Family Business Podcast Examines Succession, Trusts and Patient Capital
A Family Business Magazine episode features a fifth-generation steward moving ownership into trusts, a G4 chairman pursuing patient capital and industrial investment, and a third-generation executive on workforce development.
Family Business Magazine's podcast returns to the mechanics of staying private across generations. In Episode 53, host Zack Needles speaks with three family business leaders whose enterprises span real estate, cookware and industrial manufacturing.
Eric Corliss is a fifth-generation steward of Corliss Management Group, a private real estate development and investment firm with roots in Washington State. The business evolved from a family sand, gravel and concrete operation. In 2019 he bought out his uncle's stake and moved the family's ownership into trusts; he and his brother ultimately decided to sell the operating business they grew up around.
Corliss described a recurring succession gap. "I think this is a trap of a lot of family businesses, is that the founding generation or the oldest generation says, yeah, I want this to be passed down to my children or the next gen, whatever that is, but they really don't act like it and they don't have a plan for it." The firm retains a foundation of over 2,000 acres across Pierce and King Counties, and its development activity includes the 1,300-acre Sunrise master-planned community along with multifamily, self-storage, commercial and industrial properties, plus private lending.
Patient Capital and Institutional Memory
Ryan Reigle is G4 chairman of the board and CEO of Regal Holdings, a cookware and kitchen products company. He described patient capital as a discipline of choosing the right decision over the easy or fast one, and credited generations before him with taking the long view centered on people.
The company's institutional memory runs deep. The episode references 115 years of history shaping how the business responds to crises today, and notes the acquisition of the West Bend company — whose legacy traces to the Ziegler family — by Regalware in the early 2000s. Reigle also discussed an internal framework called the "Regal Way."
Buying out relatives, moving ownership into trusts and selling an operating business are governance decisions as much as financial ones.
Workforce and the Long View
Trey Travis, third-generation vice president of operations at Bremen, Georgia-based Southeastern Hose, discussed why investing in the next generation of employees matters to the business. The manufacturer and fabricator of hose assemblies and expansion joints recruits locally through community and education partnerships, with Travis describing a two-way relationship in which sponsorship and local engagement feed a pipeline of skilled workers.
He emphasized what the absence of quarterly earnings pressure means in practice. Decisions are weighed on whether they make employees' lives easier and on infrastructure spending that compounds over years, rather than on quarterly optics — a contrast he drew with private-equity-style management that he said can miss the morale side of building an organization.
Taken together, the three conversations address a common thread: whether ownership structures, governance and people investment are aligned with the stated intention to keep a business in a family. Corliss's account is the most direct case study, covering a buyout of a relative's stake, the transfer of ownership into trusts and the eventual sale of the operating business.
