BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

How Zippo's Founding Family Kept The Flame Alive

This article is more than 8 years old.

Eight decades ago, an oil man named George Blaisdell observed a friend try—and fail—to light a lady’s cigarette on a windy day in rural northwest Pennsylvania. The futile attempt sparked an idea in Blaisdell’s mind: He’d create a windproof lighter. The Zippo Manufacturing Co. today remains the first name in flame, and Blaisdell’s descendants still own it. How they’ve kept it going as America stopped smoking is instructive for anyone trying to retain control of a family business. Blaisdell’s grandson, George Duke, explains:

After your grandfather died in 1978, who owned the company—and what happened next? It passed to my mother, Sarah, her sister, Harriett Wick, and their families. We then went through a period of very rapid growth in the 1990s by pricing our lighters between $13 and $40 and appealing to collectors. Our sales went from $30 million in 1985 to about $150 million a decade later. And then the Wick family decided they wanted to do something else with their lives. My brother did, too.

Why not let them sell to an outside investor? A non-family member is more likely to get impatient with any lull in sales. In moments like that, things do eventually improve, so patience is very important.  We wanted Zippo to last, so my mother and I bought out the Wicks and my brother in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

And you needed patience just at that moment. We started suffering through a year or two of sales that we weren’t quite satisfied with. We oversold the market and put so much product out there. I hired a new CEO in 2001 and because it was only my mother and me as owners, we could wait for him to turnaround the company.

Is a big clan bad for a company even in good times? To have fewer owners, such as what we have at Zippo, you can certainly move much, much quicker. You can develop your strategies in a quicker time, narrow down your strategies.

When you have a CEO of a family-owned business who has to answer to them all—when you have literally 10 or 15 people in an ownership role—it gets difficult for the CEO to satisfy all the potential directions that the family suggests. That’s what can trigger the tugging and the infighting within a family. It makes for a very difficult process for the company to go through. And sometimes privately owned companies don’t make it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Follow me on TwitterSend me a secure tip