The Classroom I Thought I Was Taking Away

My education happened at Hill & Markes before I ever set foot in a school that gave me a diploma. Elementary school meant opening mail and filing papers. Middle school meant cleaning trucks and stocking shelves. High school and college meant fulfilling orders, driving my grandfather to sales calls, and delivering emergency runs when someone else couldn’t make it.

For 20-plus years, I assumed my kids would get the same education. That the business was the vehicle for something that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. When we sold, one of my first thoughts — not about money, not about what came next for me — was about them. How would they learn what I learned?

What I Found at the Barn

Four days a week, my daughter is at the horse barn. By choice. Nobody makes her go. She mucks stalls in 90-degree heat, hauls 50-pound hay bales, feeds horses at 6 AM, and would do more if we let her. At home she’s our lead dog walker, trainer, and chief poop picker-upper.

I watched her one morning and realized she wasn’t learning work ethic despite not having our family business. She was learning it because I was present enough to see her passion and support it. That presence — being there, noticing what lights your kids up, making space for it — turned out to be the real inheritance.

What the Business Was Actually For

I’ve talked to a lot of family business owners since the sale. Many of them carry a version of the same anxiety I did — that the business is the vessel for everything that matters, and without it the values disappear. I understand that fear completely.

But I’ve come to think that fear gets the causality backwards. The business didn’t create the work ethic in our family. The family created it, and the business was just one place it showed up. When the business was gone, the work ethic didn’t go with it. It went looking for somewhere else to live.

My daughter found hers at a barn. My job isn’t to hand my kids a platform. It’s to be present when they find the thing that makes them willing to show up before sunrise.

The Part Nobody Tells You About Selling

Everyone prepares you for the financial complexity of a sale. The LOI, the due diligence, the negotiations — there’s an entire industry built around that. Nobody prepares you for the identity questions that come after. Who are you without the thing that defined your family for four generations? What do you pass on when the platform is gone?

The answer I’ve landed on: you pass on yourself. How you show up, what you notice, what you celebrate, what you refuse to accept. The business was a stage. The performance was always something else.

I didn’t fail my kids when we sold. I just had to find new places to show up for them.

Jason Packer is the founder of Stride Family Business Alliance and a consultant at JPB Consulting Group. He led Hill & Markes — a fourth-generation family business founded in 1906 — as CEO before facilitating its sale to private equity in 2022.

When the Floor Drops Out

Eight top salespeople. One week. I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t rattled. These weren’t just employees — they were relationships, institutional knowledge, customer trust built over years. When something like that happens, you find out quickly who in your orbit is actually there for you versus who shows up when things are easy.

Christian Soller showed up. Not just with legal strategy — though his work in that moment was sharp and exactly what we needed. He showed up with something harder to find: the ability to hold two things at once. The legal reality and the family dynamics underneath it. He didn’t just talk strategy. He listened.

What a Real Advisor Does

Most advisors give you the answer to the question you asked. The best ones hear the question you didn’t ask.

Christian understood that a family business crisis is never just a business crisis. There was history in that room. There were relationships that predated the company. There were loyalties and wounds and things that couldn’t go in a brief. He listened to all of it — and then helped us figure out how to move forward without burning down what we’d built. He protected the business, helped preserve relationships, and when it was over the company was stronger than it had been going in.

The Consigliere Question

One of the questions I ask every family business owner I meet, directly or indirectly, is: who’s your consigliere?

Not your accountant. Not your attorney in the transactional sense. The person you call before you call anyone else. The person who tells you what you don’t want to hear, removes their own interests from the conversation, and is still there when the call is over. Jonathan Adler has been that person for me for most of my adult life — he walked me through every significant move at Hill & Markes, including the sale itself. We’ve been friends since elementary school. He’s watched my family the way only someone who loves you can watch.

Most family business owners either don’t have that person or don’t realize they need one until something breaks.

Who Showed Up For You?

I asked this question once and the responses surprised me — not in number, but in specificity. People named names. Jim Izzano, who came to Hill & Markes after a family crisis of his own and became the mentor I didn’t know I needed. Eric Stewart, who I thought was just the vendor with the ice cream machine at our trade shows, who turned out to be teaching me about community and relationships the whole time.

The people who show up when things are hard are the ones worth keeping close. If you have one — or if you realize you don’t — that’s worth sitting with. And if you want to talk about how to build that kind of advisory infrastructure around your family business, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I’m here for.

Jason Packer is the founder of Stride Family Business Alliance and a consultant at JPB Consulting Group. He led Hill & Markes — a fourth-generation family business founded in 1906 — as CEO before facilitating its sale to private equity in 2022.

