Children following in their parents’ footsteps
Admit it: You've built a successful career and you'd be pleased as punch if yor kids followed in your professional footsteps. Most executives would be. But teh path can be tricky because too much pressure at a young age can drive then in the opposite direction, while too much exposure can cause them to miss what may be a fulfilling career.
Marketers who followed their parents into the business say they are thrilled to have done so, whether they chose their career after careful consideration, or fell into it.
As a child, when classmates asked what her father did, Aimee would say, "He's a PR man," although she didn't know what that meant and wished at times he was a doctor or accountant, or something self-explanatory.
Later, when Richard became director of corporate communications for a company in San Francisco, she thought it meant putting on meetings and parties at exotic locations, since he traveled often to such places as Venezuela, Porto Rico, Hawaii and Mexico.
Nevertheless, in high school, when a school project required her to wirte a letter to herself describing what she would be in 10 years time, Aimee wrote that she would be an advertising agency account executive.
Ten years later, when her mother mailed the letter back to her, she had just been laid off as an account executive from an advertising agency in Silicon Valley that had just lost its biggest account.
Aimee switched careers, working for a few years as a reporter for a public relations trade magazine , but the constant deadlines burned her out. Meanwhile, Richard had decided that her knowledge of the PR industry and former journalistic skills were a winning combination, and offered her a job in a PR firm he founded.
"Even before she came to work for me, she was probably my chief adviser and confidant," he says. Before ptiching stories to reporters, Richard would ask her to "think in terms of leads (the opening paragraph in any article), "Aimee...if you were going to write a lead for a company's product, what would that lead be?"
Both Richard and Aimee say they thought it fulfilling to work together, but after a couple of years working form a home office, Aimee yearned to be in an office setting. She is an account manager with San Francisco-based public relations agency Allison & Partners, but Aimee says she is sure that in the future they will team up professionally again. Maybe she will even take over as CEO and run her father's PR firm.
"I know that is my dad's dream" she says.
