Growing up with father who had started his own landscaping company in the early 1970s, Chris Angelo said it was never directly implied that he would join the family business. What his father, Richard Angelo, did was ask his son to get a business degree because that would help in the running of Stay Green Inc., the business the elder Angelo had started from his Sun Valley garage before relocating to Santa Clarita. “So, I guess there was some expectation,” Chris Angelo said. “It was not like I was required to but if I did here is the skill set he wanted me to bring to the family business.” Angelo got his business degree from California State University – Northridge and began working full time for Stay Green in 1999. Stay Green is No. 10 on the Business Journal’s Family-Owned Businesses list ranked by the number of employees. The landscape maintenance, plant health care and tree care firm employs a workforce of 343 people. Family businesses are unlike others in that they bring their own complications and challenges because of the family dynamic. Not the least is expectations of the parents to whether their children will continue the businesses they started. Sarah Oberman Bartush, the chief marketing officer and director of business development at Channel Islands Aviation in Camarillo, said it had not been expected of her and brother, Mike, to join the aircraft charter and management firm started by her father, Mark Oberman, more than 40 years ago. She washed planes as a teenager and later worked in customer service while getting a business management degree at Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo. By the time she graduated she knew that she wanted to work for her father, Bartush said. “I know my parents had always hoped my brother and I would join but it was not required of us,” she added. While Channel Islands Aviation just missed the cut off to get on the list, others making it are well into their second and even third generation of family involvement. These would include the No. 1 company on the list Gothic Landscape Inc., in Santa Clarita; Galpin Motors Inc. and the Boeckmann family at No. 4; and Nancy Gump-Melancon, the granddaughter of the founder of Andy Gump Inc., the temporary sanitation company in Santa Clarita at No. 14. Dana Telford, a principal with the Family Business Consulting Group Inc., in Chicago, said that what intrigues him about family businesses is the combination of socialism of the family where resources are doled out on a perceived need and the capitalism of a business where what you get is based on what you earn. He also called working for a family business “a weird dance” with a lot of different pressures. There is the pressure that a parent can put on a child to join the company yet they can receive messages about finding their own passion and making their life their own, Telford said. Dennis Jaffe, a family business consultant based in San Francisco with Wise Counsel Research, in Milton, Mass., said, that challenges faced by family businesses occur when an emphasis is placed on family over the business. “When the family is able to create a business ethic for family members things can be set up to be more successful,” said Jaffe. In working with families that own businesses, Jaffe said he has them come up with what are called family agreements in which expectations are created and the different roles in the company outlined. “People learn that role of working in the business is different than being a member of the family,” he added. Angelo said that in his earlier years of working at Stay Green when his father had an active role in day-to-day decision making the biggest challenge the pair faced was the elder Angelo breaking the chain of command. His father would jump over him and go directly to employees to solve problems. “That created some conflict early on and I learned how to deal with it,” Angelo said. “We created job descriptions, so we totally understood what was expected out of one another.”