Quentin and Spencer Smith can easily remember their first jobs at Pacific Coastal Airlines (PCA).
“As soon as we were old enough to wash cars, we were washing airplanes and handling baggage and sweeping the floor in the hangar,” said Spencer.
The brothers, now in their 40s, grew up around the company their father, Daryl Smith, started as a small float plane operation in Powell River in the early 1980s. Today, PCA has 300 employees and flies to more than 60 B.C. destinations. Its head office is in Richmond.
Quentin is now CEO of the company, while Spencer is vice-president of commercial services. The brothers say their current roles suit them well — but it took some time to find the best fit. Both started out in the operational side of the business.
“I was very hands on, very involved in the operation,” said Spencer, who until a couple of years ago was vice-president of airports.
“Currently I’m the vice-president of commercial services. It entails all the components that drive our revenue generation: sales and marketing, our commercial schedule, our products and customer relations.”
Quentin, who worked very closely with his father, trained to be an aeronautical engineer and was originally more interested in how things worked, not how to run a business.
“Then I realized that running a business, a lot of it is strategy and vision,” he said. “There’s always more than one way to [solve] a business problem as there is for a construction problem.”
Quentin credits his father’s guidance for developing his leadership skills and the confidence to take on the top job.
“It was an interesting transition,” said Quentin. “It was a generational transition and at the same time the industry was changing dramatically too.”
Daryl Smith left the company gradually, reducing the amount of time he spent in the office over a number of years before leaving for good in 2008. He is now a director of the company.
At times, Quentin thought the process was a little too gradual.
“The trouble was that he continued to come to work everyday, so its was mixed messaging for the employees,” he said.
But he also realized it was the way his father needed to transition out of actively running the company.
“Dad built the business, he’s been in it from the very beginning, and retirement doesn’t really suit him,” he said. “As much as he wanted to let go of the day-to-day operation, he still wanted to be involved and it was his baby.”
The Smith brothers were right to try on a number of roles throughout their 20s and 30s, said Deena Chochinov, a family enterprise adviser based in Vancouver.
“You want the right fit,” she said. “Some business owners have an idea of what they want their kids to move into in terms of the role and haven’t had the opportunity or put in a process to discuss those ideas with the kids.”
Chochinov also approves of the gradual way Daryl transitioned out of the CEO role.
“He’s not leaving them high and dry,” she said. “Clearly he has a lot of knowledge to share about the industry and also about running the show.”
At the same time, the fact that a business founder has built a strong legacy doesn’t mean other members of the family can’t take the business in new directions.
“The future generations have to reinterpret the business for the time they’re going to take over, without losing touch of the legacy and the history that the dad has built.”
Hiring the right staff has also been an important part of the brothers’ successful transition to leadership roles. Over the past five years, Quentin and Spencer have both rethought their jobs within the company.
“We recognize [the gaps] and we’ve brought in outside individuals to help us,” said Quentin.
While some people have told him they can’t imagine working with family, Spencer said it’s what the Smiths have grown up doing — and there are some clear advantages.
“You each fully understand each other to a degree that no one else does or can,” he said. “It makes it easy for us to get on the same page.”
