Yea he can play with his little social toys - R&A Marketing

If Dad (see last weeks R&A story) never thought R&A Marketing was going to be a 2nd generation business, there was ZERO PERCENT part of our family that even thought it would be a 50/50 partnership with both members of the second generation. However, sometimes the path and course family business goes heads in directions one never expected.

As children and growing up, Kevin and I couldn’t of been on more opposite ends of the spectrum. As you can see below:

Kyle Growing Up	Kevin Growing Up
The one teachers toasted goodbye to at the end of the year	The one teachers wished every other one would be like
Do as little as possible to get the grades needed	Work hard to get the grades they got
Root on the sports team	Be on the sports team
Play in the band and act in the play	Play on the sports team and trek across the country excelling

As mentioned prior, everything I ever wanted to do involved R&A and being associated with R&A. R&A to Kevin was what his parents did that helped him do the things he wanted to do which was to play soccer at the highest level. As the both of us evolved, those objectives were met. I went on to get my chance at R&A and Kevin set out to do what he had built for his young lifetime in playing soccer at an elite level.

Dad, Kevin and Mom on his Senior Day at Capital University in 2009

Kevin winning the conference title in 2009

In the process of me being involved at R&A, our consultant David Lively who was advising my parents on our generational transfer, insisted on Kevin being involved in the process. As many reading this know, inheritance affects a lot of things in family business and the process of the company being acquired would affect myself and Kevin. So, as Kevin was still attending school in 2008 and I was just starting at R&A, we had generational transfer meetings every Friday mid afternoon. The purpose of these meetings was to get all of our family members up to speed on the ongoings of the company and have real conversations about the future.

During the course of these meetings, some big decisions were made that had some touches of Kevin involved in them. As the other 75% of our family would let you know, Kevin has always been the uniter of our family unit. He finds a way to get us all to get to level ground and keep our cool. So, it wasn’t surprising that he read through our discourse (mostly Dad and me usually) to help us arrive at conclusions. One of those big conclusions, came in the summer of 2009 when we were trying to figure out my next role. In various pitches of shouting between father and son, Kevin chimed in and suggested “Just make Kyle the President”. This statement proceeded to create a shock but then lead to one of the many big decisions that our family would make over the course of the next 2 years.

These meetings proceeded to continue and it became a good way for us to intertwine business with our family as our lives began to move from kids of parents to a family unit. In between all of this, Kevin was shifting his major to be more PR focused (partly due to that he hates math) and at the time social media was beginning to become a powerful tool for the use of PR. Kevin would bring this up occasionally at our weekly meetings and there was “interest” from us but we also were in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis and retail was hurting so “trying unproven methods” wasn’t appetizing.

As we moved into 2010, Kevin began truly expressing some interest in being involved in the agency and coming in just like Kyle did. Now, upon reflection, I truly lucked into me coming into the company and I should of been aware of that. However, I was young, stubborn and forgetful about how I had gotten to this point in life and decided to give a tinge (maybe a lot) of annoyance with this. On top of this, it was determined by many on the team that he would come on in an ambiguous role and we would “figure it out”.

The figure it out ended up becoming me saying “Just do this social media stuff” and he implemented this primarily working on my Dad’s key accounts. We were in the middle of bringing on a new employee, figuring out the transfer of ownership and also trying to solve retails biggest problems so he could go play with toys while we were working the big machinery. The playing actually began to turn into legitimate, actionable thoughts, ideas with physical sales performance being attributed.

What it ended up turning into, was a 6 month case study of actionable insights on the effect of Facebook and social media on independently owned furniture retail that was presented to a standing room only crowed at the NHFA/WHFA user conference in May of 2011. From there, it led to a roll out of a first to market social media solution for independent Ashley Furniture dealers and various articles, presentations and speaking gigs throughout the industry. See the presentation from 2011 below:

During this time, Dad proceeded to have us create and execute a purchase agreement that constituted a financial transfer at the conclusion of 2010 so at the beginning of 2011 the established “vet” and the “social guy” were 50/50 business partners. The choice to be 50/50 was due to me. Although we didn’t have a lot in common growing up we did know the value of what a 50/50 partnership looked like in our parents and that is what we saw working for R&A. We wanted to have the same balance with each other. Plus, when your business partner and his social toys, also happen to be your best friend, being 50/50 means you get to do all of the cool stuff that business owners get to have together.