As Bob McLean lay dying in August 2001 of the cancer that would claim him two months later, he asked one final promise of Maria, his wife of 38 years: that she would keep their family business for at least 12 months after his death.
That was no easy request. Columbia Coffee & Tea Co., a coffee roaster in Toronto with annual sales of about $1 million, had spent much of the 1990s teetering on the brink of extinction. And Maria McLean was a prominent author and magazine writer who, in 2002, would win the Golden Jubilee Medal of Queen Elizabeth II for her significant contribution to Canadian literature.
“I never wanted to work in the family business,” Maria says today, “and I was never particularly interested in it.”
Not only has Maria kept her promise to Bob, but the business is thriving, with sales up some 6% last year in a down economy.
The remarkable transformation of both Maria McLean and her husband’s business really began half a century ago, in 1952, when two partners started a coffee company in the middle of downtown Toronto’s ethnic Kensington Market. Columbia Coffee & Tea Co. was wedged between a Jewish tailor shop and a greasy-spoon restaurant. From early childhood, Bob McLean had known his father, Norman McLean, as a man whose life revolved around his business. By the time Maria met Bob in 1964, he had worked alongside his father for five years. Bob roasted and packaged the coffee; Norman and his partner, Wilf Bulgin, sold and delivered it. Bob’s mother started working at Columbia Coffee too, after her daughter got married and left her home by herself.
But Maria’s interest in the company was negligible. “I found that Bob’s parents’ whole life was the business,” she recalls. “They went to work together every day, they came home together every day. Bob’s parents wouldn’t take holidays because they wouldn’t leave the business. Any time you would talk to his dad about doing something, they couldn’t do it because of the business. So I had a negative concept of what business was like.” Besides, “My interests were more creative, and that’s where I was heading.”
Over the next 30 years, Maria avoided the business while she raised six children and got involved in Toronto’s arts scene. Unlike Bob’s parents, she and Bob never discussed business at home. By the time Bob bought the business from his father in 1990, Maria had returned to university and to the path that would eventually lead in 2000 to her acclaimed memoir, My Father Came from Italy.
Their sons Rob and Ken entered the business in the 1980s. Rob had dropped out of university to marry his girlfriend and simply needed a job. He stayed for five years, leaving in 1991 to coach swimming full-time at a private club in Toronto. Ken, on the other hand, created a sales position for himself and worked at it diligently. Ken was “more proactive, more like his father,” Maria recalls. “He knew every aspect of the business.” But pressure from his wife to live closer to her family ended Ken’s stint at the company when they moved to Athens, Ohio, in 1989.
After 29 years in the business, Bob bought out his father in 1990, when he was 47, with the understanding that his father would retire—only to find Bob’s father reluctant to leave. Father and son argued bitterly about whether Bob could manage things and whether his father would depart on the agreed date.
As Bob’s relationship with his father soured, Maria found herself accused of coming between them.
“I had nothing to do with the business, but I was blamed for being the problem,” she remembers. She was sufficiently concerned to look into psychological literature and was relieved to discover herself part of a common syndrome: “Any research I’ve done shows it’s often the daughter-in-law who takes the blame for this crazy sort of thing,” she says.
Although Bob now owned the company, his father still owned the company’s building. To distance himself emotionally from his father, in 1991 Bob took a financially crippling step: He moved the business to a new location, with three times the space, at three times the old rent. Bob figured this expensive relocation would provide storage space for Columbia’s coffee beans (previously stored in a separate, paid location). The move was consummated, an expensive $150,000 roasting machine was purchased from New York, a large loan was arranged—and then the green bean market changed. Bob, who had just invested in expensive storage facilities, found he could now buy his coffee a bag at time just as economically. So the expensive extra storage space was largely unnecessary. And Bob’s father, finally shoved out of the business by this move, was no longer around to advise his son through crises that would soon drive Columbia Coffee to the brink of bankruptcy.
Some 30% of Columbia Coffee’s volume came from contracts with two buying co-ops—that is, wholesale distributors that sold products to restaurants. But when the price of green coffee beans started to skyrocket in the ’90s, Bob found himself unable to pass on the higher cost because Columbia Coffee was locked into long-term contracts with both co-ops. In 1995 the cost of coffee beans tripled, to a point that it grew higher than what he was selling it for, Maria says.
Because of Maria and Bob’s agreement that they wouldn’t talk to each other about the coffee business, Maria knew little about these developments. All she knew was that every Sunday afternoon, Bob would become unusually crabby. If she asked him what was wrong, he would say nothing.
