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The Nathan Kimmel Story, Continued:
"Since he had started with the plastering industry, that became one of his main niches, and from there he moved into sandblasting, and the drywall industry, and the moving industry.
We opened a retail store and started selling to the pest control industry. That’s our second big line."
But in those early years, Nathan didn’t limit himself. Buying surplus lots means buying blind, and sometimes what he wound up with had absolutely nothing to do with the construction industry. It made no difference, however.
Whatever Nathan came home with was packaged and sold in the family’s cottage industry.
"One time, he got thousands and thousands of Purple Heart and Stars and Stripes medals. We put an ad in Popular Mechanics and we would sell 10 for a dollar. After school we would package them in plastic bags.
The big excitement every day was when the mail came- deciding who would get to take the dollar bills out of the envelopes! To this day, when the mail comes, I get excited. It’s a throwback to that time, I’m sure."
Nathan also knew how to inspire his workers!
As Carol and her siblings grew, their roles in the business grew deeper and more varied. But as the kids grew, generational conflicts- so familiar to those of us in family businesses- began to arise.
"My older brother became the delivery boy, and as he got older, he started developing products and helping with the buying. He worked with my dad until 1990.
He and my father butted heads because he had gone to college and gotten his degree in business. [My brother] knew the right way to run a business, but my father wouldn’t give in."
Here is a great example of how companies don’t know how to think together, to maximize their intellectual resources.
Rather than learning how to combine their knowledge for solutions that doubly enriched the business, they were reduced to fighting about which personal point of view was better than the other. They could create synergy or play off of each other.
No matter how successful this company was over time, this inability caused them to leave a lot of money on the table through the years.
"He was of the 'old school.'— Girls don’t know about machines, girls don’t know about parts. But I used to sit in a chair across from him in the office and listen to his philosophies of buying and selling. He was a super salesman."
Her father’s philosophies and skills as a "super salesman" kept her at the company through college and beyond.
"I used to work here part-time typing statements for my father, and that paid for my college. I came back to work full-time for a while, and part-time once I had my kids.
I’ve done almost everything here. I never realized that I was getting another college education in how to run a business."
When Nathan died in 1993, the family convened to discuss the future of the business their father and mother had worked so hard to develop. No one felt prepared to shoulder the responsibilities of standing at the helm.
After a great deal of thought, Carol decided that, with her mother’s blessing, she would take on the challenge. She bought out her siblings, and now runs the Nathan Kimmel Company out of a rapidly expanding warehouse space in Los Angeles.
I want to extrapolate here to make a point. I don’t know what happened except for the words on this page, so I must acknowledge that my next point may be unfair to the Kimmel's.
Still, let me pretend that my fiction is real in order to make my point. Here’s an example of a company where people were never able to talk truth about some of the most sensitive family elements of the family business.
They dodged a bullet accidentally, because Carol overheard her dad running the business as she worked there over the years. The plan for transition had not been discussed.
The optimum solution wasn’t developed and Carol wasn’t groomed the way that she could have been, had the family addressed the sensitive issues of succession and transition.
Fortunately here, Carol and the company were robust enough that they weathered the crisis.
Many other companies are much less fortunate.
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