His son, Salvatore, 42, hugs him, then kisses him several times. Vittorio, now 77, has recently been slowed by hip surgery and doesn’t make it into the Port Coquitlam plant as much as he would like to these days. But the family business is in good hands with Salvatore in charge of the day-to-day management.

Stilewood International Manufacturing is a success by any business metric. The high-end door maker’s plant is housed in a 75,000 square foot state-of-the-art building that sits on 3.5 acres. It has grown to become one of the top employers Port Coquitlam in 20 years of business. And it is exemplar of what any BC politician or economist dreams about: a company that takes a raw resource (wood), adds value, then sells it to markets around the world.

Their finely crafted doors are the gates to the homes of actors, celebrities and several Fortune Five Hundred executives.

But to Salvatore and Vittorio, all the material success would mean little without the love and support of their family. To them, the words family and business are as inextricably linked as a door and frame.

“The true sense of a family business is the family looking out for the family,” Salvatore says.

To Salvatore, the “family” in family business means more than just him and his father, who have been the active participants in the business. It includes his mother. And siblings Sarah, Anthony and Robert who all have successful lives of their own outside of Stilewood, but support it at every opportunity. And family includes his employees. His clients. His suppliers.

“There is absolute trust in the relationship between me and my father,” Salvatore says. “And that goes for our employees and our clients, too.”

Stilewood began operations humbly in a Vancouver underground parking garage 20 years ago. And in true family fashion it was a member of the clan who imagined a fertile business sprouting from within poured slabs of concrete.

“Ninety-nine percent of the population would have seen a parking garage,” Salvatore says. “But my mother sourced the location from the newspaper. It was 10,000 square feet, had high ceilings and was a great value – all the criteria we needed to get started.”

According to data from Business Families Centre at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, 70 percent of family-run enterprises don’t make it to the second generation.

Why do only 30 percent succeed? There are three criteria that must be met in order for a family business to successfully pass the torch from one generation to the next: 1. offspring; 2. interest from the offspring; 3. business acumen in both the parent and child. The first, any healthy mammal can accomplish; the second can be nurtured; the third is a genetic crap shoot.

According to Judi Cunningham, director of the Business Families Centre, there are definitely measures you can take that can help create a successful family enterprise.

“The single biggest concern of the majority of families who call us is about the preservation of the family,” says Judi, also the director of the Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise (CAFE). “Whether there are currently problems or they’re trying to avoid problems in the future.

“And this is connected to their concern about their business. It they don’t get their family moving in one direction, the fear is that the business will suffer.”

Family businesses face a number of unique challenges according to Judi.

“We try to help families control the outcome of their challenges,” she says. “Probably the biggest one is succession planning. We try to help families understand that succession is an ongoing process. If you think about it not just for your kids, but for your grandchildren and their children, it will help embed the mentality that it isn’t confined to one or two generations.”

Judi also notes that entrepreneurs sometimes have difficulty understanding the notion that you can own a business without a member of the family actively running it.

“We also help families put in proper governance structures,” she says. “For example, a family might say that anyone who wants to enter the business must have the minimum of an undergraduate degree and work outside the business for two years.

“The more you professionalize your business, the more successful it will be. You don’t want it so that just because you have the right last name you’ll automatically become the chair.”

Another challenge facing family businesses is communication.

“Families don’t talk,” Judi says. “They seem to resist getting in the same room together. There’s a lot of fear. I think it’s because of a ‘let sleeping dogs be’ mentality. They might already be in conflict and the fear is that talking about it will make it worse.”

Her advice for family businesses is to treat succession as a process.

“Families must also educate themselves,” she says, noting that there are a host of resources and courses available through CAFE and the Business Families Centre. “Education will help circumvent many of the problems that will arise – it won’t fix everything, but will definitely help.”

Many of these challenges have visited the Ciccones and they have, through their own intuition, overcome them.

“It’s not always easy, the father, son and sibling relationships in a family business,” Salvatore says. “The biggest dramas we’ve had in our family are when I met failure and I thought my dad would be disappointed. But my father never made me feel bad about any of them.

“Even as kids he would watch us fail. Allow us to fail. Then he helped us up. Advised us and mentored us at a very young age. He is an unbelievable communicator.”

It is clear that Vittorio is the central role model in Salvatore’s life.

An immigrant from Amato, Italy, Vittorio came to Canada in 1954 shortly after World War Two as a 19-year-old cabinet maker in search of work. From that southern town, just miles from the Mediterranean Sea, he landed in – of all places – Prince Rupert, BC. 

“For six months I had no work and only saw rain,” Vittorio says.

He worked a series of jobs as first a labourer, then a carpenter. But always he had a space where he would make furniture on the side. After four years  he moved to Vancouver. While he helped build the Queen Elizabeth Theatre by day, at night he would work at a small shop he rented on Commercial Drive building furniture.

“I would work from 8 am to 4 pm at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, then go to my shop on Commercial and work there from 4 pm to 1 am,” he says. “I didn’t have a car and I would sometimes bring plywood on the bus with me to bring to the shop.”

It was not long after that Vittorio started the first of a series of businesses that would eventually become Stilewood.

It’s not difficult to see where Salvatore gets his values and work ethic from.

“My father cut his finger at the shop working all alone and had to drive himself to the hospital,” Salvatore says. “He would often pull double shifts just to keep the business going. When my father would come home and say, ‘We have to mortgage the house again,’ my mother would support it.”

And why did Salvatore pursue the business and not his other siblings?

“I was exposed to the business at a very young age,” he says. “It was always in my head without question that I was going to be part of the family business. I didn’t know what shape it would take, but I knew I would be part of it. My brothers and sister had other interests, but me, I loved the business.”

His children (a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old) have not yet expressed that same interest.

“They haven’t worked for the business yet at this stage,” Salvatore says. “But as the business grows there will be more opportunities for our family to participate. Maybe that’s where my children will develop their interest: in making Stilewood a greater international presence.”