More tearing things down, the blowing things up was when I was a solider.
Family companies definitely have the pros and cons. One of the cons is that some owners will take business activities "personally" when they are not. This can cause a lot of issues for employees, that don't happen in larger companies.
I've experienced this directly :)
After the Army, my first job was an an environmental consultant working for my mother in law in Hawaii. During my enlistment in the Army the base I was stationed at was in Upstate New York, and bitterly cold, moving to Hawaii after that sounded amazing!
About 5 years after moving to Hawaii my wife decided she wanted a divorce. Perhaps a month after that, and while I was on a different island in Hawaii at a job site, I came back to the hotel I was staying at for the project, and had a fax waiting for me stating my employment would be terminated in two weeks. I decided I did NOT want to spend the next weeks working long hours for a project that wouldn't benefit me.
I let the client now I wouldn't be there the next day and flew back to Oahu where I lived the next day, and let my soon to be ex-mother in law know we could turn terminate my employee effective immediately. Fun times.
