Companies Find Success While Keeping it All in the Family
“The interesting thing is my dad is a huge risk-taker and I’m not,” said Kori Allen, who took over last year as President of Schumacher Systems, a Sullivan County-based commercial construction company from her father and its founder, Craig Schumacher. “I know I have to learn to feel comfortable taking risks.”
Running the company with her brother Brett (now the company vice president), Kori admits unlike her father, she was not as confident in accepting the job that would be one of Schumacher’s prize projects.
“We were considering doing work in 2005 at Bethel Woods, the biggest project we had undertaken. I was the project manager. I looked at the numbers and went to my dad and said, ‘I don’t think we should do this. I really don’t think we should do this.’ And he was like, ‘Yes we are doing it.’ I was OK with that because he made the decision, he was the leader and my job was to do the best we could with it. It turned out to be a great project for us but I don’t know that if I was in his shoes, considering all the risks, I would have accepted it,” said Kori.
