For more than a decade, a strong support network prepared Ali Tregunno, left, and her sister Emily to lead the family-owned Halifax Seed Company after their father died.Megan Hirons
Succession planning for garden-supply business Halifax Seed Company began in an intensive care unit.
Tim Tregunno was the third-generation CEO of the family-owned firm. In 2010, five years after a terminal cancer diagnosis, his health was failing. It took a village – and the seeds of a savvy advisory board planted one night in his hospital room – to bring the enterprise into its fourth generation of family leadership.
Tim’s daughters Emily and Ali, then in their mid-20s, were working in the company at the time but were nowhere near ready to assume the helm; their mother Nancy’s brother Mike Barclay, an employee since 1983 and minority shareholder, took on its general management.
Tim, Nancy, Mr. Barclay and three non-family members formed the original advisory board to guide and mentor the shareholders and leadership, ensuring the business would continue to thrive in the event of Tim’s death.
Board chair David Hoffman remembers conversations with his close friend Tim about setting up such an advisory body before he fell ill, but it didn’t happen. “It took a crisis to actually move it forward,” Mr. Hoffman says.
The board, which exists to this day to provide independent advice on major business decisions and long-term governance strategy, “provided immense guidance with the death of a shareholder,” says Emily, who at 41 is now co-CEO with her sister. “We have a structure that protects continuity of the business.”
“When our board formed, it was a huge relief off of our father’s shoulders,” adds Ali, 39. “To this day, it’s one of the most valuable things we have done as an organization.”
Establishing the board enabled Tim, who died in 2012 at age 55, to protect the company that his grandfather Alfred bought in 1925. A travelling seed salesman originally from Hamilton, Ont., Alfred moved his family to the Maritimes and began developing the small seed merchant that had been founded in downtown Halifax in 1866.
Today, the business serves customers across Canada from seed catalogues to golf courses as well as recreational gardeners. It has a retail location in Halifax and Saint John, a commercial wholesale division and an e-commerce platform. The firm employs in total 50 full-time, year-round staff plus seasonal workers.
Mr. Barclay continued to manage the company after his brother-in-law’s death, while Emily and Ali took on new challenges within the enterprise. “They were sponges,” Mr. Hoffman says of the siblings, though “they weren’t ready, in the early days, to take on the CEO role.”
That’s where the board came in.
“They did something very right by setting up the advisory board,” says Peter Jaskiewicz, academic director of the Family Enterprise Legacy Institute at the University of Ottawa. “It very often builds a bridge across generations but at the same time doesn’t restrict the founder or the group of people who are in charge.”
Such a body can accelerate the younger generation’s skills and build experience over time – with guardrails in place, Mr. Jaskiewicz explains. “Instead of just throwing somebody in the water and seeing whether they can swim, you can give them floaties, swimming glasses, and a few lessons on the shore.”
The sisters bought Mr. Barclay’s shares when he retired in 2016 and continued their hands-on business education by forming a four-person management team with two of their father’s right-hand people. They also later hired an outside CEO briefly. Their mother remains the majority shareholder.
Halifax Seed Company’s store in the city. The business also has a retail location in Saint John, a commercial wholesale division and an e-commerce platform.Megan Hirons
Succession was always a choice, never a burden, though when they were growing up, neither sister saw themselves running the family business. But after graduating from Saint Mary’s University in 2006 with a bachelor of science degree, Emily joined the company’s marketing team in Halifax at the request of her father, who’d received his cancer diagnosis a year earlier.
“Why wouldn’t I take an opportunity to work in his business and work side-by-side to spend more time with him?” Emily says. At night she took classes at NSCAD University in Halifax to earn a graphic design certificate.
Ali joined Halifax Seed in 2010 as a sales representative in Fredericton after graduating from the University of New Brunswick with a degree in recreation sport management a year earlier. Today she heads up the Saint John retail operation while Emily remains in Halifax.
Ali says running the business alongside her sister has brought them closer together because they’re aligned in honouring the culture and values that their predecessors fostered. The siblings’ long stint as mentees taught them the intangibles that helped the business thrive for decades: the backstories of its operations, how the company evolved over the years and the relationships that were nurtured over generations.
“We have multigenerational suppliers that worked with my grandfather, then my father, and now Emily and myself,” Ali says. “That’s incredibly valuable.”
While COVID-19 threw a wrench into mentoring, it also presented a valuable learning opportunity. The team first had tough conversations about how long to stay open and keep paying staff. But within days of lockdowns, it became clear that people were working in their gardens, spiking sales; in the end, the pandemic was really great for business. To meet demand, Halifax Seed launched a new website and e-commerce platform to support gardeners across Canada.
Emily and Ali officially became co-CEOs in 2023. After more than a decade of learning from loyal supporters, the sisters are now the mentors.
Emily’s advice to other family businesses is to start succession conversations while everyone is happy and healthy. “Take our lesson,” she says of her father’s decision to form the advisory board in a moment of crisis. “We were within hours of thinking we were going to lose our leader, without having any planning done.
“If my dad had died that night, would there still be a business? It’s hard to say.”
Have a suggestion of a Canadian multigenerational family business for this regular series? E-mail smallbiz@globeandmail.com.