Episode 148 - From Cave Tours to Roller Coasters with Chris Herschend
Dollywood. Silver Dollar City. The Harlem Globetrotters. You’ve heard of all of those, but you might not know about the business behind them. That’s what today’s episode is about.
Chris Herschend is a third-generation shareholder and Chairman of Missouri-based Herschend Enterprises, the largest family-owned themed attractions company in the US. Herschend properties span 26 locations and 10 states, employing over 10,000 people who collectively host over 13 million guests annually.
Today, Chris is going to talk to us about what it’s like serving his family, their board, and the family business, creative ways he has found to follow God both inside and outside the business, and the unique challenges and opportunities keeping a business “family held forever.”
Episode Transcript
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Chris Herschend: I just think there's a lot of ways to make a huge impact, and this is one that I had kind of ready to go and I was able to use the gifts and the motivation God to put in my heart. I was able to step in joyfully and maintain a regular life outside. I had my career on my own for a good long while, business school, other things. And then I came back in as a line employee for a season and then step back out again. And I continue to serve as a non employee. So it is totally doable. And, you know, we're 100 percent family health and I just feel like it is a model that I hope more families will grasp as they look to the future, because it is a sad, I think, mistake where if you don't have children who are interested, you need to sell the business. And I think that is a mistake.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, we got Rusty back in California, Rusty. Welcome back.
Rusty Rueff: Thank you. It's good to be back, although it looks like the same. It was when I was away. I mean, you know, you're in the same place. You were there office and, you know, and I'm just in another office.
Henry Kaestner: I feel closer to you. I feel closer. I hope our audience feels closer to you, too. We've got a great guest in the house today, Chris Herschend. Chris, our audience heard in the introduction a bit of your background and the really, really cool things that you and your family have been involved in that touch. So much of American culture. It's been cool to get to know you a bit over the last couple of years. I'm grateful that you spent time with us.
Chris Herschend: I'm glad to be here. I love podcast's.
Henry Kaestner: Awesome. All right. Well, you get yourself in the right place. So your story is one that fascinates us and a piece of it that might be even more fascinating than the rest is a place that I want to start. So your business began with your grandparents signing a 99 year lease, I think about five year leases and 10 year leases, but 99 year lease on land that had a cave that doubled as a tourist attraction. How did this whole story come about?
Chris Herschend: I think, like most of us began with a road trip and probably a discussion with our wives and then a 99 year lease. Doesn't that happen?
Henry Kaestner: No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't happen.
Chris Herschend: So Hugo and Mary Herschend were sort of adventuring souls in Chicago. They had pretty dull jobs. And they like to go out and explore the countryside and look for wildflowers, of all things. And they took their sons on these trips. And this is when cars and, you know, kind of mobility was really picking up in the US. And so they found their way to the Missouri Ozarks and made friends with two spinster sisters. And I don't know if that's the right phrase in twenty, but that's how they always described them, who owned a piece of land. And on that land was a cave that they had been touring people through for. I don't know how long decades at that point. And they thought this sounds like a great business.
Henry Kaestner: And so what year is this?
Chris Herschend: This would be in the forties. They signed the lease in nineteen fifty.
Henry Kaestner: They're looking for wildflowers. They come upon a cave to spinster sisters and they're like, that's what we need. We can do that.
Chris Herschend: Exactly. Like I said, it just leaps off the page with obvious appeal. And I've got the PNL for that business on my wall here along with the lease. I've seen it framed and it was something like, you know, a seventeen hundred dollar revenue line. And there was a line item for Telegraph in there as well, which had no expenses in 1950. So very local business. So basically they did sign a lease and they looked at it as a fun summer opportunity for them and their boys, and they fell in love with the people. And I think the work and the grit and the kind of the working together as a family was really appealing to them. And so, yeah, that's how it started. They literally committed to ninety nine years to pay these two sisters for ninety nine years. And of course it was a very, very small lease commitment. But nonetheless, I still think of it as pretty bold.
Henry Kaestner: OK, so let's turn off its Silver Dollar City. Tell us a little bit about that. Said there's a cave now. Your grandparents are really involved. They've committed for the ninety nine years, so they're thinking about it through the lens of their boys. They're saying this is so cool. We don't want this just to be part of our lifetime. We want this to be part of the lifetime of our kids and actually even beyond that. Right? So they were thinking about you back in 1950. Do you ever reflect on that?
