family-business
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Varun Kogta and the second life of a balance sheet
From bank audits to a family lender in Jaipur, Varun Kogta has helped connect the business of used vehicles with institutional capital. His story runs through the less glamorous machinery of growth: liquidity, reporting and the confidence of lenders.
Venkat S and the cost of unfinished advice
After years inside corporate finance, Venkat S helped build Practus around a demanding question: what did the advice actually change? His answer runs through CFO services, family businesses, and the everyday work of making technology useful.
Arun Kogta’s bet on the second-hand economy
A civil engineer joined his family’s lending business in 2004. Two decades later, Arun Kogta is connecting used vehicles and small businesses in India with capital from global investors.
Marc Williams and the Business He Was Never Going to Join
He inherited a Seattle agency, studied the choices people make, and kept heading for the water. Marc Williams’s career turns on a question that advertising often hurries past: what makes someone choose you again?
Scott Brandon and the logic of leaving
He left a litigation practice for his father’s seven-person agency. Three decades later, Scott Brandon is still deciding what to keep, what to buy, and when an advertiser ought to leave people alone.
Pete Barr and the meaning of an ampersand
When Pete Barr Jr. took over his father’s advertising agency, he inherited a name and a set of expectations. His answer was to keep changing the business, then put a symbol of partnership on the door.
Bethany Andell and the two-year deal that outlasted Hollywood
She came home to Houston for an MBA and a two-year commitment to the family business. Bethany Andell stayed to work on a harder question: how a company makes its story believable.
Chase Lane and the art of coming home differently
Before taking charge of his family’s Phoenix agency, Chase Lane studied how complicated organizations work. Now the former Air Force officer is applying those lessons to a business where the family name comes with unfinished business.
Jessica Francois and the Art of Taking Over Slowly
Before Jessica Francois became Quest’s sole owner and CEO, she won work in Alabama, opened a Florida office, and spent years learning the business alongside her mother. Her career makes a case for giving a successor real work long before handing over the company.
Gene Anguil Put His Name on the Door. Then He Spent 48 Years Earning It.
Before industrial pollution control became an obvious business, a Rome-born Apollo engineer started one from his Milwaukee home. The company grew across continents, but Gene Anguil's durable invention was a way of thinking: understand the problem, keep the relationship, and do not walk away.
Josh Turley and the Forty-Year Software Turn
He inherited a family software company with decades of history and a product built for the back of the garage. The hard part was preserving its memory while teaching it to move at cloud speed.
Jordan DeCicco and the Second Shift at Super Coffee
A college point guard solved an 8 a.m. problem with a dorm-room blender. A decade later, Jordan DeCicco is back at the controls, learning that the harder trick is not starting a company - it is teaching one to endure.
The Oil Filters That Changed the Family Business
Nick Bauer put a few Volvo oil filters on eBay and discovered that an old parts counter could travel. What followed was a lesson in catalogs, recalls, race cars and the expensive art of keeping a promise.
Frank Marino Learned New York by Telling Its Story
Before he advised developers, institutions and household brands, Frank Marino learned publicity in the New York political arena. Three decades after founding his agency, the city itself remains his most revealing portfolio.
William Donovan Spent Nearly 40 Years Building an Agency. His Last Pitch Was to Let Go.
Bill Donovan built an independent Pennsylvania agency for nearly four decades. When the obvious exit disappeared, he found a successor several offices down the hall - and discovered that letting go could be a form of building, too.
Richard Edelman Bet the Family Name on Trust - Then Made the World Measure It
A one-year bargain with his father became a 48-year argument for independence. Now the CEO behind the Trust Barometer is asking whether business can reconnect a world retreating into smaller circles.
Lisa Vormittag Keeps One Eye on the Ledger and the Other on What Comes Next
For three decades at VAI, Lisa Vormittag has worked where finance meets marketing - turning customer signals, careful planning and a family company’s long memory into a practical operating system for change.
