Corporate Bloodlines: The Future of the Family Firm

Nearly 90% of America s 15 million businesses are family controlled or have a major family involvement. They generate 60% of the country s gross national product and employ between 40 and 50 million people. Certainly some family businesses are in fact gigantic multinational dynasties (including 175 of the Fortune 500). However, the vast majority are small to medium-sized companies struggling daily for survival. Most family businesses have a life expectancy of merely twenty-five years. Only 30% survive to the second generation; and of these, only half survive to the third generation. Why? Corporate Bloodlines answers these and many other questions in its in-depth profiles of fourteen family-owned businesses: ~ Bixler s (jewelry stores, Easton, PA) ~ Blake-Lamb Funeral Homes (Oak Lawn, IL) ~ Bookstop (book retailing, Austin, TX) ~ Dillard Department Stores Inc. (Little Rock, AR) ~ Elyachar Real Estate (New York, NY & Sarasota, FL) ~ The Firestone Vineyard (Los Olivas, CA) ~ Fox Photo Inc. (San Antonio, TX) ~ Glen Ellen Winery (Glen Ellen, CA) ~ Grace s Marketplace (gourmet foods, New York, NY) ~ Koss Corporation (Milwaukee, WI) ~ Lazzara Optical (Villa Park, IL) ~ The 7 Santini Brothers (Bronx, NY) ~ Smith Farms (Chula, MO) ~ Unified Services Inc. (cleaning, Washington D.C.) Here are vivid portraits of families working, struggling and sometimes achieving a piece of the American dream: the Lamb brothers, who built the Blake-Lamb Funeral Home into one of the largest in the Midwest; the 7 Santini Brothers moving company, which never changed its founding credo that family comes before business, and was finally forced to sell a~er years of declining revenue, dwindling profits and bitter feuds among five family factions; and Grace s Marketplace in Manhattan, where at 5:00 a.m. vendors deliver goods long before the doors to the gourmet take-out shop open.