​I suspect my father is destroying the family business of 60+ years

Note: I’m not a native English speaker and I do not live in the USA.

TLDR: My father is an arrogant man whose mismanagement is slowly killing the family company that has stood for multiple generations. The main issues include infrastructure failure, tech illiteracy, and poor social skills/arrogance.

This is something that’s been nagging me for a while now…

Context: 60ish (I don’t remember the exact date) years ago, my now late grandfather (passed away 4-5ish years ago, sadly) founded a floricultural company that continues to operate to this day. It’s been active for entire generations, and is what allowed my family to climb into middle-class (upper middle-class in the case of my grandpa) status. It grows roses, various types of flowers, and parsley. It proved quite lucrative for a long time.

However, starting some years ago, things began sliding downhill.

I don’t have a detailed insight on exactly what’s going on inside the company or its financial records, but the conversations I’ve had with my mother and various observations I’ve made hint at the company being in trouble.

The company used to be owned and run by 3 people in total: My grandfather, my father, and my uncle/father’s brother. However, my uncle had a tragic incident which rendered him unable to do anything, and this reduced it to just my father and grandpa, and then ultimately just my father after my grandfather passed away in his late 80s (my father is now in his early 60s and I’m in my 30s).

I now find myself seriously speculating if the other two were basically keeping the company afloat all this time because of al the bad decisions I’ve seen my father makes, not to mention his horrible arrogance (on that note, my father is a toxic and unlikable person with horrid temperament problems and zero tolerance for criticism).

To be clear, my father is an insanely hard worker. That’s not the issue. The problem is how he actually runs the company. He’s not open to talking about it with me (but I did talk to my mother who has had arguments with him about it, and she admitted to me that the company has suffered ‘uneven’ profits for some years now).

From what I can gather from the conversations with my mother and the things I’ve seen, there’s 4 major issues:

1. Failure to maintain/update infrastructure

A good example are the louvers (basically very large ceiling windows that open/close automatically at certain hours) in some of the greenhouses. They’ve been out of commission for a while now, but instead of repairing them (which he says is too expensive) he decided to just patch over the issue by installing smaller fans at various places. I admit I’m not a technical expert, but this sounds like an example of doing what works in the short term without addressing the real issue.

That’s just one example; until relatively recently he was actually using something akin to analog computers (remember that this company is 60+ years old) to control the greenhouses, instead of more modern systems, though admittedly this was (albeit only recently) addressed.

Speaking of of which…

2. My father is painfully technology illiterate.

My father is the type who simply refuses to learn new technology unless absolutely unavoidable. We’ve had computers in the household since the Windows 95 era, yet he barely knows how to operate his email and often requires assistance with extremely basic things. He literally does not know ANYTHING about using a desktop aside from some utterly rudimentary stuff (even then, he still often doesn’t) despite having had literal decades to learn it.

One major way this is (in my opinion) harming him is in regard to social media.

I recently started learning html/css so that I could make my own website (albeit not business related), and during this process, it occurred to me that the company doesn’t have any website or even a facebook page. If you google its name, it will show literally nothing, like it doesn’t even exist.

I confronted my father about this issue, but he just dismissed it and said that a company like his simply doesn’t have any need for a website, and that potential customers don’t use the internet to look up businesses like his. I tried to explain it to him that while this may have been true a generation ago, this is simply a horribly outdated view today. My mother took my side and agreed with me, but my father dismissed it.

So, he’s now operating a company that has no website, no social media presence at all, not even a facebook or twitter page. Nothing. And note that this is the same guy who can barely even use an internet browser; even if I did give him a website he wouldn’t even know what to do with it.

3. Arbitrary emotional attachment

The guy doesn’t seem to have much regard for supply & demand, despite this basic law being central to running a business. Though roses have always been the primary good sold by the company, various factors that I won’t explain in detail have fundamentally changed the market landscape; parsley that is now our most profitable good.

However, my father refuses to make parsley the central focus instead of roses because rose farming is simply too big a part of his identity. Keep in mind that roses are EXTREMELY complex and labor intensive to grow/maintain, meanwhile parsley can be grown in simple pots on top of being more profitable. But he just doesn’t care apparently cus “muh identity’.

4. His arrogance.

Put simply, my father is not a great person. He’s rude, narcissistic, loud, obnoxious, etc. However, while he can get away with this within his family (even if it’s extremely irritating), he’s making the mistake of thinking he can do the same with customers.

For instance, he once got an email from a client who complained about the latest shipment, and included a picture of rose bundles where the roses had been over-cut, making them too short (btw, this is nice opportunity to mention that his workforce consists of mostly foreign labor he’s paying under the table, and who frequently make mistakes). I was present at the time and noticed him lamenting about the email/issue, and how he was going to give the workers a piece of his mind (which imo is fair).

However, when I asked him how he was intending to respond to the email sender, he just looked at me funny as if I’d asked something stupid, and asked me why should reply at all. This surprised me, because I just took it for granted he’d reply back even if only with something as simple as “sorry won’t happen again” because he basically screwed up an entire shipment of roses. But he dismissed this, saying that it wasn’t necessary and that he’d just make sure that the next shipment would be better. It’s EXACTLY this type of narcissistic BULLSHIT that makes him insufferable to me and it boggles my mind that he thinks he can get away with it when interacting with people that he NEEDS for his business. The guy literally can’t wrap his head around the idea of apologizing for messing up an order.

Oh, and he also goes to work with COVID and lies about it with no regard for his workers (and also pressures family members into not spilling the beans). Just throwing that out there. And he gets really really angry when I call him out on it as well, to a point of shouting at him.

Conclusion

So yea… I’m not sure how much longer this company is going to last. I actually have no interest in taking it over after he’s gone, but I still think it’s pretty tragic to see a multi-generational business go down like this. Not sure what I can do, really :/