Anthony Vigilante Built a Modern Business Around a 1927 Brooklyn Name
The Brooklyn operator inherited nearly a century of family history. His real work has been turning that inheritance into a system that can still answer when the boiler quits.
Alirio Torrealba Swapped Car Lots for City Blocks
After 25 years in auto retail, the Caracas-born entrepreneur found a second act in Coral Gables - one measured in courtyards, train stops and the patience to make new buildings feel inherited.
Nate Checketts Built Rhone Between Train Stops. Now He’s Playing the Long Game.
A childhood camp, an in-seat ordering startup and a briefcase full of fabric swatches all led to Rhone. A useful lesson from Nate Checketts lives beyond the clothing: small irritations can become durable systems.
Jeff Pink Built a 50-Year Beauty Company From One Small Fix
A Hollywood wardrobe problem became the French manicure. The more durable lesson is how Jeff Pink kept listening, making, and refusing to sell for five decades.
Terry Awalt Built a $90 Million Business in the Part of the Grocery Store Nobody Notices
A lost sales job, a basement table saw, and an obsession with custom work became a fixture company serving major grocers across North America. Terry Awalt’s quiet advantage was learning that the least noticed object in a supermarket can shape everything around it.
Russell MacDonnell Built the Business That Answers When Alarms Speak
After a banking crisis took away the company he had assembled, Russell MacDonnell returned with a new investor group, built again and chose the long game: a family-run monitoring business designed around people, preparation and signals that cannot be ignored.
Elise Golbert Builds for Winter - and for Belonging
At Pajar Canada, a fifth-generation shoemaker translates family memory into modern footwear. Across Montreal, she applies the same instinct - make useful things, keep people close, and give tradition somewhere new to go.
Damon Ockey Designs for the Long Run
A second-generation homebuilder with an industrial designer's eye, Damon Ockey has spent decades turning attention into something tangible - homes, community spaces, accessible details and laps that raise money for children.
Scott Sailer Builds the System Behind the Steel
At Southland Trailers, a second-generation operator turned shop-floor lessons into a system for growth - then made apprenticeships, welding classrooms and a very large pancake breakfast part of the same plan.
Celina Machado Built the Operating System Behind a Family Real Estate Team
After 15 years in communications, Celina Machado joined her husband's growing brokerage during lockdown. Her contribution was less about selling a glossy dream than building the routines, judgment and trust that let a family business grow.
Melissa Haynes
Melissa Haynes is the Chief Marketing Officer of Glik's, one of the oldest family-owned fashion retailers in the United States, founded in 1897. A digital commerce and merchandising leader who cut her teeth as a shoe buyer at Zappos and later ran merchandising at eBags, Shane Co. and Scrubs & Beyond, she now steers marketing and customer experience for the roughly 70-store Midwest chain. Her calling card is hyper-local: she believes Glik's wins by tailoring each store's assortment to the community around it, backed by modern unified-commerce technology.
Jason Andringa
Jason Andringa is the third-generation president and CEO of Vermeer Corporation, the Pella, Iowa manufacturer of industrial and agricultural equipment founded by his grandfather Gary Vermeer in 1948. A mechanical engineer who once worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before joining the family business in 2005, he took the top job in 2015 and led the roughly 4,400-employee company through a devastating 2018 tornado and the pandemic, growing it stronger while staying, in his words, oriented to the long term.
Brad Berman
Brad Berman is the co-owner and CEO of BodyBio, a family-owned cellular-health and nutritional-supplement company in Millville, New Jersey. He arrived not from a lab but from the beverage aisle, with stops at PepsiCo and FIJI Water, and married into the founding Kane family. Since taking the top job in 2019 he has rebranded the 25-plus-year-old practitioner brand, pushed it into direct-to-consumer and mainstream retail, and steered roughly 41% revenue growth that landed BodyBio on the Inc. 5000.