Dawn Calleja, editor of Report on Business Magazine.Daniel Ehrenworth/The Globe and Mail
I first met Linda Hasenfratz in 2010. I’d just returned from a year-long maternity leave after having my first child, and I was struggling to stay on top of work and mom life. Hasenfratz was CEO of Linamar, LNR-T the manufacturer her dad founded in 1966, and I was at the headquarters in Guelph, Ont., to talk about her mission to grow the company to $10 billion in revenue, even as it struggled amid the aftershocks of the global financial crisis. I was a bit awestruck by Hasenfratz’s breezy ability to manage a million and one details on a daily basis, from the shop floor to the boardroom, while having four kids at home, then aged nine to 14.
I’ll never forget her response when I asked how she managed it all (which, I admit, wasn’t a question I regularly asked male CEOs): “I have a bigger staff at home than I do here,” she told me. “Happily, I have the ability to have people do the things at home that I don’t want to do, like the shopping and the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry. So that means that when I’m at home, all I have to do is be with my kids. In some ways, I think I have more time with my kids than a lot of working moms do.”
Over the past 14 years, I’ve thought about that exchange a lot, and I’m still grateful to Hasenfratz for her candour. It’s a helpful reminder, as you sit exhausted in your shambles of a living room, that while it might seem like everyone else is coping far better than you are, it’s often just an illusion—or a decent-sized household staff.
Hasenfratz also gave kudos to her entrepreneur husband, Ed, for his unwavering support, and to her top lieutenants at Linamar—including then president Jim Jarrell. “I just steer the boat,” she said. “They shoot the ducks!”
That long-ago conversation sprang to mind in August, when Linamar announced that Hasenfratz would be relinquishing the role of CEO to become executive chair. Her successor? Jarrell.
What set the handover at Linamar apart from those at other family-controlled companies was, well, the complete and utter lack of drama. There was no backstabbing à la Rogers. No irreparable rift à la McCain. Which is not to say there’s no tension—Hasenfratz, after all, has four kids, and while none of them works at Linamar, she dearly hopes that one day they will. How will she prepare the third generation to shepherd the company into the future? In the meantime, though, Jarrell’s in charge, and we sent Trevor Cole to Linamar HQ to write about what makes this company so delightfully functional. Read his story, “Enter Jarrell, Exit Hasenfratz” to find out.
And just one more note from Hasenfratz, mostly for the parents out there: “I have never been so busy,” she told me of those early years spent juggling her company and her kids. “In retrospect, though, anything else feels almost easy. I learned that you can accomplish so much more than you think you can.”