Chris Herschend: Not in the way you phrased it there, which makes me think I'm probably fairly shallow, which is probably true, but I do think there were long term thinkers from the beginning. The initial attraction was called Marvel Cave Park. The cave is called Marvel Cave. And it became Silver Dollar City when an early marketing genius who worked for us, he was a genius guy named Don Richardson came up with the idea of it. We had no budget, of course, for anything, anything. And to give people change, he gave it to them in silver dollars. And then when they took out their silver dollars, as they traveled back to the, you know, to Texas or Oklahoma or Illinois or wherever they were from, it was a little unique even then. And they were always, well, where did you get this? And Silver Dollar City. And it stuck. And so that's how we became Silver Dollar City. It also illustrates not only their long term thinking, but their complete lack of resources. There was just nothing there but a team of people that came with the cave and then a few people who came alongside them as they started to grow the business that were just I mean, we were so lucky. We were surrounded from the very beginning by committed, thoughtful, creative, fun people. And I think my grandparents, yes, deserve a lot of credit, I think, for seeing what could be. But I mean, from day one, it was we had great people. There were no degrees. There wasn't even indoor plumbing in the area. My grandmother tells a story or told a story before she died about being the first indoor plumbing in the county, you know, which she was a librarian from Chicago. She was hardly a hill country, Ozarks kind of girl.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, wow. OK, so walk us through the process of going from that original theme park to having properties that span 26 locations in ten states. So now we're talking massive scale. We're beyond that first, you know, additional attraction. Now we're talking scale here. You guys employ more than 10000 people who collectively host over thirteen million guests annually. How do you make that leap?
Chris Herschend: It was slow, I would say super deliberate. And really, we were lucky because my grandfather died in 1955. So we signed the lease in 1950. We lost Hugo in 1955. So much of the credit for our growth goes to people, not the founder, which obviously is a tragedy. You know, my dad when his dad died was twenty one. So just a terrible I mean, always tough to lose a parent, I think. But I think a lot about what that must have been like. So they had a little tiny business in a place away from home. And my grandmother, who was a librarian, she sold their house. She had to decide on my moving back to Chicago and just going back to normal life or can we make a run at this? So she sold their house in Chicago and plowed the proceeds into the business. And I always refer to that as kind of a burn the ships moment. I mean, they were not going back to Chicago at that point, which also saved us from being Cubs fans in my family, which I'm forever grateful for. We're Cardinals fans in my family. And that was, you know, where we took the road less traveled right there.
Henry Kaestner: Was there a time where there is obviously cubs have been around for a long, long time? I should know that's about to say one of the cubs start. But, you know, you think about Wrigley Field. So there's a point in time where you said, like, for instance, I grew up in Maryland. I was a Maryland fan until I moved in North Carolina. And there's a fateful night in 1997 where I said, you know what, I'm no longer a Maryland Terrapins fan. I'm now a unsee Tarheel fan. And that was there's a lot of drama there.
Chris Herschend: That was your ships moment. That was a big deal for you and your family.
Henry Kaestner: Clearly, it scarred me to this day because I still regret it, maybe a little bit. That's not for now. But for your family, having grown up in Chicago, there was that burn the ships moment, right?
Chris Herschend: Well, I don't think they thought about it in terms of baseball at the moment, but it was nonetheless a big deal for us in a lot of ways. And she came down and really made a go of it. I mentioned the indoor plumbing. I mean, you know, Mary Herschend was a gritty, tough woman, but she was not a you know, a hillbilly type of person at all, and she was surrounded by people who would be affectionately called hillbillies. They were just rough country folk, uneducated and simple. And, you know, Mary, of course, a librarian, I mean, well-educated, sharp and used to living in a big city. So to her credit, again, I think she saw down the field further than I would have been able to at that time. And, you know, she would go in and meet with local bankers and she would persuade them to loan her money, which had to have been difficult for a woman with no experience in an industry and under by any definition and undercapitalized market. So, you know, they grew the business. To answer your question about growth, that's how they grew it brick by brick, season by season. And it was bank debt. And we still own 100 percent of the business today, which is unusual given how little capital we had to start. What's a fairly capital intensive business?
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, I just have to come back to Henry's allegiance change. You know, those Maryland Terrapins, they're always slow to change.
