In 1955 my mother suddenly found herself a 44-year-old widow with two small children and a debt-burdened family company in a world where very few female CEOs existed. Nevertheless, Ebba Benson Hoffman transformed Minnesota-based Smead Manufacturing Company from a struggling concern into a leading international provider of filing and organizational products.
What were her business credentials? Ebba was the youngest of five children, and she spent most of her youth on a farm near Cannon Falls, Minn. At age six she was sent to a one-room country schoolhouse; her formal schooling ended after eighth grade. But of course her informal education never ended. Her ability to learn from others was the key to her personal growth, and her company’s.
Ebba took her first job as a waitress at the age of 14. Following that she worked for Land O’ Lakes. In 1928, at the age of 17, she landed a job at Honeywell in Minneapolis. On a visit home one weekend, she met Harold Hoffman, who ran Smead Manufacturing with his father in Hastings, Minn. After a courtship of several months, Harold proposed. But Ebba—convinced she was too young to marry—turned him down. Harold did marry someone else, but fate intervened 14 years later, leaving him widowed and bringing them together once more at a farewell party for a Honeywell employee.
As close as my parents were, my mother had no involvement with Smead operations. She quit her Honeywell job to care for her family—the customary pattern at that time. Ebba rarely came to Harold’s office, but she often accompanied him to dealer conventions and trade shows.
In August 1955, while in Buffalo on business, Harold suffered a fatal heart attack. I recall my mother’s tears when she received the phone call, because she seldom cried. Since Harold’s father had died the previous year, Smead Manufacturing’s two key leaders were suddenly gone. Neither man had written a will. Now Ebba had two young children to raise, two estates to settle and a cash-poor company to run. Most people assumed she would sell the company.
Yet in fact Ebba possessed many of the necessary CEO qualifications: a capacity for hard work, keen intuition, common sense and even some management experience at Honeywell. She knew the dealers from traveling with Harold, and she appreciated the importance of manufacturing quality products. She knew Smead’s employees and felt a passionate loyalty to them. So she took the helm herself.
“I had to do it,” she later explained. “I wanted to be able to raise my family, satisfy my debts and leave the company to my children. Beyond that, we have a family of loyal people who rely on our success to raise their own families.”
Over the next 43 years this tough, witty woman took Smead from a $4 million company with 350 employees to a $315 million company with 2,500 employees. And, somehow, it never lost the “family feel.” At the age of 75 she remained at the helm when her putative successor, my brother John Peter, died unexpectedly of a bleeding ulcer in 1986 at the age of 38. Retirement wasn’t really in my mother’s vocabulary. “I enjoy coming in to work too much to leave,” she told a reporter in 1996, when she was 85. “My circle of friends is here, and I like to talk to them. I am afraid if I retired I would lose contact with these wonderful people.”
My mother passed away in February 1999, just seven months after turning Smead’s presidency over to me. It’s a much bigger company than the one she inherited in 1955, but I think I’m up to the challenge. After all, I had the best possible role model.
Sharon Avent is CEO of Smead Manufacturing Company in Hastings, Minn. (www.smead.com).