“He was carrying it all himself,” she remembers now, “and was constantly worried about it. He could see he was in trouble, but he didn’t know why. His father was not available for advice, and Bob couldn’t confide in anyone at the coffee company, especially on financial matters.”
Finally Bob turned to his wife. “He felt I had strong organizational skills,” she says, “and that I could be incredibly tough when I needed to be. And he knew I wouldn’t let him down.” For her part, Maria knew Bob wouldn’t have asked for help if something wasn’t terribly wrong. So she set aside her misgivings and joined the company in November 1995.
What she found dismayed her. “Bob was working at the company without actually managing it, without having any time to think about what he was doing,” Maria recalls. The problem, she quickly sensed, was Bob’s need to prove himself. “He had his finger in every pie. If you were to go in and talk to Bob, he’d be at his desk. If the phone rang, Bob would pick up the phone if someone didn’t pick it up on the first ring. If someone came to the front door, Bob would be there before anyone else had a chance. If something went wrong with the roaster, he would be out back fixing the machine. He would be ordering the green beans. He would be dealing with the sales reps. He was just literally running around in circles.”
Maria noticed another problem in her husband as well. Bob was a “nice guy” to such an extent that he was a pushover for just about everyone: his three sales reps (to whom he granted larger car allowances and expense accounts), his customers (to whom he extended longer credit terms) and his accounting department (for whom he bought expensive new computers). And to please his banker, Bob was paying back the company’s bank loan faster than the company could afford.
Maria turned for advice to Canada’s Federal Business Development Bank, where an adviser confirmed her worst fears. “You’re on a sinking ship,” he told her. “You can throw some people overboard and save the rest, or you can all drown together.” He recommended three actions: raise coffee prices, decrease operational costs and increase volume.
“At that moment,” Maria recalls, “I understood you have to have a separation of head and heart. You’re in business to make money in order to pay your workers and to make a living—and if you can’t do that, then you have to think about how you can do it.”
Setting aside her distaste for the business, Maria plunged into Columbia Coffee’s survival. “I wanted to protect Bob,” she says, “and I wanted to protect the family business.”
The first problem area was sales. Three reps weren’t generating sufficient revenue to justify their annual $150,000 cost. “It was incredibly difficult for Bob to fire them,” Maria says. “He had never fired anyone before.” Maria, also a neophyte firer, nevertheless offered to do it for him. But Bob, his backbone stiffened by Maria’s support, bit the bullet and fired all three reps himself. “He said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life,” she recalls.
Next, Columbia jacked up its coffee price from $3.95 a pound to $5.50 and, as expected, lost its two big co-op customers, accounting for a third of Columbia’s volume. (The co-ops, having found two other suppliers willing to provide coffee at the old lower price, were happy to let Columbia out of its contracts.)
Third, the company joined a government program that allowed the company to assess and pay wages only for actual hours an employee worked; additional unworked hours were paid (at 60% of normal wages) by the government. This plan—aimed at reducing applications for government unemployment insurance—allowed Maria to assess which staffers were really working the hours they were getting paid for and to eliminate jobs accordingly.
Among those laid off were a driver; Bob’s assistant; the receptionist (who was leaving the city and wasn’t replaced); one of the packaging people—“the one who balked the most”—and Maria’s sister, who resigned because she was upset about all these changes. “My sister felt a great empathy for the other employees she was working with,” Maria says. At the company meeting to tell the employees what was going on, Maria asked her sister to sit at the head of the table beside her and Bob. But she refused, preferring to sit with the employees.
“After she left the company, she stopped speaking to me, and to Bob,” Maria remembers. “Even when Bob was diagnosed with cancer and later when he died, she retained her silence. Until then she was my closest support and ally. So I lost a lot when I decided to separate business decisions from personal feelings.”
Her sister’s departure did produce one unexpected side benefit: “We found her assistant had a Ph.D. in economics,” Maria says, “so we put him in charge of bookkeeping, and he upgraded the computer system.”
By the time the dust had cleared, Columbia Coffee’s work force had been sliced from 21 employees to seven, and Maria was getting the cold-shoulder treatment from relatives and colleagues alike. “I would walk into the plant and the employees who had been talking with each other grew instantly silent,” she recalls. One time, she overheard the roaster complaining to the packager because Maria had told him to sweep the area around the roasting machine. “He said, ‘Who does she think she is?’” Maria remembers. A sales rep refused to talk to her if she answered the phone; he would ask for her sister instead.
Nerves were on edge throughout the company. No one knew who would be next, and everyone blamed Maria as the woman behind the changes. “All I made were suggestions,” she insists. “It was always Bob who made the decisions. It was his company.”
