When Archie Williams, an entrepreneur in Boston, died in his bed on Thanksgiving Day in 2002, his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, recalls confronting feelings that went beyond grief.
Should she take over her father’s company and give up her career, she wondered? At 38, she had been director of diversity at Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts for two years, and the future seemed promising. Ten days earlier, Ms. Williams, a single mother, had just bought her first home.
“It came down to the fact that I was the only qualified person in the family to take over,” she said. “If it wasn’t me, it was close the doors.”
Her father’s company, Roxbury Technology, remade used toner cartridges for copying machines. Though her father started the company in 1994, it was still a fledgling operation with three employees and less than $4 million in sales. Ms. Williams knew nothing about the business, she said, but she admired her father’s devotion to building a business in the inner city.
See full Article.
Posts
