Julie Smolyansky has spent more than a decade as chief executive officer of her family's successful business, but her path to the corner office was unplanned.
Smolyansky, 41, assumed control of Lifeway Foods Inc , maker of kefir and other dairy products, when her father died suddenly of a heart attack in 2002.
Her mother and brother are also involved in the company, which had revenue of $118 million in 2015, as well as in a family charitable foundation. In addition, Smolyansky founded a nonprofit, Test400k, to eliminate the backlog of untested rape kits.
The family has come a long way from its arrival in the United States from the Ukraine when Smolyansky was a baby and her parents had only $116 to start a new life.
Reuters talked with Smolyansky about her views on estate planning and philanthropy as well as values she wants to teach her two young daughters.
Q: Given that your father passed away without a written estate and business succession plan, how does your family now make financial decisions?
A: We have family meetings. We do them as retreats. It's hard to get everybody together, even though we all live a mile away from each other.
We talk about succession, what gifts are going to happen. Is anyone getting married? Births happening? All these things we've had to navigate in the last few years. It gets complicated.
We also always build in some sort of social impact piece. For example, we were off in the Caribbean, and we booked a whole thing about the environment. We thought about how running a business with a manufacturing facility impacts our environment. What kind of plastics can we use? When you physically see coral reefs disappearing, it impacts your decisions.
Q: What do you think your family foundation will look like years from now?