Family business all personal, say owners

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Gil's Television and Appliances co-owners Lisa Sienkiewicz, left, and Gail Parella. At right is Joe Parella, Gail's husband. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
ALL IN THE FAMILY: Gil's Television and Appliances co-owners Lisa Sienkiewicz, left, and Gail Parella. At right is Joe Parella, Gail's husband. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Lisa Sienkiewicz grew up in a family business. From an early age, she was an employee of the business started by her parents, Gil and Sarah Almeida, 51 years ago. Sienkiewicz worked alongside mom and dad at what was originally Gil’s Music Store, then Gil’s Television in Bristol for 11 years before her younger sister, Gail Parella, joined the business. A few years later, Gail’s husband, Joe Parella, came to work there too.
Today, the sisters co-own Gil’s Television and Appliances as equal partners, the brother-in-law is there full time, and the three of them know the secret to balancing work and personal lives in a family business – you don’t. When you work in a family business, you’re always with family, and you’re always with the business.
“You don’t really ever leave work,” Sienkiewicz said. “You’re always plugged in; you’re always on duty.”
Yet Sienkiewicz and the Parellas seem to have found a level of harmony that many family businesses struggle to find.
“I think they run this business much smoother than many other family businesses I’ve seen,” said Joe Parella of his wife and sister-in-law. Parella grew up with a front-row seat of his own family’s business – a furniture store in downtown Bristol.
“I think one reason it works so well here is because it’s just the two of them,” Parella said. “When it’s 50/50, you only have to convince one person. It makes a big difference.”
Sienkiewicz is the president of the company, and Gail Parella is the vice president, but the titles don’t matter much. The two sisters check with each other on any important matter and typically make decisions as a team. Joe Parella said he will often hear one sister say to a customer or vendor, “Hold on, I want to check with my sister on that.”
Even when they do disagree, Sienkiewicz said, “Eventually we come to the same conclusion.”
Because both sisters have children who are school-age, they face similar issues in balancing work and personal lives. There are sporting events, performances, school meetings and sick kids to attend to, and it helps to know the owner is sympathetic to your family needs. A room in the back of the Gil’s store over the years has often been a home away from home for the kids, all of whom have come to work with mom for many hours. Gail Parella joked that half the employees changed a diaper there at some point in time. Yet the sisters have also worked hard to keep distance between the business and their children. “We learned from our parents, both good and bad,” Sienkiewicz said. “Our parents were so busy working, they didn’t have the time to help us or be with us all the time. We wanted it different for our kids.”
So the moms coordinate their schedules and their vacations to maximize family time. Both of them said it’s critical to find time away from work.
“Take vacations,” Gail Parella said. “You need time to get away.”
In a nondescript building along Waterman Avenue in East Providence, another family business is laboring to reinvent itself. Tom Coyne founded Road Light Inc., a supplier of signs and road-construction materials, and ran the business for 25 years, before selling to a large conglomerate back in 2000. Both Coyne and his sons, Jason and Jared, went to work for the national corporation, but they were never as happy as they had been running their own business.
A year ago, all three left and restarted their company, now named Traffic Signs and Safety, or TSS for short. Dad and the two sons are equal partners in the business, which competes with their former employer, RoadSafe Traffic Systems, and half a dozen other regional suppliers of signs and construction materials.
Even though you might find Tom Coyne driving a forklift to unload a new shipment of barrels from a delivery truck at a time when he could be enjoying retirement, he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I’m doing this with a bigger goal in mind,” Coyne said. “I did this more for them than for me.”
Coyne enjoyed the rewards of owning his business and being his own boss for 25 years, and he wants the same for his boys. He watched them struggle as employees of a national corporation, and he wants to build a lasting enterprise that can support both their young families.
The elder Coyne and the two sons work side by side all day to fill and deliver orders, and they seem to have their own level of harmony. “We’re very similar, so with us it’s so easy to get along,” said Jason Coyne. He and his father have worked together since Jason was a high school freshman, first in the family business, then in the corporation and now as equal partners. Like the owners of other family businesses, the Coynes bring work home with them – all the time. “You never turn it off,” Tom Coyne said. “It’s always with you.”
Yet the spouses tolerate shop talk because it’s part of their lives, too. “You don’t go home and talk about every little detail, but you have to talk about the big stuff,” Jason Coyne said. “They’re invested in this too, so they want to know what’s going on.”
Ira Bryck, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Family Business Center, has spent years studying the dynamics within family businesses and has a few words of wisdom for anyone working with their relatives.
“There’s a cliché that’s been in a million movies and TV shows, that ‘it’s not personal, it’s just business.’ That’s ridiculous. In a family business, it’s all personal,” Bryck said.
He suggests that family business owners or managers be as specific as possible in all communications, even starting a conversation by saying, “Speaking as your father,” or “Speaking as the owner of this company,” or “Speaking as your manager.”
Bryck suggests bringing the same specificity to any conversation about performance. “Instead of generalizing or stereotyping, be very, very specific,” Bryck said. “Say something like, ‘We set a target where sales were going to increase 15 percent and they only increased 12 percent, let’s talk about that. … Make it a little clearer that it’s not about personalities, it’s not about relationships.”
Lastly, Bryck suggests meetings – several meetings. “You need to sit down in more than one kind of meeting. Sit down in a managers meeting, and separate from that, sit down in an ownership meeting, and separate from that, sit down in a family meeting.
“The slogan of my center is, ‘Treat your business like a business and your family like a family,’ ” he said. &#8226

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