A wife’s hidden value
Barry Meguiar
Meguiar’s Inc., Irvine, Calif.
In the 1960s, third-generation owner Barry Meguiar pulled his surname off some of his company’s packaging, to read “Mirror Bright,” instead of the original “Meguiar’s Mirror Bright.” The company was launched in 1901 by his grandfather as a furniture polish maker. With the advent of automobiles, the company expanded to produce polishes and cleaning products for car makers, body shops, boats and aircraft.
“I thought this name no one can pronounce was a detriment,” recalls Meguiar (pronounced “McGuire”), now 60. But he was wrong. “We had a 100% negative response—so many calls and ugly letters from people thinking the family had sold out, that the product didn’t work the same.”
Meguiar quickly put the family name back on, dropping the “Mirror Bright” instead.
But a few years later, Meguiar had to learn this lesson a second time, as he was about enter the retail market.
Most package designers he contacted suggested space-age concepts (because of the recent moon landing). But one designer, Craig Carey, insisted that Meguiar was forgetting the heritage of his family. “He told me I would be out of my mind to leave that out.” So instead of a futuristic approach, the new logo became a scripted “Meguiar’s” to capture the good old days.
Meguiar didn’t quite appreciate the family factor yet. During his early tenure, he was embarrassed that his wife, Karen, instead of a “professional,” worked trade shows with him. One year she couldn’t make the show, and everyone asked for her. “It meant a lot to the people. So she’s worked almost 40 years of trade shows. If she’s not there I’m in trouble. She knows everyone, and it really plays well.” Now Meguiar boasts instead of hiding the fact that many other family members are involved.
Meguiar doesn’t spread his family-business gospel via a traditional advertising campaign. Instead, he sponsors about 2,000 car shows around the world. The approach seems to work. The company’s revenues grew 15% last year in a market that has been flat to declining 3% or 4% a year for the last seven years.
“Car-crazy people like to buy from car-crazy people,” he’s concluded. “We don’t define ourselves by our size or industry. We shout loudly that we’re a four-generation, 100-plus-year-old company.”
By the way, we’re a family business
George Vukasin Jr.
Peerless Coffee and Tea Co., Oakland, Calif.
When John Vukasin launched his business in 1924, he chose to name the company “Peerless” to symbolize quality. Even though the family name isn’t part of the company name, over the years the company, whose 85 employees roast coffee beans and sell tea to hotels, restaurants and cafés, has stood out more and more in the San Francisco Bay area as a family company.
“Fifty to 100 years ago, the coffee business was all family-owned,” explains John’s 30-year-old grandson, George Vukasin Jr., vice president of operations. With fewer family coffee roasters around now, “People are very much attracted to doing business with a company that has that family background and that personal touch, as opposed to a larger, faceless corporation,” he adds.
Yet, true to his grandfather’s founding principle, when Vukasin attends trade shows or calls on clients and prospects, he says he emphasizes quality of his product and service first. “Then I will mention, ‘By the way, we are a family business.’ If they want to talk to an owner, we’re easy to get ahold of. Clients like that.” Vukasin gives customers his cell and home phone numbers and the numbers of the other four family members in the business.
However, Vukasin believes that the benefits of family ownership go only so far. “It may open a door,” he says, “but won’t get you a deal unless you deliver.”
An impediment to growth?
Roosevelt Barnes
Barnes Barber & Beauty Supply, Cincinnati
Roosevelt Barnes’ father had nine brothers and five sisters. All the boys were barbers; all the girls were salon operators. When the family moved from Alabama to Cincinnati in the 1950s, they opened a barber and beauty salon. Barnes worked there on and off through college.
In 1996, Barnes and his older brother, Harry, launched an ethnic barber and beauty supply distribution company, called Barnes Barber & Beauty Supply, which now employs seven other people.
Barnes and his brother, who has an MBA, thought a lot about what to call their company. “We chose to use Barnes because we felt that the name had a great deal of equity in the city,” says Roosevelt Barnes, who’s now 29. After all, customers of Barnes Barber Shop down the street, which their father and three uncles own, often start lining up for haircuts as early as 4 a.m. to wait for the doors to open at 7 a.m. (“It’s a little like the movie Barber Shop, but more reserved,” explains Barnes. “Sort of an urban country club.”) And after race riots in Cincinnati a few years ago, the local TV station chose Barnes for live broadcasts to discuss race relations.
Most of Roosevelt and Harry’s clients are family-owned beauty salons and barber shops, who appreciate the brothers’ empathy.
But the family name also comes with a downside—a mom-and-pop image. That could become more of a problem as the Barnes brothers’ company expands to regions where their family name is less known. Roosevelt Barnes says he’s become more conscious of that small-time business stigma as competition heats up in response to what he calls the “browning of America”—the rapid growth of African-American and Hispanic populations.