Henry Kaestner: Yes. Yes, that's good. That's good.
Rusty Rueff: Yes. All right. So I want to hear some of the you know, the business grows. Yeah. But there had to be some interesting stories along the way with some luck and maybe some serendipity and, you know, tell us some of those stories.
Chris Herschend: Well, I think we were really lucky in two significant ways. One is and I think a lot about this in the context of 2020 and all that we've seen and particularly the kind of what I like to think of as headwinds and tailwinds. And I just think we had tailwinds. We were a you know, a family that had access to capital. We had a mortgage. We had equity in a home to sell. You know, we were able to go into the bank and take a meeting with the banker. I'm sure it was hard for me as a woman to do that. But I think about friends of mine today who think back to their two generations earlier and, you know, they were African-American or they just didn't have access to capital or they couldn't get a mortgage or whatever. And I just think we have to acknowledge and my family, we spent a lot of time talking about this. We just have to acknowledge not with guilt or shame or but we had that going for us, number one. Number two is a little more romantic. Maybe the guy who produced the number one television show in the country during this season, the show is called The Beverly Hillbillies. And the guy who produced it was a game show, a great show. Paul Henning was the producer and he was from the Ozark Mountains. And so he knew about what was going on with this little park that was now called Silver Dollar City by that time. And he shot four episodes of the show in 1969. The shows aired in 1969. I don't know if they shot him that year or not, but that was huge to remember. This is two or three TV channels. You know, the whole country is watching one show every night and that was it. And so that catapulted attention to the park in a way that really was it changed things for us forever at that point. There was really no going back there, similar to how, you know, moving from Chicago to Branson was a big moment after that. In our minds, we couldn't go back to being just a small local attraction. We were now at least regional, if not national. And because of the leadership we had, particularly from my uncle and my dad, who are a great young partnership, by then they were in their 30s. At this point, they were not willing to go back. They weren't going to just start reaping dividends out of the business and sitting back. They were hungry to grow it for a lot of reasons and we could talk about those, but that was pretty special. Uncle, I never met Sam Walton, but I think Jack Hershon would be a lot like Sam Walton, the humble, kind of deceptively simple, just gritty, badass CEO who everybody loves. And there's a guy named Darwan Smith that Jim Collins talked about and good to great around Kimberly Clark, who tells that story about the scraping the windshield with his credit card, you know, get Frost off. I don't know if you remember that story. That's my uncle. And people loved working for him. And he was never hungry for his own gain. He was always hungry for the benefit of those around them. And so he was willing to sacrifice sort of the pleasure of today for the promise of tomorrow, if that makes sense. And I don't know if that phrasing if that works, but that's the way I think of it. He deferred a lot of pleasure in the name of building something that would last and be really great for a lot of people for a long time.
Rusty Rueff: It's very cool. Can I make the assumption that the show Ozark is not the same kind of attraction where people are coming like they might have from Beverly Hillbillies?
Chris Herschend: It's a little different. It's in a much more fragmented marketplace for time and attention and not quite as hopeful and cheerful as jet and crew.
Rusty Rueff: Exactly. Exactly. One of the other things you had going on in your family, too, is it seemed like a pretty clear division of labor from the skills and experiences. Talk a little bit about that, because we have, you know, family entrepot. Viewers who listen to the podcast who try to figure that out, like who does what?
Chris Herschend: Well, I know that there was a lot of careful thought about this. It also happened to be there were only two people. There was my grandmother, Mary stepped out of the business from a day to day operations perspective, I want to say in the early 70s. So it was really my uncle, my dad, Jack and Pete, who ran the business together. Jack was Mr. Inside. Pete was Mr. Outside Natural Division of labor. They had opinions and they shared responsibilities on the park and different things, but they were naturally wired that way. Introvert, extrovert, details, big picture, all of that. They were really quick. And I would say this might have been as early as 1971 to invite independent board members into the picture. They formed their first independent board in around 1971, and that was huge for them. To your point about family, entrepreneurs often find themselves at odds with each other. And how do you decide who wins, especially in a 50/50 scenario like this was they would use the board to mediate their disagreements. It was a great blessing. And there are a lot of stories in our family about where they would even trade sides to argue to the board they'd go in with, you know, one says and says as and they'd flip and argue the other side in front of the board to make sure the board had to make sure they understood the other guy's viewpoint, but also that the board couldn't identify with, you know, a person or the other. It was just which ideas best.
