Mother knows best

Like many entrepreneurial success stories, Beckey Neal's and Kim Godsey's began with a hobby. Both mother and daughter were working in the medical field — Neal as a hospital nurse, Godsey as a lab technician — when they started pouring candles together at home in Mississippi. Originally, the activity was just for fun, but Neal had the idea to open a small retail shop during her extra time on weekends. In 1999, they opened Wicks n' More in Tupelo, Mississippi, based around their signature hand-poured pillar candle.

Within a year and a half of opening, Wicks n' More was taking up all of their time and profitable enough to replace their medical salaries, so they quit. "When we realized that we could do something we loved doing and make money, it was even better," Neal says. "The store was so successful that we had no choice but to keep it going."

Today, the business focuses on wholesale manufacturing and occupies an 83,000 square-foot manufacturing facility in Mantachie, Miss. Revenue now stands at approximately $6 million and Neal and Godsey oversee as many as 60 employees, depending on the season. Their candles are sold in more than 3,000 boutiques and department stores nationwide. "It's definitely grown above and beyond what we expected," Neal says.

When it comes to family-owned businesses, fathers and sons have long been considered the classic entrepreneurial team. But the explosive growth of women-owned businesses has paved the way for a new breed of entrepreneurial pairing: mother-daughter businesses.  Although no concrete statistics have been compiled for the number of mother-daughter businesses nationwide, family-business experts say their ranks are definitely growing.

Experts point out that over the past decade, there has been a shift in the cultural environment of the workplace, and women have gradually received more acceptance as business leaders. From 1997 to 2006, the number of women-owned businesses increased 42.3 percent -- almost twice the rate of growth for all U.S. firms, according to the most recent data from the Census Bureau. Today, the United States is home to an estimated 7.7 million women-owned businesses.

"Women have proven themselves in the working environment," says Kurt Glassman, co-founder and president of Leadership One, a Sacramento, Calif.-based consulting firm for family businesses. "Just because you're a man doesn't mean that you're the best-qualified person to run the business anymore."

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As a result, many children now perceive their mothers as role models in the business world, according to Glassman. "Daughters are seeing from their mothers that you can have it all," he says.

In addition to the inherent mother-child bond, Neal and Godsey attribute their success to shared business philosophies. "From day one, we had the same expectations and goals," Neal says. "We are always focusing on having a better candle and putting out a high-quality product."

Neal and Godsey say their disagreements are usually confined to the color or name of a new candle, but they concede that every business suffers from the occasional dust-up. "There are a lot of trying times when you need to have respect for each other not just as mother and daughter, but as a business partner," Neal says.

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