You can’t choose your family, but you can choose whether or not to go into business with them.  Steven Raeburn gets round the table with the family in law who have stayed close by keeping the emphasis professional.

Sometimes it is difficult, but at the end of a busy working day it can be a blessed relief to finally shut the door behind us, and switch off from work both physically and mentally. Somewhere on the journey between home and office, work life should (ideally) melt away to be left behind in every sense. If you are in business with your family that can be difficult if not impossible to achieve, and conversely, it may be even harder to make that journey in reverse, and try to leave your home life behind you on the way to the office. Family businesses often depend on succession, and therefore the elder and younger generations have usually in some senses been in mental training for it for much of their lives. An exception to this is the Hamilton niche legal practice Nicholas J Scullion and Company, run for 26 years by Nicholas Scullion (senior), but now managed by son Nicholas and assisted by brother Nigel, both solicitors, neither of whom ever anticipated entering into business with their dad. Yet they have managed it whilst avoiding the pitfall of blurring the lines between work and family, and innovating with the launch of their dedicated roadtrafficdefence.com service, and refocusing the business away from their court-based background. No mean feat, considering neither son had been groomed to take on a role at the firm at all.

“I never anticipated being joined by the boys. Neither of the boys wanted to be lawyers,” says Mr Scullion, a former boxer and the virile patriarch of the potent Scullion brew.

“Nigel did economics for his first degree, and Nicholas worked at Proctor and Gamble for four and a half years. So during that period of time I never thought about the boys. I never thought about anything. I used to work all the time. We are always very busy. I worked every day in court. I was never ever finished before 7.30 every night for twenty years. For about 12 years I worked every Saturday. I just had my head down.”

When he left Proctor and Gamble, Nicholas studied law and trained at Semple Fraser, coming in for a three month application of management consultancy at the firm.

“I thought it would be an ideal opportunity. I was delighted. Nobody had ever looked at the business. We survived on the basis of knowing where next week’s work was coming from,” Mr Scullion says.

“The firm changed when Nicholas came in, it was obvious he wasn’t in here to stare out of the window at the cars – he was in here to do things. Nicholas had plans to develop and do things that weren’t in my immediate sphere. He started the trainees, started the conveyancing side of the business, got us on to mortgage lenders’ panels, revamped the whole business and made it modern. I genuinely thought what we now had was the basis of a business. There may be bigger businesses out there, but my concern was simply, ‘were we doing OK?’ Nicholas worked away and made the business more smart. He started seeking other sources of business we hadn’t ever touched before.

“We ended up very busy, and for the first time ever in the 25 years of the business, the conveyancing was earning more than the criminal side.”

As managing partner, son Nicholas is the de-facto boss, subverting the traditional patrilineal hierarchy of family seniority. He says that the model only works successfully because all the family agreed at the outset to respect the discipline of the agreed office hierarchy, regardless of their respective roles within the family.

“Our mother works here – she is an accountant and does all our compliance. So around the office we have to maintain a professional distance. That is something my mum and dad have been very clear on from day one, because they worked together with my gran in the years before this. So there are ground rules about how you approach this,” he says.

“You must have a professional approach for two reasons, one being that it is not an ice cream parlour we are running here, it is a law firm. We have all done other things and are here on merit. In addition, other staff have to be assured that there is a place for them, and the rules of the business apply to everyone. It is not a closed firm, it is inclusive.

“The second thing is, we have to be quite schizophrenic. We all have disagreements about work things, so when you leave work and go for a drink afterwards, we won’t continue work discussions outside of work.”

It sounds impossible, but ahead of our meeting we all had lunch together, joined by the boys’ 17 year old brother Roger, and outside the office dad is still definitely dad, yet somehow in the work environment, a subtle but definite shift of mannerisms takes place, restoring the agreed professional hierarchy. If it wasn’t for the distinct resemblance, there would be nothing else in the behaviour that would obviously suggest a family relationship, and Mr Scullion is quite at ease leaving the boys to run the business.

“When Nigel came in, we had organised the business, and he came in to do court work. I said to him at that time that Nicholas was running the business. You can’t have two people running a business, and you can’t have a situation where no one says who is doing what function, and perhaps you end up with brothers falling out or people not speaking,” he says.

“Nicholas was going to be the managing partner. Nigel came in to look after court work and run the summary department. Now, we are in the position where I take nothing to do with running the business at all. I trust Nicholas and Nigel. We have moved premises during that time. I would never have acquired these premises if the two boys hadn’t been here to take the business forward. We are lucky in that we have always been pretty close. They boys have their own life, but when we come in here, the prime mover is the success of the business.”

Nigel Scullion agrees that the structure works well, but concedes that it requires discipline to separate out family relationships and work relationships.

“It is also a learning process too. With the family being your work colleagues, you can’t escape emotion. It is something that I have had to deal with. Nicholas is very pragmatic, whereas I am a little more raw,” he says.

“Yes, we are all working together, and it could be said we are all under each other’s feet, but we have different jobs and responsibilities, and we are not in and out each other’s pockets. There is not an overexposure. Our sisters don’t work in this business, and they are just as close. You have to retain that ability to separate your professional relationship from your family relationship.”

Nicholas says that as managing partner, he expects more from his family members as employees to ensure that they are seen and respected by everyone within the business on the basis of their performance. It is essential, he says, to keep family matters strictly out of the workplace to ensure the success of the business.

“The first rule is, it is a professional business we are running here. You do have to separate things. We all get on pretty well, but if we did have a situation where we had a fall out, we still have to come in the next morning to work, and we still have to work in a professional manner. We don’t want people to feel there may be any kind of issue, so you have to be pretty focused,” he says.

“I don’t see much of a difference between partners who have known each other for years and were maybe friends at Uni, who then set up a law firm together. What is the difference? Perhaps only that a lot of partnerships split up because the partners can’t stick each other. Regardless of whether we can stick each other, we will always be together.”

Despite being first and foremost father to the two boys, Mr Scullion is quite at ease working within the apparent dichotomy of being in a subordinate relationship in the workplace.

“We can argue the toss, but we are still family. If we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be working together. I am aware how difficult things are economically, and this is a business,” he says.

“In a sense, you always think of your children as being your children, not your workmates, but now effectively we are partners in an enterprise, and I am delighted they are able to do their work without any input from me. They are self motivated, which is the main thing.”

Nigel says there is a good combination between himself and Nicholas which utilises the best of their respective collective strengths.

“We are two fundamentally different people, although our goals and objectives are the same. The methods we would employ to achieve these things are quite different. We work very well together because we are both very open and communicative, and sensitive to each other’s ideas, and we bounce things off of each other. From us being so relatively different, we do complement each other in a number of ways.

“I think of myself as more creative, whereas Nicholas is good on the process. They are fundamentally different, but both necessary. I wish I had some of Nicholas’s skills. And I hope he wishes he had some of mine.”

Nicholas J Scullion and Company have been hit by the recent downturn as much as any other business. However unlike many firms of a similar size and character in smaller towns all across the country, their firm has proven to be sufficiently versatile, enabling them to adapt their business model to accommodate the changing times. Applying such adaptive logic is an uncommon trait in any business, as the failure of larger firms has shown. Whilst the family bond is evidently tight, it is business nous and the acumen of enterprise that has defined the recent evolution of the business. In recessionary times, that is an example to us all.