing 380,000 people.
Claire O'Mahony asks three companies about some of the lessons they have learned from working with their relatives.
Personal and professional lines become blurred
"You sit down to have a conversation with your family about other things going on in your life and inevitably it goes back to the business. You never switch off," says Rebecca Winckworth who co-founded White & Green, a fully certified organic and Fairtrade cotton high-end bed linen and homewares brand that works directly with farmers in India, alongside her mother Sari and sister Danielle in 2016.
Winckworth, who divides her time between Columbia and Ireland, looks after marketing, PR and the Fairtrade side of the business, and her mother (who is based in Wicklow) and sister (who lives in Australia) focuses on production, design and merchandising. The trio is all involved in the day-to-day running of the business, which employs 10 other people part-time, and this means working over three different time zones.
"The second I wake up, I've already received a tonne of emails from my sister who’s 15 hours ahead and even your family WhatsApp group is hijacked as well," Rebecca says.
John Connolly is the co-founder of Hazel Mountain Chocolate in the Burren, Co Clare, a boutique bean-to-bar chocolate factory with retail outlets, an online store (they recently launched a new range of pre-made cake mixes using non-wheat flours) and café on the site on what was originally his grandparents’ home, with a staff of 18 people. Kasha, his wife and Hazel Mountain Chocolate co-owner comes from a family of bakers and is the company’s creative director. Connolly explains that they have had to compartmentalise in order to separate work from the rest of their lives.
"When we’re at home, we don’t check emails, because it just never ends. We removed all emails on the phone so I can’t answer them, even if I wanted to," he says.
Brothers Mark and David Van Den Burgh and their sister Orla, meanwhile, are behind Max Benjamin, the luxury candle and fragrance company which is based in Enniskerry, Wicklow. Named for Orla’s twin sons, Max and Benjamin, it employs 20 people and Mark, the company’s creative director, says that working with your family allows for frank discussions to be had, that you mightn’t necessarily have with another employee. "Because they’re your sibling and you have a row or a disagreement then it’s soon forgotten about but you always have to be mindful of the boundaries because you are at work, and you have to ultimately put on your work hat and say 'They’re not my sister or my brother right now’."
Family is there for the highs and lows
While working with family is not without its pitfalls and conflicts might occur, there is also a level of support there that doesn’t exist in other work environments.
"Being entrepreneurs, there have been humungous successes but then also the upsets, the challenges and the stresses," says Winckworth.
"There have been years when we’ve had other jobs on the side to try and sustain ourselves and our business because we weren’t taking a salary but you support each other. You can put in the extra hard work and we would work Saturdays, Sundays, nights, early morning because that’s just what families do to get each other through. The joy is that we’ve also been able to share the successes with each other and celebrate and they understand, and the rest of the family understand as well and they celebrate with us because it’s not just one member of the family doing something that the rest of the family can’t identify with."
You’re coming from a place of shared values
Having and sharing the same strong core values in regularly highlighted as being a key factor in successful family-run businesses. While other members of the Connolly family are not directly involved in Hazel Chocolate Mountain, they regularly act as sounding boards including John’s mother who has many years’ experience in retail, his brother who works in finance and his sister who has a doctorate in health and who is often consulted in relation to new product developments.
"People talk about capital in the sense of finance but the human capital that you get with your family, it really helps. You have a solid foundation when you do things," he says.
Mark Van Den Bergh lists some of his family’s shared values that reflect their business as including a strong work ethic, loving what they do and understanding people’s differences and respecting those differences.
"Max Benjamin is right beside our parents’ house where we were brought up so we’re surrounded by nature and that has affected everything that we do," he adds. "We’re surrounded by flowers, beautiful fields, trees, fragrances in the heather, the honey and the lavender and that’s ingrained in who we are and what we do and that translates into the products as well."
