College studies in family business help next generation take charge

By Barry Flynn
The Orlando Sentinel

After 19 years of running and owning a franchised barbecue restaurant, Bob Hudgins talks in impersonal terms about the hopes of small-business owners, but you know he's talking about himself.

"So many people work so hard to start a business," Hudgins said. "You hate to see it go by the wayside."

He elaborated: "I'm 71 years old, so I'm going to have to get out of it one of these days. So, either I have someone take over or I have to sell it."

That's where his younger daughter, Tiffany, 22, might come in. She is a recent college graduate with a degree in business. She wields both a firm sense of practicality and a people-person openness.

Her father would like her to join him and his wife in the business — now two Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q restaurants in Lakeland, Fla. — to begin learning the ropes with an eye to eventually taking over.

Tiffany's mother, Jean, who has worked in the business for the past five years and has taken more responsibility as health problems have hampered her husband, feels the same.

"I'd love for her to do that," Jean Hudgins said.

Even so, both parents would rather see their daughter do something else than work for them against her will.

Tiffany is not sure. Still, she is taking a serious look. She recently moved into her parents' home and is prepared to help out any way she can while her father faces surgery.

The Hudginses are living one of the great truisms of American hometown capitalism: Family businesses pass only with very great difficulty from parents to children. Far more businesses are sold or closed than survive into second- and third-generation ownership.

Tiffany is certain she is too young and inexperienced to take over the business yet. But she is also probably better equipped to survive and thrive inside a family business than most young people faced with similar options.

That's because she spent much of her undergraduate career at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., focusing on the problems of family businesses, in which she took a minor and in which Stetson plans a major starting next spring.

Not only did Tiffany take courses on family-business issues, but she was required to write a career plan and did an internship with another family business.

The director of the family-business center at the university, Greg McCann, reckons the specialty is sorely needed and bound to grow across the country.

About 30 years ago, the study of entrepreneurship in colleges and universities was in its infancy, about where the study of family business is now, McCann said. Today, there are as many as 300 programs in entrepreneurship.

"I would like to believe that in 20 years almost every business school will have some type of program" designed to serve family businesses, he said.

What can students learn about their own families' businesses from an academic program?

"Mostly it's how family involvement changes the business," McCann said.

And most people interested in the topic agree that the effect of family dynamics is enormous.