Nearly 90% of America s 15 million

businesses are family controlled or have a major

family involvement. They generate 60% of

the country s gross national product and employ

between 40 and 50 million people.

Certainly some family businesses are in fact

gigantic multinational dynasties (including 175 of

the Fortune 500). However, the vast majority

are small to medium-sized companies struggling

daily for survival.

Most family businesses have a life expectancy

of merely twenty-five years. Only 30% survive to

the second generation; and of these, only half

survive to the third generation.

Why? Corporate Bloodlines answers these

and many other questions in its in-depth profiles

of fourteen family-owned businesses:

~ Bixler s (jewelry stores, Easton, PA)

~ Blake-Lamb Funeral Homes (Oak Lawn, IL)

~ Bookstop (book retailing, Austin, TX)

~ Dillard Department Stores Inc. (Little Rock, AR)

~ Elyachar Real Estate (New York, NY & Sarasota, FL)

~ The Firestone Vineyard (Los Olivas, CA)

~ Fox Photo Inc. (San Antonio, TX)

~ Glen Ellen Winery (Glen Ellen, CA)

~ Grace s Marketplace (gourmet foods,

New York, NY)

~ Koss Corporation (Milwaukee, WI)

~ Lazzara Optical (Villa Park, IL)

~ The 7 Santini Brothers (Bronx, NY)

~ Smith Farms (Chula, MO)

~ Unified Services Inc. (cleaning, Washington D.C.)

Here are vivid portraits of families

working, struggling and sometimes achieving

a piece of the American dream: the Lamb

brothers, who built the Blake-Lamb Funeral Home

into one of the largest in the Midwest;

the 7 Santini Brothers moving company, which never

changed its founding credo that family comes

before business, and was finally forced to sell

a~er years of declining revenue, dwindling profits

and bitter feuds among five family factions;

and Grace s Marketplace in Manhattan, where at

5:00 a.m. vendors deliver goods long before

the doors to the gourmet take-out shop open.