When your coworkers are your family, what happens to the bottom line?
Aleeza operates a nursing home with her husband and his siblings. While initially it was just she and her husband, Michoel, who ran the place, over time Michoel’s siblings came to work for the home in various capacities.
When Aleeza and Michoel were newlyweds, enjoying their shanah rishonah in Israel, they got a call from Michoel’s father telling them he was burnt out and wanted to give up the nursing home he owned and ran. He told them if they wanted to take over the business, it was now or never. He was either selling it to them, or, if they didn’t want it, to someone outside the family.
“We basically cut our year in Israel short, hopped on a plane, and, as 21-year-olds, took over running a nursing home, not having any idea what we were doing,” Aleeza says. “It’s a miracle our business survived. It’s a miracle our marriage survived. It was a really hard time. It’s a hard business when you’re in your forties and you’ve had 20 years of experience in the working world. But when you’re 20, and you don’t know what you’re doing, success is just a miracle.”
Dorothy Stoll didn’t intend to start a family business at all. She was living in Los Angeles, just about to make her first bar mitzvah, and was speaking on the phone to her brother, Phillip Tewel a”h, a caterer in Detroit. She was telling him how she’d really like to make a nice bar mitzvah, but it was so expensive, and they joked that they should just make a Pesach program and make the bar mitzvah at the program. A destination simchah, if you will, long before that was even a thing.
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