(excerpted)
full story here“The curiosity of youth may take you in directions you’ve never dreamed of,” Whitacre said. “But older generations have a fear of change, a fear of risking everything they’ve worked for. The questions becomes: “When do you let the next generation run with the ball.”
Shelley Mauss has been “running with the ball” from an early age.
Like most junior members of a multi-generational family business, Shelley Mauss was given an opportunity that shaped her life and, later, her chosen career – at a time when most of her peers were flipping burgers.
A senior investment advisor at The Mauss Group with Merrill Lynch, Shelley began as an intern for her father, First Vice President of Investments Thomas Mauss, when she was 15. Merrill Lynch hired Shelley when she was 18.
Though she wasn’t interested in making a career out of her high school experiences, Shelley majored in finance at the University of Portland and eventually joined her father at Merrill Lynch, where she worked in the cubicle farm alongside other investment advisors.
Shelley’s brother, Michael Mauss, joined the family business as a financial advisor last July, after getting a teaching certificate at Pacific Lutheran University, coaching football and attending seminary school.
“We received a tremendous opportunity and the benefit of the doubt, but we rarely got anything handed to us,” Shelley said. “If anything, we hold ourselves to a higher standard. We have higher expectations of ourselves, because we don’t want to let (dad) down.”
While some families are prepared to hand over their businesses to the next generation, the Mauss family is more typical in that the children followed their father out of interest, not out of obligation. Still others don’t follow their parents at all, but still carry on their family heritage of business sense and ethics.
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