In 1981, Jack Kloke started a trucking business and recruited his two college-age sons in order to give them some real-world experience outside the classroom. He bought a Mercedes truck, secured contracts from furniture retailers to deliver their wares and put his boys to work. Ten years later, the five moving and storage businesses that grew out of that initiative, run by Richmond, Va.-based Kloke Group, were prospering. But Kloke’s sons decided that their futures lay elsewhere.
 Kloke and his wife and co-owner, Beth, had to decide who would take over. Kloke was in his mid-60s and knew he would soon retire, so he sought a way to extract his capital from the company. He also wanted to help his employees, and offer them a retirement plan that, he hoped, would provide his company with a higher employee retention rate than its peers in this turnover-plagued industry.
The Klokes realized that they could not saddle their children with an unwanted company. Irene Firmat, CEO and founder of Full Sail Brewery in Hood River, Ore., had a similar dilemma. “It took us a while to decide what we wanted to be when we grew up,” she says, “and I can’t think of anything worse to do to my kids than to say, ‘Hey, we made this decision so it’s made for you!’ I want them to be anything they want to be. Right now one of them wants to be a restaurant critic and the other one wants to design roller coasters; they don’t want to be brewers.”
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