Family-run businesses present their own unique operating models.

Under the ideal version, the members have an understanding of each other and their mission along with a loyalty that’s unrivaled. The business is part of their identity. Each member of the family understands his or her abilities and place in the enterprise. Often, they learned the operation from childhood on, starting at entry level. For their employees, however, that can come at the price of exclusion and upward mobility.

Sometimes the organization is headed by a patriarch or matriarch with the authority to make and enforce difficult decisions. In this model resentments and perceived sleights can mount over the years before erupting. Or the family head may no longer fit the kind of executive the company needs at a particular stage of its growth; a founder, for instance, may have technical expertise but not the people skills for marketing or adapting to a changing market.

What have you seen or experienced?

In my novel What’s Left, Cassia has every reason to wonder. What does it mean to be Greek-American?

How does your own family identity shape your life?

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My novel What’s Left includes reflections on a first generation of a family business dynamic, somewhat like one I also describe in passing in Nearly Canaan.

In reality, the model of a restaurant run by two brothers and their wives was one I observed in a small Midwestern city where I edited the local newspaper. In this case, their roots were Italian, not Greek, and the economy was essentially farming and two large factories, without a university or county seat to boost business.

Do you have any insights on ways siblings interact when they run a business together?

They definitely weren’t suburban. A big pink Victorian house suits Cassia’s colorful extended family in my novel What’s Left. And guests, even guests of guests, are typically welcome.

Have you ever been welcomed in a home like Cassia’s? How does it differ from yours?

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