Steve Butler stands precariously on the roof of a bungalow in Bromley,
southeast London. “A company in the 1970s offered vacuum-only cleans,” he
shouts down, grinning and oblivious to the gusting wind and gathering clouds
above. “But they went bust because there's only one way to clean a chimney!”
As he speaks he jabs a finger in the air, briefly prophetic, then wobbles
his way around the chimney pot to remove the cap. Once down and crouching in
front of the fireplace, he sends his brush up, releasing an avalanche of
crumbling stone and soot.
Butler swept his first chimney when he was 8. His grandfather, Percey Pearce,
taught him. Percey was a chimney sweep, as were his six brothers. Percey's
father was also a chimney sweep. So were his seven brothers. Their father
and his five brothers were also sweeps... and on it goes back to 1648. Cut
him and Butler's blood would surely run black with 13 generations of soot.
At one point, there were more than 35 sweeps from the extended Pearce family
working in their traditional South London patch across Bromley, Croydon and
Peckham. Today, there are just two - Butler, 47, who runs Pearce &
Grandson, and his cousin, Steve Pearce, 49, who has his own sweep service,
Stephen Pearce Chimney Sweep.
Their brushes and rods are the same as they were 350 years ago. Their tool
boxes are made from wooden juice crates. Their art has barely changed. But
theirs is far from a dying business.
Not only has there been a resurgence in chimney sweeping in recent years as
people move back from central heating to fashionable open fires, but Butler
and Pearce have also found their own enterprises to be remarkably resilient
in the face of a recession in which so many others have crumbled.
They put it down to luck, to hard grind - 12 chimneys a day, seven days a week
in the run up to Christmas - and to this year's uncharacteristically cold
winter. But is there more to it? Could this be, in fact, the year of the
family business?
“One of the advantages that family businesses have is ‘long termism',” says
Grant Gordon, the director of the Institute for Family Business and
co-author of Family Wars: Classic Conflicts in Family Business and How to
Deal With Them. “They want to be a responsible owner of this business that
has been passed to them and will be passed to their children. They have a
clear vision, not just for the next quarter but for the next decade: “It's a
more conservative approach - there is less appetite for growth and more
caution applied. But it means many of them are coming into this recession
with healthy balance sheets.”
Butler and Pearce have no debt. They have no grand plans to finance, no
shareholders to placate, and have already seen out two previous recessions.
“As long as I tick over, I'm quite happy,” says Pearce. “In fact, I'm more
happy now than I've ever been. Things are going nicely.”
They have faithful customers who come back to them year after year. “We've met
their children and their children's children,” says Butler. Their customers
too, have met their fathers and uncles and grandfathers. And they will meet
their sons. Butler's boy, Mark, is 18 and talks of studying music and
running his own studio, but is clearly relieved to have the safe,
comfortable backup of the family business. “Dads don't sack their kids,”
says Sheila Butler, Steve's mother, who has been managing her family of
chimney sweeps since childhood.
Of course, there are myriad other problems that come with working with family:
nepotism, fierce rivalry and the looming issue of succession. But it is
their heritage, customer loyalty and forward thinking that is helping them
to beat the credit crunch. Here we speak to three family businesses that
have found keeping it in the family the key to their survival.
Liz Federici, 60
Frederick's, Lancashire
My husband's grandfather, Mattia Fed- erici, arrived in England in 1886 from a
small village in Italy. He had heard he could make money here - and that the
British had a sweet tooth. So he changed his name to Matthew Frederick and
set up an ice-cream shop in Chorley. Sixty-eight years later, I was 16 and
working in a paper factory when Matthew's son, Anthony, came by on his
ice-cream round. Not long after, I married him and have been in the family
business ever since.
As well as my husband, all four of my grown-up children and one of my
grandchildren work at Frederick's. My grandson's 18 and wants to be a pop
star, but if he carried on in the business he would be the fourth
generation.
So we have the burden of history and the responsibility of the future on our
shoulders. We have to work together to ride out whatever we're faced with -
including the credit crunch. So far it hasn't affected us at all.
We're very lucky because we all get on and it's actually quite pleasant
working together. There's no in-fighting and no watching your own back. It
wouldn't work if there was. The key is to always talk about things and
communicate.
Of course, this does mean that one person's problem is everybody's problem. It
really affects you when someone in the family is stressed. You can't go home
and switch off - you have to thrash out the issue over the dinner table.
Work becomes your life. My husband, now 63, works 14-hour days and every night
after dinner, he goes out again to check that the freezer doors are all
closed.
The children all own 10 per cent of the business and when my husband and I
retire, the remaining 70 per cent will be split evenly between them.
I am aware that it won't go on for ever. We wouldn't force the grandchildren
to carry it on if they didn't want to. Family is always more important than
business.
Andrew Berry, 51
HJ Berry, Lancashire
We're one of Britain's oldest chair makers and living proof of the difficulty
of hand- overs in family businesses. My dad refused to retire from running
the business until he was 77. He was an autocrat, a dictator, and he
couldn't let go.
He was finally told to retire after the bank insisted that we undergo an
independent business review. The review identified the relationship between
me and my dad as a major problem. We've never been the best of friends, but
working together was just getting harder and harder.
HJ Berry of Chipping, near Preston, has suffered in the past year. Business is
down 25 per cent. If we weren't a family business we wouldn't still be here.
But we're not beholden to shareholders, we have customer loyalty and a long,
proud history.
The business was my dad's life. His great, great-grandfather set it up in the
1840s and since inheriting it, Dad had run it, obsessively, single-mindedly,
for 40 years. I promised myself that I would never follow his example, but
now that I'm in charge, I'm just like him. It possesses my head 24 hours a
day, seven days a week. It isn't just about finances, it's about emotional
ties. And the funny thing is, I didn't even want to come into the business
in the first place. There were other things I wanted to do. But I felt
obliged - not just by my father, but by society and my heritage.
That said, it being a family business has allowed me to put some of my other
passions into it. Although my son's only 6, when it comes to it, I will
encourage him to do whatever he wants to do. I've left him my company shares
in my will if he wants them, but my dad is still the majority shareholder
and he's showing no sign of drawing up any handover plans for the future.
Willie Robson, 64
Chain Bee Honey Farm, Northumberland
My youngest child, Frances, 25, will take over the business once I go. The
other two are intelligent, but Frances has that determination and that
resolution.
I started working full-time here when I was 17. All my friends had proper jobs
and were earning proper money. I thought perhaps I might like to have a bit
of that. But my mother said no matter what happens, I had to stick at it.
That's the only way a family business can work.
Especially a beekeeping business. Nothing ever changes in beekeeping. You
can't alter the process because you can't alter the bees. And you can't
learn the real secrets of bee-keeping in a book. The knowledge has to be
acquired through decades of experience and handed down through the family.
My family has been keeping bees in Horncliffe, near Berwick, for five
generations. We've gone from 100 hives to 2,000 and it's taken so much hard
work. Fortunately, we haven't been affected by the financial crisis at all.
We've always been hugely forward-planning and we have no debt. Also, it's
becoming harder for young people to find work and security. Working in a
family business offers both. My daughter, Heather, left the farm for ten
years to be a journalist. She went to university and was working on a
newspaper in Cornwall. But I think she eventually realised that she would
always be just a number there, so she came back.