Rusty Rueff: And I assume that that sort of infusion into the DNA of the business, bringing in the independents to help with the board has also carried over because your family owned business. But you have a non-family CEO. Tell us about that.
Chris Herschend: Yeah, which is not uncommon for larger later stage businesses, but it is uncommon when we started it and we've now kept it. Now we are 30 years into our nonfamily CEO history for a business that's 70 years old. Wow. So our first non-family CEO was brought on when Jack and Pete were in their late 50s, if I'm not mistaken. So right in the prime of their they still had plenty of gas in the tank and plenty of influence and leverage. And they were not checked out and hanging out and, you know, playing golf very, very committed. But they did what I think is miraculous. And the longer I observe them and other leaders, I realized just how precious and rare this is, what a huge gift this was. But they were able to step back and out from operating roles. I mean, they literally moved their offices out of the building, over the park, and they they went out to a few miles away. And then they let the CEO run the show without coming in behind them and making comments or asking questions or throwing them under the bus. Our first CEO was, I want to say, eight years in the role, which is phenomenal and had to be painful for them to watch him fail, which he did. I mean, we all do. And they managed to let him fail. And still they didn't come in to sweep up everything behind him, which I think is the real magic. And I tell people who are struggling with this decision, I say, you know, they traded in their job titles for influence. They gained so much influence and credibility within our family when they made that switch that they're nearly papel in the way people sort of revere them today in our system. And there's no bitterness over them hanging on too long. And they didn't leave town. Like I say, they stayed in the same town and they just shifted their focus. And it's been it's probably other than having an independent board, it's probably the single biggest ingredient that's allowed us to continue and to whatever extent we've been successful to be that part.
Rusty Rueff: But there also had to be a really good alignment around values and principles, and I think that's part of it. Right. So what are those values and principles that allow this independent and the family to come to the table together?
Chris Herschend: So both my dad, my uncle came to a personal Christian faith in the 60s and 70s, I want to say late 60s, early 70s through different channels and paths. Both of them were heavily influenced by their wives, my aunt and my mom, and by employees. But it was really cool. They would both say, and I've got on my wall in my office, in addition to that lease that Henry saw, I don't know if you saw this. There's a decision making model that my uncle drew up that helped him think through how to apply scripture to business decisions. And it's just it's two pages and it's loaded with scriptural references about confronting lovingly and all the different things that you have to do to properly apply the gospel to your work. And it includes, you know, like I say, like truth telling and confronting, not just being nice. And let's all get along and talks about taking risk and diversifying and just a lot of different things. And the standard, for example, of Christ in the room, you know, if he was in the room, what decision would you make is a different than the one you thought about making prior to that question. So they applied that. Then they asked their board members to support it. They didn't ask their board members to all be Christians. They asked their board members to all support their values and the values that they had identified as being important to the company. They even codified it in our, you know, sort of documents and things. We have a mission statement and we have our values. And early on before these things were extremely commonplace, a servant leadership, these guys were doing it before it was, I think, described as anything approaching servant leadership. B, they were in the mission statement, vision statement kind of world early on. And again, these are two relatively inexperienced people. These were not MBAs. They were both well-educated, thankfully, but neither of them had formal business training. And so they were just learners. They're just always seeking out people around them. But one of the things they did is they put at the foot of our mission statement. It was all in a manner consistent with Christian values and ethics. So all the things we need to do to run our business in the way we treat people, all that, but all in a manner consistent with Christian values and ethics. And that was there was no in the formal documents I described your decision making model J'accuse, but that was just one of his personal tools. It was not something we pushed into the company or said, everybody needs to think and work this way. Now, we'll say if you roll that forward to today, we're still very much the same. We don't ask anybody to be a Christian to work for us. We don't ask our directors to be Christians. Right. We say this is the way we expect to behave. So these are the things that we want to see, the fruit we want to see from all of us. So doesn't matter if you're Christian or not. A Christian honesty is important. Forgiveness is important. And so we've modeled this out. And another one of your guests on our earlier podcast, Joel Manby, really did an awesome job when he served as our CEO. He did the best job of taking the thought life of a Christian individual and translating it into how do we apply this to work and employment and employees in a way that doesn't require anybody to have a heart change, but just simply says these are the values we want to promote. And so that happened early with Jack and Dad and our board and it continues today and it's evolved over time. But the principle is rock solid.
