I lost the job I’d held for 17 years. The harder problem came 30 years later.
The first week of November 1994, I lost the job I had held for 17 years. My last day would be Jan. 31.
They were decent about it. There was time to look for another position inside the company, and my wife, Arlene, covered our health insurance before I finished worrying about it. I did not get a golden parachute, but I landed safely.
Which turned out to be the harder problem. A man with no options must move. A man who has landed safely can sit on the ground for months, telling himself he is about to take off again.
My son’s 8th birthday came three weeks later, and I sat in a rented theater doing arithmetic instead of watching the movie. Somewhere in that hour I stopped asking who would hire me and started asking whether 17 years of knowing my trade was worth anything with my own name on the door. That was the first decision I made as a man who intended to work for himself.
I spent those years at the Coca-Cola Company, four in fountain sales and 13 in purchasing. I knew what suppliers kept getting wrong and where the money quietly leaks out of a deal. That knowledge did not belong to my badge. It belonged to me.
‘Whoever learns the new thing stays ahead’
I got into that company through a door that somebody else opened. In 1977, Dr. Jennye Harland Emanuel ran the internship program at Clark College and decided I was ready for rooms I had not yet been in. That year, I became the first student from the Atlanta University Center to hold two internships in one year — first at IBM, then at the Coca-Cola Company.
That summer I used a fax machine for the first time and understood that whoever learns the new thing first stays ahead of everyone waiting to see if it catches on. Eighteen years later, the first purchase order my own company received came in over a fax.
On March 6, 1995, from a converted bedroom in Decatur, I started the R.L. Hawkins Group.
My boys never knew anything was wrong. The only change they saw was that Dad was around more and coaching baseball. In 1996, the mother of a boy on my younger son’s team turned out to be an editor at this newspaper. She asked a writer named Bill Husted to call me, and that July, during the opening week of the Atlanta Olympics, my one-man company landed on the front of the Personal Technology section, in a story about business use of technology on the go. Opportunity showed up at a Little League field.
In November 2001, this paper came back and photographed the three of us on the same computer screen. John was 14, pulling down box scores. Michael was 13, mostly there for the music. I did not know one of those boys would end up running the company.
About half of new American businesses close within five years, and roughly two-thirds are gone by year 10. We are in year 31.
Plan the handoff with the same seriousness as the launch
So, I assumed I had survived the hard part. I had not. Owner-led companies rarely die of recessions. They die in the handoff. Only about 30% reach the second generation, and while most owners say they want to keep the company in the family, only about a third have a written succession plan. Those two numbers explain each other.
Michael joined the company in 2024. On Sept. 1, 2027, he becomes president and I move to chairman. We did not leave that to chance, or to a lawyer reading my will someday. We put a date on it. We wrote it down. And we built his pay so he shares in the business he brings in, because a successor who inherits only a title inherits none of the fire.
I will not pretend it is finished. No plan covers whether I will actually step back when the date arrives or find reasons to keep signing things. Ask me on Sept. 2, 2027.
If 31 years are worth anything to somebody reading this over coffee, let it be this. Plan the handoff with the same seriousness you gave the launch and start years before you think you must. A handoff without a date is not a plan. It is a hope.
I began with a lemon in November and had no idea what came next. Atlanta gave me room to build the rest, and that is more than lemonade.
Robert L. Hawkins is founder and chairman of the R.L. Hawkins Group Inc., a packaging distribution company he started in Decatur in 1995.
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