Clients also like the fact that two generations of Traphagens are looking after their money, he adds. The firm has about $60 million under management. "Many clients have expressed that they feel very secure working with our family owned business because there is a structure and succession plan in place to continue well into their future," he says. "They feel protected."
The roots of the firm were planted in 1970, when V. Peter Traphagen Sr. started his own accounting firm in Ridgefield Park, N.J. His younger brother Robert joined seven years later, forming the firm, Traphagen & Traphagen CPAs, which still exists today.
Oddly enough, it could have been an engineering firm. Peter Sr. says his father wanted him to study engineering in college, despite the fact that his father was also an accountant. "It was the early 1960s, and he felt that engineering was really the future," Peter Sr. says. His father, he adds, also was unhappy in his job as an accountant at a private company.
Although he aspired to be an accountant, Peter Sr. did follow his father's wishes, and did study engineering-but only for a year. The studies left him feeling isolated and confined, so he switched to accounting. "I preferred working with people," he says.
By abandoning his engineering major, Peter Sr. lost the financial backing of his family, so he worked at a small CPA firm during the day and attended accounting classes at night to get his degree. It was an experience that led Peter Sr. to exert as little pressure as possible on Peter Jr. when it came to his choice of a career. As it turns out, it didn't matter. Peter Jr. says he was intent on joining the family firm the moment he entered college. He graduated on a Sunday, and started working at the firm the next day.
"I was elated," Peter Sr. says. "The comfort I get is the knowledge that I can rely on my partners, including my family, when push comes to shove."
Tough Love
Don Nicholson Sr. was elated when, unexpectedly, his son approached him about joining his financial advisory business.
But then he thought about it and decided that some "tough love" was in order. So he took his son, Don Jr., out for a 45-minute walk to talk about it. "I finally told him, 'Let me think about it and talk to you later,'" he says.
If he went with his heart, Don Sr. probably would have been doing back flips when Don Jr. approached him that day nine years ago. Don Jr. was a finance major in college at the time, but had never expressed his thoughts about joining his father at Donald W. Nicholson & Associates in Wilmington, Del., which he started 35 years ago.