Henry Kaestner: So I think that that's a huge takeaway for me. I'm embarrassed to not seeing that. I was probably kept on looking over your shoulder looking for some Dolly Parton memorabilia or something like that, where I should have been really looking for the formative two page piece.
And may that be said of all of us that we take the time to say what's unique in Christ like about the business that we hope to create? And what does that mean? What does that mean for the different stakeholders that come in contact with us? And are we prescriptive about what their faith needs to be or what are the values that we hope will be a witness to the hope we have without being judgmental? And, you know, when you set a culture in an organization like that and obviously it lasts and and you have these formative documents, are there are other initiatives that you have seen over the course of the last 40 or 50 years that are really informed by the faith of your dad and your uncle in a way that may be a distinctive or a differentiator, or if somebody else from Wall Street or some other place would come and say, gosh, that's different and not what I would expect. But if you look at the origination of that special thing that your family business does differently, that comes out of this faith commitment.
Chris Herschend: Yes, I think and this will I'm going to oversimplify it, but I think it's almost not oversimplified. And that is we are not in business to maximize profit. And that's, again, a little bit catchy right now. But there's this Old Testament principle. It's illustrated in Ruth with the gleaning and they leave some behind for Ruth and that story to come through and feed her own family. And basically the owners of the field leave something behind. They don't take everything. And so that principle applied to business today is that we have public competitors who are excellent operators and they will have higher margins than us better, thicker, fatter margins than us, because their mission, because they're in the marketplace in a slightly different marketplace than us, not for customers, but for stakeholders. And we accept that. But we still drive and push and grind and try to maximize within our framework. But our framework puts an emphasis on saying there's a higher purpose to this. So some of that benefits our front line employees and the way we handle wages and incentives and things like that. Some of the benefits are external stakeholders, but it's a key assumption that we make because we've agreed that we're not in this business to get fat and happy as stockholders. That's not our primary objective as stockholders. And so in our vision statement is to bring families closer together. You know, our mission statement is to create memories worth repeating. Those are things that we do. Those are our business, not our family, per say. But are those are things that we do that don't tie to an economic return. The economic return is a reflection of us doing those things well. And again, I hear secular wisdom around that today. But that is a fundamentally Christian concept. It's an ancient Christian or predates Christianity. Even the concept of, you know, you are part of a bigger system. Then just your own family or company and you want to benefit so 12000 employees, that's 12000 families, that's a whole ecosystem in and of itself.
You know, if we're good at serving our employees, if they feel treasured, if they feel cared for, if they feel respected, appreciated, thanked, not just by us, but by their peers. And, you know, the whole ecosystem needs to work here. They're more likely to be better husbands, wives, little league coaches, neighbors, volunteers at church, whatever they're into outside of work. So we really view that responsibility as kind of sacred, as profound.
Henry Kaestner: It is sacred. It is sacred. It's a special thing to be able to be invited in to the intimacy of a family. And it starts with the families that you employ and then to be able to be part of a million plus family stories. That's some pretty heady stuff.
Chris Herschend: Yeah, and we love that about our business. I meaqn, I'm always blown away when I learn about new businesses, how many different ways there are to make money. And I think it's all God ordained. I mean, almost all we're lucky and that our business is productively producing. It's a service, obviously, but we're producing a memory and an experience with people that they get to share. Almost by definition, it's very hard to experience most of what we do alone. You're almost always doing it with someone else that you care about or work with, you know, depending on the environment. But the laughter, the memories, the stamp that goes down, we love that. And that's not to say we don't understand that that's the product, but it's also we're just really lucky. And it helps us with a lot of things within our family. The family engagement. You know, we have such a tangible product. There are a lot of things that are difficult about our industry. I mentioned earlier the capital intensity. It's difficult to grow quickly. We can't just stamp out more of what we do. It's you know, in business school, I was sometimes a little embarrassed about the business I owned. It wasn't as flashy as my friends who are going to, you know, investment banking, consulting, flying all over the world.
And I was like, you know, when we started as a cave tour, I'm saying that a little embarrassed to admit it, but I felt a little bit like, well, our business is not really, you know, it's slow growth and, you know, in these markets. And but I've come to see it as just a beautiful expression of how we're all wired and everybody needs time with the people they care about. And sometimes you need to do it, as we all know now, after nine months of sitting inside together, sometimes you need to get out and do it elsewhere. And so that to us is a joy.