“Technology and marketing are our biggest weapons to kill that image and to help us be looked at with just as much respect as a larger conglomerate group,” says Barnes. He’s exploring an on-line ordering system. As for marketing, his ads focus on providing pricing economies to customers and don’t mention that the company is family-owned and -operated.
Keeping the change
Dan Meixner
Brady Ware Employee Benefits Group, Dayton, Ohio
When Dan Meixner picked up his new business cards last year, they no longer read “Schneider Meixner Co.” He is now listed as president of Brady Ware Employee Benefits Group, a division of financial service consulting firm Brady Ware Schoenfeld Inc., which bought a controlling interest in his family business in 2000.
Dan’s father, Jim, had sold his majority share of the company he co-founded in 1983 and then retired, leaving Dan, 37, as the company’s last family employee and family shareholder.
For the first two years, the employee-benefits division blended the two companies’ names—Brady Meixner—and then phased out the “Meixner.” Meixner wistfully acknowledges that the name change is the right thing to do. “The change does take away a piece of our family business identity—for me. But that’s personal. You have to look at the bigger picture.”
The Meixner name, he maintains, “has become less important because Brady, which has been around for 50 years, now symbolizes that longevity.”
When dealing with prospective clients, Meixner is quick to bring up his background in the family business. “I can still say things to our clients that nobody else can say because it’s my family business. And that’s one of the things I want to maintain no matter what the ownership ends up being or how we go to market—that this is my family business.”
At home with two names
Georgia and Gary Kelley
Mountain-Lake Log Homes Inc., Pell City, Ala.
One name just wasn’t enough for Georgia and Gary Kelley’s company.
When the Kelleys became log-home distributors in 1994, they wanted their company name to reflect the Mountain-Lake setting where clients will build log homes.
But the couple also realized that the manufacturer they represent, Jim Barna, had a national reputation as a leading log-home maker, so the Kelleys decided to take on a second name: Barna Log Homes of Alabama.
The couple briefly considered using the name “Kelley” too. But “the focus should be more on the product: log homes,” Gary says. “And we didn’t want to take away from Jim Barna’s reputation.”
Whatever name they use, the company has sold about 200 log homes since they started and in a recent good year churned more than $2.5 million in sales.
The company’s print ads usually list both names (which one appears first depends on where the ad will appear). The ads don’t mention that the company is family-owned. “Paying for an ad and saying we’re a family business won’t draw people,” says Gary. “Once we have a client, we can tell them that we’re a family business,” adds Georgia.
The company’s website (www.bestloghomes.com), which generates about half its sales, does emphasize that they’re a husband-and-wife team. But it doesn’t mention that sales reps Todd and Matt Willis and Rachael Baribeau are Georgia’s children (from a previous marriage).
At in-person events, on the other hand, the Kelleys revel in the family nature of their business. At trade shows, “Our sons or daughter may play up the fact that we’re a family company, to help build some credibility,” says Georgia. “It does allow the customer to feel they can trust the sales person to say, ‘My parents own the company, my stepfather is V.P. of construction services.’” Georgia also hires her 73-year-old mother as a hostess at open-house events. Having multiple generations present, she says, enables prospects to find someone to whom they can relate.
Getting close to customers
Gregory C. Hyatt
Hyatt’s Graphic Supply Co., Buffalo, N.Y.
“It’s always been tempting to change our company name and come up with something that’s more generic,” says Gregory C. Hyatt, 49-year-old president of Hyatt’s Graphic Supply.
Hyatt’s Graphic, founded in 1959 by his father, Charles, has a direct competitor in that market, Advantage Sign Supply, which uses a generic name. “He can appear perhaps bigger than we might appear to be. We’ve thought of changing our name to things like Sign Power or Computer Sign or National Sign Company, but it just never felt comfortable to us. We don’t necessarily want to do things that are trendy or changing.”
Hyatt’s biggest retail competitors are art and craft chains such as Michael’s and Joanne’s, national chains that use first names, not surnames, for the company name. And although Hyatt can afford to send fliers out only four or five times a year instead of almost weekly, as those chains do, he balances that with his involvement in the community. “We present ourselves as being experienced and knowledgeable and as having in-depth inventory compared with craft chains. But we don’t play up the fact that we’re small or local or family-owned.”
Hyatt says his ambivalence about his company’s name probably stems from the temptation to try to be as successful as he can. “You want every customer out there, but it’s not possible. But that’s actually a good thing because the customers you get closer to, you develop a profitable relationship with. By having the family name on there, we are being honest, as a true reflection of what our business is all about and how we make decisions every day. It’s hard to put on a different suit of clothes and pull off something you aren’t.”
Jayne A. Pearl is a freelance writer, editor and speaker based in Amherst, Mass. She is the author of Kids and Money: Giving Them the Savvy to Succeed Financially (Bloomberg Press) and a new workbook based on her seminar, “How to Gimme-Proof Your Kids” (www.kidsandmoney.com).