by Kelly Wilson
Benefits and Challenges for MBA Applicants from Family Businesses
You work for the family business and are applying to MBA programs. Will this background be a net plus for you, or a minus? How can you make the most of this experience?
Whether you work for your family’s tiny start-up with headquarters in your home’s basement, at one of the local grocery stores your family owns, or at your family’s multimillion-dollar enterprise with hundreds of employees, you have numerous strengths you can highlight in your essays.
Benefits of working for your family business
1. You’ve had an immersive experience in all the working parts of a business.
Suppose you’ve grown up in the business, no matter its size. In that case, you have probably gained valuable knowledge in many areas, including sales, production, marketing, product research and innovation, customer recruitment and retention, customer service, basic finance, and even legal issues (e.g., licensing, leasing). If you started working for the business on weekends as a teenager – and especially if the business is small – you will have the same advantages as other applicants who have worked at start-ups or small companies.
Most likely, you have learned to be flexible, filling different roles as needed and gaining a holistic view of how the business operates. This immersive experience has given you a great deal of knowledge about and appreciation for how various business functions work together for a common goal.
2. You have an owner’s mind-set, not an employee’s.
As a family member, you have a vested interest in the business’s ongoing success and destiny, whether or not you plan to return to it post MBA. This personal incentive to see the company thrive and grow might have prompted you to work after hours on projects you initiated. Additionally, with some level of built-in trust from management, you might have been given more leeway to innovate. The potential impact of your contributions will be that much more significant, and the lessons learned will be that much more valuable.
3. You’ve developed communication skills that enable you to influence people who are senior to you.
You are likely much younger than your relatives who own the company, and you might also be considerably younger than some employees with management responsibilities. Therefore, you might have introduced tech-savvy innovations, a social media campaign, or another idea to tap into a new market. Sharing how you have gotten “buy-in” from someone with an “old school” mentality is a way to demonstrate your communication skills and savvy.
4. You have a job when you graduate, if you want it.
The business school you attend won’t need to worry about your employment prospects if you want to return to the family business. Nevertheless, you will still need to prove that you’ve enjoyed the level of responsibility that you claim.
Challenges for family business MBA applicants
The adcom might be skeptical that your dad/mom/uncle/aunt really held your feet to the fire in meeting deadlines or proving yourself on the job. Also, the dynamics among relatives who work together can be tricky, and getting letters of recommendation might be challenging.
Here are some ways you can address these issues:
1. Quantify your achievements, and offer as much anecdotal evidence as possible.
Demonstrating your impact is strategically important, even if you don’t have a family business background, but it’s especially important if you do. Perhaps you successfully negotiated a new lease agreement for the company, saving it $X per month; found a better way to attract job applicants through UpWork, Fiverr, or other gig economy platforms; or brought in new customers through targeted social media ads or posts. If so, write about it. The classic “show, don’t tell” rule is critical here.
Just as you would with any other company, if you began with a lower-level function but now have a higher-level title, list the different roles and your added responsibilities, which will show your professional growth.
2. Demonstrate your ability to navigate the pitfalls of working with family members.
There are often built-in conflicts between and among family members who all have a stake in a family business. One client of ours proved his management chops when he helped resolve a huge, ugly fight over succession. The family patriarch and founder of the business had passed away, and all the siblings were fighting over who was next in line for company control, which was unclear legally. Our client convinced everyone in the family to agree to work with a skilled mediator to help reach an understanding. The mediation succeeded, which arguably saved the business from being destroyed by lawsuits. It also preserved family relationships.
What if older family members resisted ideas you were convinced were necessary, such as introducing new customer relationship management technology, another software program, or a new service or product line? What if you had conflicts with a long-term, highly valued employee? If you found ways to overcome these obstacles, you should have substantial and compelling stories to tell in your essays about thriving in this business environment. For example, you might have been able to find research that convinced the business’s decision-makers that your ideas were excellent calculated risks. You might have sought advice from a business management consultant on how to smooth relations with the long-term, valued employee. Identifying creative ways to solve problems will emphasize your skills as a future business leader.
3. Don’t ask relatives, especially those who share your last name, for letters of recommendation.
Even if the relative in question is your direct supervisor and knows your work and capabilities better than anyone, there is simply no way that a letter from a parent, cousin, grandparent, or other family member will seem objective enough to be credible. So, whom should you ask? Consider asking a supervisor from a previous job or an organization with which you have been actively involved as a volunteer or member. Either one should be able to attest to your maturity, quantitative skills, initiative, and standout achievements.
Still, it would be best if you have recommenders who can discuss your abilities over the past two years. If you’ve worked only for the family business, someone affiliated with the company might be a suitable recommender — an accountant, attorney, important customer, or supplier. Remember, your interactions with these individuals must be, or have been, frequent enough and substantial enough for them to comment intelligently and with some specificity on your work and personal character traits.
Working for a family business has provided you with incredibly valuable experience. It has taught you to be nimble in working across different departments. It has given you a front-row seat in watching your relatives deal with the ongoing challenges of running a business in rapidly changing times. This is not a bad set of experiences with which to apply to business school!
As the former executive director of admissions at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School and assistant dean of admissions at Georgetown’s McDonough School and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz School, Kelly Wilson has 23 years’ experience overseeing admissions committees and has reviewed more than 38,000 applications for the MBA and master’s programs in management of information systems, computational finance, business analytics, and product management. Want Kelly to help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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