Rusty Rueff: You mean like if you had a Harlem Globetrotters jersey, you're not cool, I mean, you had that not until not until twenty thirteen, I think.
Chris Herschend: OK, too late. Too late. Sorry. Grown up. Grown up after my tortured youth.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, that's good. That's good. Hey, you know, I just want to compliment you on the whole idea of the thought life of a Christian, you know, being infused into the business because I don't know. Henry, you've ever been to Dollywood?
Henry Kaestner: I'm embarrassed to say. And before we went live, I talked about how I thought that Dolly Parton was an American cultural treasure and in my opinion, the best songwriter ever. But with that being said, I have not been to Dollywood and I'm embarrassed.
Chris Herschend: So we were saying that's a really tough question. Rusty right on right on this.
Rusty Rueff: So Patti and I actually went there. We hung out in Gatlinburg during the New Year's Eve into the year 2000 when we thought the world was going to, you know, come apart. Like I had one of those big satellite iridium phones, you know, in case, like, you know, I'd get this call in the middle of the night and we'd have to, you know, do something with the business. And I was at the time and we went and visited Dollywood and we took our friends, kids who were at the time, probably five years somewhere in there, three to five years old. They were blown away. Right, and the redemptive family experience, you know, was just totally obvious there, positive, uplifting, just a blast. So, you know, it's funny how we look for the obvious thought life of a Christian, but yet we can experience that abundance because somebody created an experience around that. So hats off to you and your team. I want to come back before Henry closes us out. And we're missing our third partner, William, because he would have been all over this. He's from the south. I mean, I was born in Kentucky, but he's all over it from Alabama. So you would have loved this story. But I want to ask one more question on the family owned business piece.
So, you know, there had to be times along the way where you felt like you needed to get involved because you felt compelled to be a part of it, but you might not have felt called to go do it right. So were there times of tension? And if there were and if they weren't, that's fine. But if there were, talk about that, because family owned businesses, you know, may say, well, wait a minute, I don't feel called to do that. But, you know, that's our business. I need to step in at this moment in juncture.
Chris Herschend: Well, yes, there were lots of decision points, and I think it's very common, so we were not required to work for the company and that was not something that my parents sort of drove. And my uncle and my aunt, his wife and their boys, I don't know that it was an expectation. But so, you know, two family branches, two brothers, eight children between the two of them, and they took a path that was fairly you know, they stayed in town. They went to work for the company. They went to school nearby, and then they went to work for the company. And it just was difficult. It was just difficult. Our family went a little further afield and by kind of nature, just stayed further outside the company. So my decision to come into the business was not vocational. It was curiosity and interest and an invitation to help to I think at the first invitation was to serve as an observer on our board of directors. And I was working in Atlanta for Coca-Cola and I loved my job. And, you know, I thought, well, why not? You know, that sounds like fun. So I started attending the board meetings and it just captured my energy and attention, not in a calm working my way, but like, wow, this is really neat and special. And then that has blossomed over time to truly appreciate. And anybody who is part of a family business, I think should just pause and remember this, because there's a lot of cynicism sometimes when there's an expectation attached to it or there's a lot of, you know, difficulty. But owning a business well gives you a platform that you cannot have otherwise. Now, I shouldn't say can't. It's much harder to attain. And the equivalent amount of assets in the form of cash in the bank doesn't give you the influence that an operating business has with its tentacles out into the community. And the employment benefits we already talked about earlier, just that has a huge ripple effect. So I felt like that was part of it for me was truly wow. Look, if I'm an effective influencer in this circle into which I've been invited because I'm an owner and now I've been invited into this next layer in of stewardship, if I'm effective at this, it has a significant multiplier effect over my own sort of witness and impact and multiple times over. Now, that was 23 years ago. I've seen that in play. And simple example would be, you know, influencing how we handle our corporate giving, not to whom, but structurally how, how much, where and things like that. And that's just one example that most people would understand because they're hopefully giving in their tithing and they're generous with their income no matter where they own a business, they're just receiving a paycheck. But I think most people can identify with that. If you had the chance to influence and operating businesses, giving strategy, just that one example, that's a special thing. So anyway, I, I also know a lot of people who've come in and kind of it's like a martyrdoms thing. They feel like they have to do it for the family and they they tend to carry that with a heavy weight. So I felt like I was always able to do it joyfully. All of my work sort of invested in the business was kind of just personally joyful. It never felt heavy. There were difficulties for sure, but it never felt like work. And I've heard that over and over and over again. Listening to your podcasts is, you know, that light, easy burden of important work, work that's important and meaningful to you, and that is the hotel. And so for folks who are called into it and they may not, you know, this may not be the season or I just don't know. And I talk to a lot of folks who are considering that. And it's just sometimes it is a season and you just got to, you know, put your head down and grind through it. And it may not be forever, but I definitely I feel like the return my economic return is significantly no different than my sisters and brothers who don't work in the business. Right. I don't receive a ton of compensation for what I do as chair, but I just love it and I'm compensated for it. I don't mean to suggest that I'm doing it for free, but it is, you know, fairly consistent with what I'm sure I could earn doing a lot of other things. So that's clearly not the reason. And I just love serving my family in a way that's unique and meaningful to them. And I think that seems to be a common thread for folks who are successful in these kind of situations. Is serving your family needs to be highly motivating.
