Family Inc.: The New B-School Job Choice

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The classes cover everything from creating a succession plan for a family business to creating a personal leadership development plan. Perhaps more important, the classes give students the time and space to reflect on whether they really want to return to the business after graduation, with some schools even requiring students to keep reflection journals. At the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business (Opus Undergraduate Business Profile) in St.Paul, Minn., parents are invited to attend some of the classes with students, a move that helps both iron out concerns about working together, says Ritch Sorenson, academic director of the school's Family Business Center, which introduced a new family business major for undergraduates this year.

Entrepreneurship Approach

Not surprisingly, many family business courses tend to be housed in the business schools' entrepreneurship centers, where instructors try to help students returning to family businesses learn how they can innovate and take the business to the next level, says Frank Hoy, co-author of a new textbook on family business titled Entrepreneurial Family Firms and a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester Undergraduate Business Profile) in Worcester, Mass. That's a proposition that increasingly appeals to today's students, who want a career path that will let them advance and grow in their field, he says. "The second generation joining the family business better well be entrepreneurs if the business is to continue to succeed," Hoy says.

One of the pioneers in the family business academic field is Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., which started offering classes in family business in the late '90s and became the first school in the country to offer a family business major in 2004. With more than 40% of the school's business majors coming from family businesses, the school felt it was important to create an academic program where students could explore whether they wanted to return, says Greg McCann, a professor of family business and the academic coordinator of the school's Family Enterprise Center.

"For these students, one of the biggest career decisions they'll ever make is when, how, and why should I work for my parents, and we found that very few schools give them enough or oftentimes any help at all with that decision," McCann says.

First Job Out of School

The degree program has proved to be popular with students so far; there are 40 students majoring and 19 minoring in the topic, McCann says. Enrollment in the program continues to grow and, with the rough economy, more students are "giving weight" to the idea of joining the family business right after school, rather than waiting a few years, he says.

One of the students taking that path is Bart DiNardo, 21, a family business major at Stetson who plans to go back to work for his father's swimming-pool cleaning company, Nu-Clear Swimming Pool Service in Port Chester, N.Y., after graduating this May. He'd like to eventually work in the sports industry, but with the tough job market he's temporarily putting those hopes aside; he recently accepted a job with his father's company as an assistant field supervisor. Before joining, he asked his father to write him an official job description, using one of the strategies he learned in his classes. He's already coming up with new ideas for the company, from using environmentally friendly cleaning chemicals to revamping the company's computer system, he says.

"It's a pretty bad job market, so I feel that this is the best option for me now," DiNardo says. "I still have job applications to other places and hopefully something will come through, but in the meantime having a family business to fall back on is not a bad thing."

Damast is a reporter for Businessweek.com.

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