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Two decades ago, as Jim and Val McClure were operating a farm and raising a family in northeast Georgia, the world around them was rapidly changing.
The completion of Georgia State Route 400 was ushering in a population boom in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rural farming areas were beginning to look more like Atlanta suburbs with houses cropping up everywhere and traffic clogging roads.
The McClures were in their 40s. "I didn't know if we could make it to retirement age doing what we were doing," Jim McClure said. So, they started looking for a business that could supplement the income from their family farm.
Their search brought them to franchising, which brought them to Captain D's Seafood Kitchen. The McClures opened their first location in 2004. Soon after, they signed an agreement to open another three units. When those were up and running, they agreed to open another three.
"The last one we opened was in 2017. By that time, we were in our early 60s" and still operating a family farm, McClure said.
Soon, Covid became "a big, stressful event," one that made the couple start to think about the endgame. They owned seven restaurants and the real estate those businesses occupied. Their choice: Sell it all and walk away or bring in one of their children.
Their oldest son was happy working for a mid-size construction company. Another son, who lived about 60 miles away, wasn't especially interested; his wife's family already owned a business.
However, their daughter, Kate Cook, was a school teacher looking to make a change. She had worked in her parents' restaurants throughout high school and college.
"She had questions about what she would be doing," McClure said. "She wasn't really interested in going back to the restaurant and being manager."
He didn't want that either. "I needed somebody to take some of that responsibility off of me," he said.
He wanted someone who eventually would pay vendors, keep up with repairs, visit each restaurant location, and communicate with the accountant.
"One of the key things was defining what she would be responsible for and making sure that she completely understood it and was comfortable with it," he said.
It was a huge learning curve, he said, but he trained his daughter. "Instead of just throwing everything at her at one time, we started out with the lesser responsibilities and then worked more things into it," he recalled.
Cook has been an officer in the company for four years now.
"She handles a lot of the day-to-day things that I was doing before," he said.
She's on the organizational chart so that it's clear to everyone what her job responsibilities are and to whom she reports. It's not him or his wife.
"That pretty well keeps everybody else from saying, 'Kate's getting special treatment because she's the owners' kid,'" he said. "It also helps just having clear paths of communication for the other people who are at the above-restaurant level."
The couple sets clear performance goals for employees, including their daughter. "Otherwise, everybody's looking to see if there's favoritism," McClure said. "That will destroy the work environment if that's going on."
McClure offers this advice to other franchisees who plan to incorporate their kids into their business: Make sure it's what everybody wants.
"I went to all of our kids to ask, 'Do you want to be a part of this? Do you see you running this business in the future?' The answer has to be 'yes.' It can't be 'probably,'" he said. "Restaurants are a seven-day-a-week business. We're only closed two days a year, and that's Thanksgiving and Christmas. Other than that, we're open. You'll get phone calls every day. So, you've got to be aware of that, and you've got to be able to manage that part of the business."