Needless to add, this wasn’t a happy time for Maria. She hated going in to work “because everyone hated me.” As for Bob, “He didn’t really notice; he was still busy running the business.”
Maria resolved to get out as soon as possible. “I was there to help Bob,” she says, “but I didn’t want to work there. I had no intention of staying in the coffee business.”
But thanks to these adjustments, within six months the company’s future looked brighter. Bob, relieved to get away from the office, was out in the field, using his superb customer-service skills and vast knowledge of the business to attract and retain customers. Their daughter Kathryn, then 18, took a year off from the University of Toronto to join the company. She worked for 18 months without pay and then signed on full-time. “It wasn’t necessarily so much that I was interested,” Kathryn says, “but they needed me to come in and help out a bit.”
By 1999 the company was financially sound again. But then one day Kathryn noticed the lump on Bob’s cheek. The diagnosis was grim: At 56, Bob had cancer of the parotid and salivary glands.
Maria and Bob’s son Ken, in Athens, Ohio, wanted to come home and help out, but his wife—afraid that they’d never return to America—resisted. So Ken traveled weekly between Athens and Toronto—an eight-hour drive. Maria believes the emotional stress of Bob’s illness, together with Ken’s distress at his wife’s reluctance to move back to Toronto, made Ken leave his marriage. (For his part, Ken says, “You could say it was a difference in opinions of where you want to live.”) For some six months, Ken ran the company in Canada, returning to Ohio every two weeks to visit his children. But in October 2000, when Bob’s cancer seemed to be in remission, Ken moved back to Ohio.
The following August Bob was ill again—terminally this time—and Ken, now divorced, moved back to Canada. Maria, confident that Ken would manage the company together with his sister Kathryn, stepped out of the business to nurse Bob at their home. Kathryn had planned to return to university full-time that year, but a week before classes began, Bob’s condition worsened. “I felt like without my dad here, who else is going to do it?” Kathryn says. “Not that it was all on me, but if I wasn’t here, it would be so much more that someone else would be doing.”
Two months later, in October 2001, Bob died—and the day after the funeral, Ken moved back to Ohio. He says he “still can hardly talk about it without getting upset.”
Maria insists she understands her son’s needs. “He was always torn between his family in Toronto and his children back in Ohio,” she says. “No matter which way he did it, he was unhappy.” But as she recounts his departure, her anger seeps out.
“On one level, I feel you have to do what’s best for yourself, and children are more important,” she says. “But Kathryn and I weren’t able to say, ‘This is not working; I’m going back home.’ We had to answer the phone every day, people asking about Bob—we had to get through that.” Ken says he still feels torn between his three children in Ohio and his family in Canada: “You always want to be somewhere else; it’s difficult.”
Maria and Kathryn now run Columbia Coffee as joint partners with equal salaries. “I had been unpaid until this time,” Maria notes, “but after Bob’s death I added his salary and Kathryn’s salary together and divided it between Kathryn and myself.” Their operating style is very different from Bob’s, not to mention that of Bob’s workaholic parents. “We took two and a half weeks off this summer,” she notes, “and didn’t hire anyone to fill in for us, and the company managed fine.”
The management style is more collaborative now. “Before, my dad always had the final say,” Kathryn says. “Now it’s more like partners.” She believes the employees “find it quite the same because my mum and I haven’t really changed anything.”
Columbia’s customers say they’ve barely noticed a difference since Bob died. “They just take really good care of us,” says Jesse Ostlund, manager of the Ruth’s Chris Toronto restaurant and a Columbia Coffee customer for seven years. “It goes beyond business.”
Kathryn continues her university education. Her South Asian studies take her away from the business just one day a week. She takes few business courses: “I know the basics of what needs to be done” at the company, she says, “and we have an accountant and a bookkeeper.”
Maria says she tries to run the business the way she raised her family: “My employees are part of my family. I respect them, ask their advice, try to include them—but at the end of the day I still make the decisions, because I am the owner/parent.”
At 56, Maria is now planning her estate so she can turn the company over to Kathryn within five years. Her business advice for Kathryn, she says, is simple: “Be aware of how you project your business. If you have problems, find a few people to talk to. And for everyone else, project a business picture that is strong and successful.”
Maria admits the business has taken a lot of time from her writing. However, she adds with a mischievous grin, “I’ve also met an awful lot of interesting characters who will show up in a book—one way or another.”
Welsh-born Ffion Llwyd-Jones lives in Toronto, Canada, but travels frequently to her homeland. She writes for publications in Britain, Canada and the U.S.