“Come spend a day as a guest of George Vanderbilt,” beckons a marketing campaign for the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C. Since 1930, tourists—including luminaries like Jimmy Carter, Robert Redford, Bill and Melinda Gates, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, Walter Cronkite and Anthony Hopkins—have been flocking to the property, which once was home to George W. Vanderbilt (1862-1914), a member of the prominent Vanderbilt family. The crowning jewel of the estate is a 250-room castle that Vanderbilt erected in 1895. Modeled after a French Renaissance chateau, it remains the largest private residence in the U.S., with 65 fireplaces, 35 bedrooms and 43 bathrooms.
The 8,000-acre property is now run by Vanderbilt’s great-grandson William Amherst Vanderbilt (Bill) Cecil Jr., 47, the Biltmore Company’s president and CEO, along with his sister, Dini Cecil Pickering, a vice chair of the board and a member of the executive committee. (She declines to reveal her age.) The property includes the Biltmore Estate Winery, established in 1985, and the 213-room Inn on Biltmore Estate, which opened in 2001. Cecil’s father, William A.V. Cecil Sr., 77, who retired in 1995, still owns the estate, which is designated as a National Historic Landmark. Cecil Sr. continues to serve as chairman of the board, established in 1978. Eight family members are directors, and six non-family members serve as advisers.
“My father still wants to know what is going on in the business,” says Bill Cecil. “But it is fortunate for us that when the generation transferred, he did not go from being all the way involved to halfway involved. He really did shift to a board-of-directors involvement only. He had the courage to let us take over.”
The estate, which has appeared in movies like Last of the Mohicans and Forrest Gump, was named “Biltmore” after the Dutch town of Bildt, Vanderbilt’s ancestral home. A self-guided tour of the estate costs around $40; guided tours are available at an additional cost. About 1 million guests visit per year; according to the family, the Biltmore Company reached $100 million in annual revenues in 2003.
But the numbers weren’t always favorable. The estate first opened to the public on March 15, 1930, at the request of the directors of the Asheville Chamber of Commerce, who hoped it would attract tourism to the area during the Depression. Before William Cecil Sr. took charge of the estate in the early 1960s, the property was managed by a local dignitary, Judge Junius Adams. According to the Cecils, in the early years the estate simply opened its doors to visitors, with little marketing and promotion. When Cecil Sr. took the reins, the business was losing $250,000 a year. In 1968, the company recorded a profit: $16.24.
Cecil Sr. was “very proud of that accomplishment,” his son says. “He indicated to me that he thought it would be his entire 30 to 40 years of work to be able to turn it around and make a profit.” Of course, Bill Cecil notes, “He had some luck, too.” Two major interstates run through Asheville, making the estate a convenient drive for many East Coast residents. (Recent ads tout Biltmore Estate as “a faraway place that’s not far away.”) Cecil Sr. made improvements to the estate and began growing grapes on the property, which previously had grown produce and operated a dairy.
Cecil Sr.’s son Bill spearheaded construction of the inn in response to requests from visitors who wanted to stay at Biltmore House. “The next best thing to protect the artifacts was to have them stay in an inn,” Bill Cecil says. The company continues to pay attention to visitor feedback, he notes. “We seem to do really well when we listen to what our guests say,” he says. “They are the ones who pay the bills.”
The inn now plays a central role in the firm’s growth strategy. “Hospitality has become one of the hallmarks of our business,” Cecil says. “The people who work here really go out of their way to make you feel welcome. That is an experience that Vanderbilt would have wanted his guests to have.” Recently, members of the executive team attended a leadership training program in Chapel Hill, N.C., to learn strategies for enhancing employee efficiency, Cecil reports.
Family business students
Cecil and Pickering have also been educating themselves about family businesses so they are better equipped to sustain their fourth-generation sibling partnership. “We have so much knowledge of each other,” Cecil says, “that we bring a lot of extra baggage to the table that you don’t bring with people that you don’t know quite as well as you know your family.”
Several years ago, the siblings hired a consulting firm—the Family Business Consulting Group of Marietta, Ga.—to help them keep the family working well together. “Bill Cecil and Dini Pickering are tremendous students of family business,” says Drew Mendoza, the consulting firm’s managing principal, “and they have strived to put in place as many applicable best practices as possible for their family business. They are keen, enthusiastic students of the field, always looking for great new information.”
