I was not very keen on joining the family business... there were 14 family members working together, and it worried me that I would not have enough individuality.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
All my kids have worked in the family business. I've been successful at that. My family knows how to work. We all started working very young.
When I look back, I did what I had to do for business and then fit family life into it.
My family were all entrepreneurs, including my parents and grandparents.
I built the business exactly the way my mother built and ran her family. I wanted a replication of the big, happy family I grew up in. I wanted happy people having fun.
When I was 18, and when I entered my family business, I soon realised that it wasn't as easy as I thought. I had to deal with people of my father's generation. Building trust was key to doing business.
My dad told me he wanted me to join in the business, but nothing was firm. He was quite young when he died, so we hadn't talked about it in depth.
It was a very hard life. As I got older, the family was depending very much on me. My two older brothers got married, so they had their own families depending on them. I had seven people relying on me, so I worked in a grocery store.
I was just born into a business family. It is really a destiny.
My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business.
I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.