Mitzi Perdue

Putting the “Family” in Family Business: It’s Worth It

Here’s a question for you:  to qualify as a family business, do at least some members of the business need to be related by blood or marriage?

Tobi Silver, President of Sterling Resources, LTD has a simple, one-syllable answer to that question:

“No.”

The family business that Silver belongs to consists of employees who are not related, at least in any traditional sense.  But still, the esprit and the family-feelings are so strong that, Silver insists, “We think of ourselves as family members working in the family business.”

Can Other Companies Learn from What Sterling Did?

What did founder Karl Feitelberg do to create such intense employee engagement?

Here’s the Sterling Resources story.  It was founded in 1989, and Silver was one of the first hires.  She began work as the controller, and because of her technical background in finance, she soon found herself deeply involved with the firm’s clients.

“We had decided from the very beginning,” recalls Silver, “that our niche was going to be treating our clients the way we’d like our own families to be treated.” This approach of treating clients like family had an enormously positive spillover.

After all, if the niche you want for your brand is, you treat your clients right, it follows that as part of your culture, you should also be treating your colleagues right.   However, one year after the company’s founding, that principle got put to an enormous test.

 

Romance Enters the Picture!

Silver was working at the company’s Hingham, MA office and one evening she went out on a blind date.  Her date turned out to be the love of her life.

Wonderful!  What could be wrong with this picture?

Her husband’s job was in Rutland, Vermont, a four-hour drive away.  Within a matter of months, the new couple wanted to get married and start a family.  The problem was, it’s an eight-hour round trip between her home in Vermont and Hingham.

Karl Feitelberg, the company’s founder could have let Silver go, but instead he told her, “I don’t want to lose you!”  He encouraged her to set up her computer in her new home, she bought a thermal fax machine, and she taught the FEDEX driver how to find her obscure country road address.

Silver, thanks to the forward-thinking of Feitelberg, was now a full-fledged telecommuter. Once a month, she’d make the trek to Hingham, spend a day or two there and then return to Vermont. The rest she handled by fax and phone.

Interestingly, Silver’s career didn’t suffer from her working from a distance. In short order, she became the CFO.

But then came another seeming obstacle to her career with Sterling.

Silver Wanted Children

In 1994, she and her husband decided to start a family.

Silver didn’t want to be an absentee mother, dropping her kids off at daycare. She wanted to spend more time with them than that.

Since her goal was to devote significant time to motherhood, this could have been career-ending for her.  Instead Feitelberg, agreed that she could keep her job as a telecommuting CFO.

He’d shuffle things around to spread some of her load, so she would work a 25-hour week during her childbearing years.  Over the years, Silver’s responsibilities grew, even though she was telecommuting.

Eventually she was named COO, and then, when her children were grown, she was offered the job of President. Her husband had his own law practice by this point and could telecommute, so the couple moved back to the south shore of Boston.

The Secret to It All

The story of Sterling Services is an extraordinary story of people understanding family needs, and caring enough about each other to fill in and accommodate and simply do what had to be done to keep the work force functioning.  The company’s culture of treating clients like family was mirrored in how employees treat each other.  Several years ago Feitelberg’s son joined the group, deepening the firms family roots.

Jim Clifton, Chairman of Gallup, could have had Sterling Services in mind when he talks about his polling research on employee engagement.  “Unimaginable success results when you select  people who have the proven motivation of making a difference in the lives of others, not just their own.”

Treating people well, even like family, is key.

To contact Tobi Silver, tobi@sterlingresources.com