The Most Expensive Breakfast in Family Business History
Larry Miller was very good at his job. As a young parts manager, he took one car dealership’s parts department from 961st in the country to No. 1 in just 28 months. He was promoted to operations manager for five dealerships.
Then the owner invited him to breakfast at Denny’s and told him he was being demoted. The owner’s sons were getting the top jobs.
Miller walked out and built his own auto empire, one that eventually included the Utah Jazz.
His story appears in a recent Wall Street Journal essay by economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick, adapted from their book The Everywhere Millionaire. Their research is a welcome correction to how we think about wealth in America. The real rich aren’t a handful of coastal billionaires. They’re about 3 million private business owners, worth more than $65 trillion combined, who built fortunes in hot dogs, gutters, convenience stores, and HVAC. Most came from ordinary backgrounds.
The American Dream isn’t dead. It’s just unglamorous.
Building it is one job. Passing it on is another.
The same research carries a warning for family business owners. Only about a quarter of owners worth $5 million or more inherited their companies. About 40% of children from the top 1% fall out of the top fifth of income entirely.
The authors put it plainly: nepotism drives out talent, and competence and grit don’t pass down as reliably as a bank account.
I see this constantly in my work. Founders spend forty years building the business and about forty minutes on the succession plan. When the time comes, family gets the top jobs by default. The best non-family people are watching, doing the math, and quietly updating their LinkedIn profiles.
The Larry Miller in your building
The answer isn’t to keep family out of the business. Many of the strongest companies I work with are multigenerational. The answer is to make the rules visible before anyone needs them. That means deciding how leadership is earned, not assigned. It means giving your top non-family talent a real path, and telling them what it is. And it means having the hard conversation early, in a conference room with an agenda, not over pancakes after the decision is already made.
Every family business has a Larry Miller somewhere in the building. The question is whether you notice before he leaves.
That Denny’s owner kept his sons happy for a while. Larry Miller ended up owning an NBA team.
Choose your breakfast meetings carefully.