Family Business. How St. Petersburg’s Big Businessmen Develop Companies Together With Their Relatives
Russian Ministry of Economic Development proposed to legislate “family business” concept. The Ministry also suggested to work on a special tax regime for such type of entrepreneurship.
Small and medium-sized companies represent the biggest number of family businesses: family restaurants, studios and clinics. But family ties help big companies too. “DP” magazine explains how St. Petersburg’s billionaires and heads of large companies build their businesses together with their relatives.
Two cousins franchise
Businessman Arkadiy Pekarevskiy, former co-owner of Sela retail chain, created and developed the company together with his cousin Boris Ostrobrod. Arkadiy admitted in one of his interviews for business magazine Delovoy Peterburg that Boris has “an amazingly business brain” and he was a kind of Arkadiy’s mentor both in life and in business.
“Each situation is different. And family relations are different, so there are no rules. In my case, family ties helped the business a lot. If it hadn’t been my cousin in the business, then probably we’d hardly did many things. We would not be able to overcome the huge number of crises that happen in any business, regardless of whether it’s a family business or not, – Pekarevskiy told Delovoy Peterburg business magazine.
The two cousins registered the Sela company in 1991, when they got the idea to start selling clothes. Sela soon expanded and became one of the first and largest franchise companies in Russia. In 2007, Arkadiy Pekarevskiy decided to leave the Sela management and start another business, so he sold his share to his cousin. Nevertheless, the billionaire believes that the joint work with Boris Ostrobrod taught him many things.
“Thanks to family relations, you understand that in any case, regardless of the situation, several times a year we simply have to sit at the family table, because family is important. This imposes additional obligations and, perhaps, even additional opportunities to maintain the relations. The family business taught me and my cousin to listen to another person and try to understand what he was talking about. Family ties make you take the other person’s position more seriously, although initially it seems that his position just can’t be accepted. But family relations make you listen and accept or find some compromise. Therefore, I am happy that I had such an experience of family business”, – the businessman said.
Source Delovoy Peterburg https://www.dp.ru/a/2018/10/05/Semejnij_biznes__Kak_krup