Henry Kaestner: There's a lot of wisdom in that. And it's super cool that you've got that sense. There are these three levels of family. You're serving your family as your family serves the families of those that work at Herschend. And then if you do all those two things, well, then you get a real chance at being able to indeed make memories for folks that are worth repeating. And I don't know who the different people were that you were sitting next to in your MBA class, but I can't imagine any of them being in a spot. That would have as much of an impact on the lives of America and American families as you.
Chris Herschend: Well, that's that's very I mean, I did joke with many of them because they were going into investment banking consulting, I said, well, one day you'll work for me. If we have maybe said if we do deals or we need consultants, you'll be in the room. But they make a huge impact. And I have to disagree with you, Henry. As much as I like you, I just think there's a lot of ways to make a huge impact. And this is one that I had kind of ready to go and I was able to the gifts and the motivation got to put in my heart. I was able to step in joyfully and maintain a regular life outside. I had my career on my own for a good long while, business school, other things. And then I came back in as a line employee for a season and then step back out again. And I continue to serve as a non employee. So it is totally doable. And, you know, we're 100 percent family health and I just feel like it is a model that I hope more families will grasp as they look to the future, because it is a sad, I think, mistake where if you don't have children who are interested, you need to sell the business. And I think that is a mistake. I see lots of talent out there who can run your business and you can be a great owner and cultivate that culture in your family.
Henry Kaestner: That's very, very, very, very important for people who think that running the family business needs to be this just yoke that they put on themselves. You can maintain there are other ways. There are other models. You've had a non-family member, CEO for 30 years. You have the same cultural values as you had before. And just because I don't like to be beaten this early in the morning, we're recording this early morning Pacific Time. I want to push back on you and I want to do it in a way that hopefully will be encouraging to our audience. And that is, of course, our audience are Faith Driven Entrepreneurs and business owners of all different types of sorts. All of them have an opportunity to be able to know and enjoy God through what they do. There is something special, though, about a business that has at its core wanting to bring joy to families. Yeah, and there's a business aspect of what you do. And yet it's clear that the business aspect of what you do doesn't come before this kind of cultural sense you have in this higher purpose. And you mentioned that and we talked about Friedman and you know what, the real purpose of business. But you've never had that as part of what you've done. And the challenge here for our listeners is what is that bigger purpose? There are lots of different businesses. There are lots of different ways that we could orient our business towards loving on our community or other families. But when you have this higher purpose of I want to help people to love their families better, well, it doesn't just need to be a theme park. It can be a whole bunch of different things. And so the question is, is your listen to this is yes, you may very well be making your own and operating a plant that makes widgets, but what is the higher purpose? Now, how do you love one in your community? What is it that's better about society and about culture? Because you guys exist? And I think that that applies for everything. And maybe it's slightly more obvious if you run Dollywood, maybe it's a little more obvious. But I'd suggest that each one of us has an ability to be able to impact the broader culture. And it starts with family and it starts with the family that you have. This has been really cool. And it's you've got a special message about what it looks like to love on a family in a family business. And this non-family member CEO is a model that if more people put in place more family changes in their culture and their value would stay.
