Stop by Ricci’s Italian Sausage in McKees Rocks this holiday season and you might be served by an orthopedic surgeon or an attorney. The lawyer is Ernest A. Ricci, 30, great-grandson of Ricci’s founder, the original Ernest Ricci, while the surgeon-in-training is Gianni Ricci, 27, Ernest A.’s younger brother. The two sons’ presence at the [...]
Susan Michel has always taught her four kids a consistent lesson: You get what you earn. Susan, 58, has approached succession planning at her financial advisory business, Glen Eagle, with the same philosophy. The kids have watched her grow the Princeton, N.J., firm from a kitchen-table operation into a regional stalwart with $400 million in [...]
The family business is one of the oldest and most common economic organisational models. The significant role they play in the global economy is undeniable, with companies such as BMW, Wal-Mart, Toyota and many more all having started as family businesses, and at some point adapting their structures, processes and policies to continue to grow [...]
Here’s how hard it is for a business to survive 50 years: only about 36 percent of them make it to their 10th birthday, and about 21 percent make it to their 20th anniversary, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are many reasons why so few companies last. They expand too quickly [...]
The story of the Al Fahim Group, today one of the oldest and largest family business conglomerates in the region [UAE], began with a problem many of us are familiar with – cars getting stuck in the sand. In 1960, Abdul Jalil Al Fahim, who two years earlier had opened a small food and textile [...]
From a tiny office in the front of his store, Bill Nusser gives a friendly wave and hello to all the customers who stop in his jewelry store, much like his father, grandfather and great grandfather before him. Nusser is the fourth generation owner of Hands Jewelers, a fixture on the Iowa City downtown retail [...]
More than 110 years ago, Fung Pak-liu, an English teacher, and Li To-ming, a local merchant whose family owned a porcelain shop, started an export trading company in Guangzhou, shipping porcelain, fireworks, jade handicrafts and silk, mainly to the United States. The Fung family have steadily built the company into one of the world’s largest [...]
The Danish family behind the Lego plastic-brick empire is shaking up the company’s ownership structure, elevating an executive widely credited for rescuing the toy maker from the brink of bankruptcy to manage all-things Lego and explore new business ventures. The Kirk Kristiansen family said Lego A/S Chief Executive Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, who has transformed the venerable Danish company [...]
In our agrarian past, every farmer wanted 10 sons because all that “free labor” meant he could have a much bigger farm. The patriarch not only controlled the family business, he also generally controlled the career choices his children were allowed to make. That trend has persisted in modern family businesses—until the past few years. [...]
How can an organisation with a relatively small investment team such as a family office deal with the deluge of data that can inform investment processes today? While some family offices show great entrepreneurial spirit, to date many have been slow adopters of technology tools for efficient portfolio management. But that is changing as the [...]