Jamie Shah is president of the business her father founded, Chem-Impex International; a Polsky Center entrepreneur in residence at the University of Chicago and a WAVE Advisory Board member at the Wisconsin School of Business, her alma mater. In this interview, she discusses her own career journey and explains how family businesses can provide a unique pathway to entrepreneurship.
A portion of this interview originally appeared on the Family Business/Business Family podcast. Don’t miss an episode! Follow Family Business/Business Family on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Family Business: What does entrepreneurship mean to you?
Jamie Shah: I’m on the entrepreneurship board at the University of Wisconsin, where I graduated from, and sometimes I felt kind of like a fraud. I was like, ‘Wait, but I didn’t found the business. I’m second generation. Am I really an entrepreneur?’ And one of the new strategic initiatives at the University of Wisconsin is that they want students to be entrepreneurially minded, even if they’re not entrepreneurs. That really spoke to me and finally made me feel accepted. It makes me feel like I’m not a fraud in this field because so much of what I do is very entrepreneurial.
To me, entrepreneurship is not that you’re the person who’s toiling away in the garage to make the thing. It’s ‘How do you really get something to evolve? How do you get something to grow? How do you scale something?’ And I think entrepreneurship can happen at all different levels in all different types of companies. One of the things that I love to showcase now with my work at UChicago is that family business is a path to entrepreneurship. And I think it’s truly a path that allows you an incredible amount of freedom — sometimes even more so than venture-backed entrepreneurship. With venture-backed entrepreneurship, you’re often a CEO of a company where now you’re reporting to the board. [Often] in a family business, you’re reporting to your family and you have a lot more freedom. And what I love even more is that often you can optimize for things that aren’t just return on investment — you can also optimize for family values. You get to operate based on your shared dream, your shared values, your shared goals.
FB: Can you talk a bit about your career before joining your family business?
JS: I started my career in investment banking and I really loved it. I loved my analyst class. I was at a big investment bank where we were all kind of two years in the trenches – I definitely had times where I slept underneath my desk. But those were some of the best days and still some of the closest friends I have.
But I realized that I was really interested in what happens after the liquidity event. We would help people structure a deal and the company would go public or they would merge and then we would be kind of done with our work. But I would feel like the work was just starting. So, I decided I wanted to work at a large company to see what would happen there, and I worked at Google, which I think is one of the most entrepreneurially minded businesses out there. Still, it was such a large organization that it was really tough to feel a sense of freedom in operating, and I thought, ‘If I couldn’t feel that there, where could I feel it?’
So, I did what all people who are lost do — I went to business school. I went to UChicago and I was interested in [venture capital] at that point, because I felt like it mixed entrepreneurship and my interest in finance. But to be honest, I still felt this need to be that person on the other side of the table — to be the operator, to be the entrepreneur – and I felt like as a [venture capitalist], you would have to sit on your hands and you wouldn’t really get to do the thing. You could always advise, but you couldn’t do it, and that was frustrating for me.
So, I was talking to my dad at the end of my second year of business school, and I was like, ‘I still have no idea what I want to do.’ And he said, ‘Well, you should consider joining the family business.’ It was like a lightbulb went off in my head because I felt like, ‘My God, all along, the thing that I wanted was right in front of me and I had never even considered it.’
FB: And what was your path to entrepreneurship in the family business once you joined?
JS: I started out in the family business not really knowing anything about it. I knew that we had a chemical company — we sell laboratory products to pharmaceutical companies and universities — but I had never paid much attention to what my dad was doing. I felt like my training was truly on the job.
I didn’t have an assigned seat, I didn’t have a special office. My dad was just like, ‘I’m really busy. You’ve got to make yourself useful and you have to prove your value here.’ I remember hearing the phone ring and nobody was answering it. So, I answered it and the customer was saying, ‘Where’s my order?’ I went into the warehouse and realized it was in quite a state of disarray because we had grown a lot, but our systems hadn’t grown with us. I started building out our entire warehouse operation system and started barcoding everything and just bringing it up to the next level. I let the customer lead me and that was truly my guide to figuring out what we needed to do in our business.
The customers started asking questions about our quality systems, so we built out our quality system. Then, they would ask questions about new products, so we would start to think about that as well. When I think about entrepreneurship, it always starts with: Who is the customer? And if you can make that person happy, then you’re doing your job right. That’s really what helped me grow in the business and bring clarity to our business.
FB: Every definition of ‘entrepreneurship’ mentions an appetite for risk or tolerance for failure. How can a family business allow people — especially NextGens — to take risks and potentially fail without putting the whole enterprise in peril?
JS: It starts with figuring out: where is there a need? So, doing the background work to figure out: is this a worthwhile endeavor and who is advocating for it? Is it a customer or is it just a whim that we feel would be interesting?
But I think the most important thing is to iterate. The faster you can test things, the better. I actually have the problem where I try to go too fast and I often break things. But I work with my twin sister, Jessica, who’s a lawyer by trade and has a very risk-based outlook on everything. She really does counteract my need to move as fast as possible, so we just try to take baby steps.
I love what Jeff Bezos said: Think of every decision like two types of doors. There’s Door 1 that you can open and see what’s going on. Then you can close it and reevaluate your decision. But with Door 2, you go in and there’s no way to come back out. Ninety-nine percent of decisions in life are ‘Door 1 decisions.’ Most decisions can be reversed and the world isn’t going to end. How much are you really putting at risk if you’re taking small steps? It’s usually very limited.
FB: What advice do you have for NextGens who can’t conceive of their family business as a place where the entrepreneurial mindset can flourish?
JS: Any business at any point in time is either expanding or contracting. Based on that, you need to orient your business accordingly — either you need to create processes to help you scale or you need to find ways to create more revenue, which presents a different type of opportunity [for entrepreneurial ideas]. The entrepreneurial mindset is feeling like everything can always become just a little bit better. Even when I go to a restaurant, I’m finding 10 different things that I think they should do differently.
And I will give my parents a lot of credit for really believing in my sister and me. They give us space and trust us. I don’t think all families have the fortune of feeling that way. Sometimes it’s not even about you; it’s maybe about some insecurity the previous generation has. That [generational misalignment] needs to be addressed, but I think it’s shortsighted to view a family business and say, ‘I don’t think there’s potential there.’ There’s potential everywhere.