The Non-Family Executive Who Told Me the Truth

Jim became my mentor. That word gets used loosely — what I mean is something specific. He was the non-family executive who told me the truth. No sugarcoating. No family politics. No calculation about what the Packer kid needed to hear versus what would protect someone else’s position.

When I screwed up, he’d close his door: let’s talk about what really happened. When family dynamics got messy — and they do, in every family business, without exception — he’d take me to lunch and show me a better way. He could see the situation from outside the system. That’s what made him irreplaceable.

What Happened to the Business

Jim helped us grow 20X. I include that number because it’s real and because it matters — but it’s not the most important thing he did. The most important thing he did was show a young family member how to become a leader.

That’s what the right non-family executive does. They don’t just run their function. They create conditions for the family to become better than they would have been on their own. Jim did that without being asked. When I eventually became CEO, I thought I’d be the one with wisdom to offer. Jim was still the teacher.

What This Means for Your Business

The Jim Izzano question is one of the most important ones a family can answer. Not “do we have good people” but “do we have someone who will tell us the truth without a stake in how we receive it?”

The families that get this right don’t just hire well. They create conditions where a Jim Izzano wants to stay — giving talented non-family executives real authority, real respect, and room to do what they’re good at without being second-guessed by family dynamics at every turn.

When that works, it can change the trajectory of a business entirely. I’ve seen it. I lived it.

The Full Circle

A few months ago I met Chris Wessell, who bought Amy Johnson’s PeopleWise — the firm that made the original connection 30 years ago. I told him about Stride.

“I totally believe in it,” he said. “There aren’t enough resources for family businesses. You’re filling a real void.”

When a family business gave Chris six months to plan for a retiring CFO, his reaction was: finally. Real succession planning.

The thread from Jim Izzano to PeopleWise to Stride is a straight line. Great hires aren’t transactions. They’re transformations. Thirty years later, that’s still true.

Jason Packer is the founder of Stride Family Business Alliance and a consultant at JPB Consulting Group. He led Hill & Markes — a fourth-generation family business founded in 1906 — as CEO before facilitating its sale to private equity in 2022.

What I Thought I Was Watching

Eric ran a Taylor machine franchise. He showed up at our events, set up his equipment, and made people happy. That was the transaction as I understood it — he got exposure, we got a crowd-pleaser.

What I missed was what was happening around the machine. Eric was marketing our events harder than we were. He was rallying other vendors when we couldn’t. He was turning a trade show into something people actually looked forward to — a community event, not a sales exercise. He was doing the most important work at the whole event, and I had categorized him as dessert.

The Lesson I Almost Missed

When I became CEO, I thought the relationship would invert — that I’d be the one with something to offer. He had other ideas. Eric started introducing me to customers I didn’t know. He opened doors I hadn’t thought to knock on. He reminded me, consistently and without making a point of it, that real business isn’t built on transactions. It’s built on relationships that accumulate over time into something that functions like trust.

I’ve talked to a lot of family business owners who could tell a version of this story. The vendor who became a mentor. The person in a peripheral role who turned out to be central. The relationship you almost didn’t pay attention to that ended up mattering most.

What He Did at Our Launch

When we launched Stride last September, Eric didn’t just show up. He recruited Ronnybrook Farm Dairy — a family business supporting another family business — and booked a comedian. He built community before we’d figured out how to do it ourselves.

That’s not what you expect from a vendor. That’s what you get from someone who has been watching how you operate for years and believes in what you’re trying to do. Eric believed in what we were building before we had much evidence it would work.

Some partners help you succeed. A rare few make you better. Those are the ones worth naming.

My First Day in Business Development

My first job at Hill & Markes was business development. I was told to get out of the office and go get new business. I loved it — the freedom, the open road, the chance to make a name for myself.

Then I walked into a pizza shop at lunchtime and asked where the owner bought his pizza boxes. He looked at me and said, get out of my pizza shop. My confidence was shot. I drove home and told my wife I didn’t think sales was for me.

My dad, my mom, and the company lifted me up. I went back out. My second call was Saratoga Coffee Traders. The manager gave me a shot, looked at my quote, came back out red-faced: I cannot believe how much we’ve been paying for cups. That was my first account. He went on to build Death Wish Coffee Company and advertise in the Super Bowl.

Business is made of these moments and these people. The ones who give you a shot. The ones who keep showing up. Who’s yours? It’s worth knowing the answer.

Jason Packer is the founder of Stride Family Business Alliance and a consultant at JPB Consulting Group. He led Hill & Markes — a fourth-generation family business founded in 1906 — as CEO before facilitating its sale to private equity in 2022.