Chris Herschend: They would change so much. Our culture got better under a non-family CEO is more well documented. It was more well measured. It was more well promoted and spread throughout our company. It was we got better not because the previous guys were bad, but because the new guys were so good. And that was really big for us to really do want to champion that for families and just say, look, don't assume anything about your culture. First of all, you can't take it for granted. And secondly, you cannot assume that because you are not at the helm or one of your heirs is not at the helm, that nobody else could possibly steward it as well. That's just that kind of status.
Rusty Rueff: That assumption kills a lot of family businesses by the way.
Chris Herschend: And it puts way too much pressure on the heirs because some of them are not very good at this stuff. That's right. Many of them. And so it's of my notes. But you got seven billion people out there. Seven billion. You know, we had eight people in my generation. The math is probably in favor of going out to the seven billion.
Henry Kaestner: So that's really good. The BIID and then this other thing, because that's what one of the things that's unique about American culture is the number of family owned businesses that are part of the fabric of our economy. And I think that that's if there's going to be a movement that you advocate for, that you're uniquely equipped to be kind of the leader of it is that it's let's not have these thousands of businesses pass out of the hands of family culture. It doesn't have to go that way. That's an important message. And it's taken us one hundred and thirty hundred and forty podcast to finally get to it. But that's super important. Well, thank you all. I really appreciate it. Chris, thank you for having shared your story, your family story with us. And I'm fired up about getting together at Dollywood with you.
Chris Herschend: It sounds like you owe me a visit. I do.
Henry Kaestner: I very much do. So great thing with the last thing we want to ask and we ask this of every guest that we have is what are you feeling that God is speaking to you through his word and it doesn't need to be this morning, but maybe it's this week or or this month, but a sense that God is speaking to you about anything.
Chris Herschend: Thanks again for having me. I love this question. It's might be my favorite part of your podcast, so I'm feeling a little pressure.
Henry Kaestner: Me too! It's always William and asking, and I'm like does William say it that way?
Chris Herschend: He says it better. But you did. OK, you did. And I thank you.
William Norvell: He says it slower for sure.
Chris Herschend: I had a tough, internal, tough decade leading up in my forties, kind of late thirties, early forties, and just some decisions I made in business that just didn't work out and not necessarily with our family, but just my own decisions. And I carried that with some bitterness. And and in that process, you know, and I think that's not uncommon. But I was really disappointed in myself and I felt like I'd done everything right and it just didn't work. And so I thought about this in the context of what's he teaching me now? And this is really not yesterday or today so much as thematically in the last several just months of my time with the Lord, which is look back how faithful he's been. I see this every day in the world. I was able to read through the entire Bible every year for the last decade, almost, I think maybe a full decade. And that was because I was going through pain and I felt under attack. And I felt like I could identify with all these psalms that David wrote where he was like, hey, get these people off my back and while you're at it, hurt them. And, you know, and so I came to this word "Abide" and John fifteen. And then again this week, what caused it to mine was in first John "abide" shows up over and over and over.
And just the simple act of staying like, you know, sometimes tempted, we ask God all the time, what do you want me to do? What do you want? What do you want? What do you want? And I heard clearly in a season where I was really seeking with that question was, hey, this is what I want, knucklehead. And when you here with me, I want you to abide. I want you seeking me and I'll take care of all this other stuff. And it doesn't always work out with a bow, I guess. You know, I think that's what I was sort of bitter about as I was like, well, he promised he'd take care of it and he did. And he is. But my job is really not to worry so much about the outcomes, but really to be just patiently abiding. And so the daily just soaking and steeping and. And praying and reflecting and then walking out feeling like God is well pleased with me, though he may prune a little bit, and that is the thing that I think is this playing in my sort of thinking right now is anything else that God's doing in my life is just abide some stepping in that that's super helpful.
Henry Kaestner: And if there's one message that hopefully is consistent in our podcast that people hear is how important that is, because otherwise, for those of us running businesses, you know, it's achievement oriented. You got to earn your own salvation. You got to work. And it is in anti-abide type of mindset. And we have to break ourselves of that.
Chris Herschend: Never heard that phrase.
Henry Kaestner: I've never said that before. Anti-abide mindset. We have got to make sure that we do not have anti-abide mindset. And that is actually more simply stated as an abiding. So thank you for his great encouragement. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your partnership in the gospel.
Chris Herschend: Thank you, guys. I love being with you. Appreciate what you do and your impact is incredible.