One essential lesson they’ve learned, according to Cecil, is how to communicate with each other. “We actually go through and talk about how to teach communication [to employees and family members],” he says, “or have people come in to teach us about communication techniques. And then we start using this common language. For example, instead of saying, ‘That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,’ you learn to say something like, ‘Can you help me understand this?’ That works with everybody, not just family members.”
Following up on agenda items not only guarantees mutual understanding, but also opens a dialogue when misunderstandings occur, Cecil notes. He cites an example: “‘You said you were going to do this, but it hasn’t gotten done yet. What is the problem?’ This is not an attack message, but it’s a pretty direct message” that is solution-based, he explains.
Family meetings are an essential part of the estate’s strategic planning, Cecil adds. “We have to get on the same page, especially with the family members who are not as involved in the business,” he says. “We need to make sure they understand why we reinvested in this or why we think this was a good idea or not. That is why family meetings are recommended.”
The family holds two annual meetings, with 11 people in attendance, including Bill Cecil and Dini Pickering’s spouses and children. (Cecil has three children, ages 18, 15 and ten; Pickering has two sons, ages 18 and 14.) “Our kids like going to the meetings so far,” Cecil says. “It prepares them to talk about difficult subjects, like how they will earn their jobs and what doing a good job means. Family meetings are a lot about them, and about preparing them for leadership in the next generation.” All of Cecil and Pickering’s children have expressed interest in the estate; two of them have worked there on a part-time basis. Members of the fifth generation join the board at age 18.
Last year, Biltmore Estate and the Family Business Consulting Group teamed up to offer a series of two workshops for family business owners. “During a conversation over the future of the inn,” Mendoza recalls, “I suggested that [Cecil and Pickering] take this wonderful property and turn it into a destination location for a family meeting.” Six business families attended the first program.
“It was sort of a natural partnership,” Pickering says. “They agreed to provide the faculty for our programs, and we provide a wonderful facility. We are very much on the learning end of the spectrum. Bill and I are attending these courses along with the other families that sign up, so we are learning the same kind of materials to put to use here with our particular family and our family business.&3148;
In addition to the Family Business Consulting Group workshop series, a program of the University of North Carolina-Asheville Family Business Forum was held at the Inn at Biltmore Estate last October.
Preserving the legacy
“I think the family business has served us very well,” Cecil says. “There are not that many decision-makers, and sometimes it takes a long time to get all four or five of us on board. But once you get us on board, the decision is made right away.” Unlike a corporate entity, the family firm has no cumbersome bureaucracy, he notes. “It is not like you would then have to go to some other body and start over explaining.
“For example, we agreed, a couple of years ago, to invest more in advertising,” Cecil says. “We invested $2 million more in our advertising budget to address changes in our marketplace. I did not have to go to some other part of the country and try to explain that to a corporate headquarters. We just went together over to lunch and talked about it.”
Cecil and Pickering say they strive to be true to their great-grandfather’s vision. “We ask questions like, ‘What would George Vanderbilt think if we did that?’” Cecil says. “We try not to do anything that we think he would be upset with. It helps us preserve the core nature of our attraction and the beauty of the estate.”
The siblings acknowledge that new generations will leave their mark on the estate as they carry it into the future. “As we grow the company there is no road map, so we have to learn as we go,” Cecil says. Adds his sister, “We are in this for the long haul.”
Jonathan Poston is a writer based in Asheville, N.C.
Family business advice from Vanderbilt’s descendantsSiblings Dini Pickering and William A.V. Cecil Jr., great-grandchildren of George W. Vanderbilt and proprietors of his Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C., share what they’ve learned about working with family members.
From Dini Pickering:
1. Schedule family meetings.
2. Set agendas.
3. Use teamwork.
4. Separate family business from company business.
5. Work with a consultant.
From William A.V. Cecil Jr.:
1. Plan ahead.
2. Identify goals and determine what you have to do to get there.
3. Communicate using neutral or non-loaded language.
4. Sift through opinions and look at the facts to find a solution.
5. Follow up on agreements.