I am the non-family CEO of Victaulic, a 104-year-old family-owned company. I’ve been at the company for 14 years and have been CEO for almost three years. My initial decision to join Victaulic was grounded in our shared values and Evergreen® perspective on business, and my experience leading the company has been wonderful for largely the same reasons. I am often asked what it’s like to be a non-family CEO of a multi-generational family company, so I have spent some time thinking it through. I believe our success rests on a few key, foundational factors which are specific to Victaulic.

First, Victaulic is unique in that it has never had a family member working within its ranks. It was decreed from the beginning that this would never happen. Our legacy began with our first patent in 1919 when two men, Lt. Ernest Tribe, a British Royal Engineer, and Dr. Henry Selby Hele-Shaw, an eminent research engineer, imagined a solution to move fuel to the troops on the front line. This innovative solution to swiftly and effectively connect pipes led to the company’s inception. The “victory joint,” so named because of its potential use by the British soldiers during wartime, was quickly adopted and early applications were used in the oil and water markets outside of military applications. At the end of the war, Mr. Frederick Bedford, who was working as an executive at Standard Oil, saw the value of this invention and proposed to his boss, Nelson Rockefeller, that they launch a business manufacturing and selling the connectors. Rockefeller was not interested, but he gave Bedford the green light to pursue the idea as an investor, provided he agreed to one condition: no Bedford family member should ever be employed by the company. In 1925, Bedford founded Victaulic Company of America with James H. Hayes serving as chairman and president.