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| Your Family's 100 Year Plan: Behind a Behemoth |
The Big Picture
Michelle Seaton
12/01/2004
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Hal Lainson took a part-time job at his father’s hardware wholesale company,
Dutton-Lainson, in 1928, when he was 16 years old. He delivered invoices to
customers in Hastings, Neb., in exchange for the 2-cent postage they would cost
the firm to mail. “My father told me not to throw the invoice on someone’s desk,
but to hand it to them,” says Lainson, who is now 92. Although his father never
communicated specifically what he expected of his son in the family business,
this part-time job provided crucial experience in dealing with
customers.
After graduating from college, Lainson returned to the business
full time. His father gave him projects that taught him about hardware and about
the company’s various product lines. Finally, he put Hal in charge of the
manufacturing plant, which had six employees working in a corner of the building
next door, using outdated equipment to make a single product—a bicycle
pump.
The poor condition of the facility shocked the budding entrepreneur.
Undeterred, he ordered new equipment and ramped up production. In 1938, with the
world gearing up for war, Lainson traveled to Washington to secure a government
contract to make munitions. Dutton-Lainson got the contract, and in two months
Lainson had 86 people working for him. Dutton-Lainson’s business and expertise
blossomed to the point where the company trained government inspectors in how to
evaluate shells. Lainson had complete authority. “My father had a tremendous
personality, and was a master salesman who was loved by everyone, but he had no
interest in manufacturing things. He expected me to be creative in the ways he
wasn’t,” Lainson recalls.
His father visited the factory just once or twice
a year, making what Leslie Mayer, CEO of Mayer Leadership Group, believes is a
classic mistake: The founder gives an heir some control over one aspect of a
family business, but fails to teach the heir how the overall business should be
run. “The way you transmit business knowledge is key,” Mayer explains. “The
trouble comes when the entrepreneur is motivated and talented but not terribly
verbal. Some heirs can’t learn by watching. They learn by hearing or reading or
doing.”
By the time Lainson inherited the family business in 1950, he had
confidence, ambition and a real sense that he belonged in the family business
and could make it his own. In that sense, he was among the most fortunate of
second-generation heirs. What he did not have was a strong sense of his own
father and of how he built and ran all of Dutton-Lainson’s operations.
After
his father’s death, Lainson gathered his father’s staff together to discuss the
company’s future. As the new owner and president, he sadly found himself asking
company employees such questions as “What was my father like?” and “How did he
operate this company?” Though Lainson led his father’s company for the next 19
years, and grew it into an operation 30 times larger than the one he inherited,
he never really found answers to those questions.  Back to Main Article: Behind a
Behemoth
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