A third generation owner of the firm, Melvin Bender sold Dashew Supply Co. to his daughter Jory and then stayed around as a consultant. 
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When 103-year-old J. Dashew Inc. had plans to liquidate three years ago, Jory Bender took her ideas about not buying the family business and tossed them out the window.
| A third generation owner of the firm, Melvin Bender sold Dashew Supply Co. to his daughter Jory and then stayed around as a consultant. |
“I had no intention of buying the business,” she said of the company she renamed Dashew Supply Co. Inc. “It was never in my plans to buy J. Dashew.”
But because of her family’s century-old history of running J. Dashew, Bender “didn’t want to see it end like that,” she said.
The sewing supply company, which Bender moved from West Baltimore to Glen Burnie, started in 1898 with Jacob Dashew, a Russian immigrant who founded the business as a repair shop. Eventually, it grew into a sewing machine repair shop that also sold parts and supplies for sewing machines.
From there, J. Dashew changed hands three more times before it fell in Bender’s lap. After her great grandfather, there was her great uncle, her grandmother and then her father, Melvin.
Melvin Bender recalled the days — only five or six years ago — when J. Dashew was pulling in $13 million in annual sales. That was before needlework started moving to cheap labor overseas.
So instead of allowing J. Dashew to file for bankruptcy, Jory Bender bought the company from her father; changed the name; moved it from its Baltimore location to a significantly smaller space in Anne Arundel County and downsized from 50 employees to five, one of which is her sister, Lisa.
Although Bender classifies the fact that the company has been in her family for four generations as “pretty good,” it’s actually amazing considering the statistics for multi-generational family businesses.
While privately owned family businesses account for more than 90 percent of all businesses in the country, only 10 percent of them survive to the third generation, said Allen R. Stott, partner and managing director of the Baltimore-based Executive Sounding Board, which specializes in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. Thirty percent survive to the second.
“A primary reason for these statistics, for such low success is because most business owners focus on growing their company, but only a few make the necessary steps to prepare for some type of family succession,” he said. “A lot of business owners, once they’ve become successful and wealthy, they go on to send their children to be doctors and lawyers.”
Harsha Desai, professor of management at Loyola College in Baltimore and director of the school’s Center for Closely Held Firms, said the percent of businesses nationwide surviving to the third generation is actually more like 12 percent or 13 percent.
“The fourth generation might be about the same or less,” he said.
The secret is planning.
“The seasoned generation works with the younger generation over the years to mold and shape and fashion the individual,” Desai said.
 Jory Bender says Dashew is ‘a nice niche business’ with clients such as Aetna Shirt Co., Maryland Monogram and Jos. A. Bank. |
Through succession planning, as well as leadership/education planning and a solid strategy, there is “a very clear strategy that says, ‘here are some of the things we want to do,’” he added.
Successor generations also must be open and inviting to change, Desai said.
Today, Dashew Supply sells everything but the sewing machine with such products as threads, bobbins, backing, needles, aerosols and scissors — much different than when it started as a repair shop.
Desaid said it’s part of ensuring the company survives.
“Even if a change takes place, the change is accommodated, accepted,” he said, “because the values are such that change is good.”
Bender described Dashew as “a nice, niche business that can just keep going. In her company’s database, she has about 1,000 active clients, including Baltimore-based Aetna Shirt Co., Pasadena-based Maryland Monogram and Hanover-based JoS. A. Bank.
Bender’s father, who was president of J. Dashew for about 20 years, believes there’s room for growth and is ready to see one of Jory Bender’s four children take the reins down the road.
“I’d like to continue to see if one of the grandchildren is interested,” Melvin Bender said.
In the meantime, Jory Bender is working toward making her Web site an e-commerce hot spot this month.
“Hopefully, that’s really going to work for me,” she said. “If there wasn’t the Internet, then I would definitely have a corner on the market.”
