I have spent a lot of my adult life struggling with my legacy. Where do I sit in a family of very successful businessmen. My grandfather was one of the few Huzzards to leave York, Pennsylvania and he did so by moving to Washington, D.C.. I don’t know his full story but he ended up owning Fuller and d’Albert. A photography store on F Street in Washington, D.C. and moved it to Fairfax Circle in the 70’s.
My father graduated from Virginia Tech and went to work for Riggs Bank. He had some early success in real estate buying, renovating, and renting homes on Accomac Street in Springfield, Va with a small investment from his father. Eventually he would transition that into purchasing a Florist Shop and eventually purchasing Fuller and d’Albert from his father and turning it into a $10 million business.
When I graduated college I went to work for my father with the idea that I would eventually take over that business. The biggest issue is it was a business and industry in turmoil and transition. Digital photography and the government’s switch from contracts to GSA and cratered the businesses two biggest revenue streams and I helped first try and turn it into an online photography store and then into an industrial casework subcontractor. I realize now we were so close to success and if we had realized the difference between cutting 40 cabinets a day to making 40 cabinets a day we might have made it.
If I could go back and do it all again then a lot would turn out different, but I can’t. I have internalized and lived with that failure. I blame myself for failing my family and destroying our legacy. The fact is we were fighting several rising tides at once and my father’s stubbornness, the 2008 financial crisis, and the death of the photo industry had more to do with it than I ever could have. It was simply a bad time to be an industry in transition.
That brings us to today. I have been given a second chance at building on that legacy. Campbell Drive Properties is what remains of the successes of my father and grandfather. I have always looked at my small $300K revenue dog walking and pet sitting business as an ant compared to what they built, but now I have the chance to carry on that legacy.
There is a saying the wealth is shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. Thanks to being a change of life baby born 19 and 15 years after my sisters I view myself as generation 3.5. My grandfather built the wealth, my father continued it, and my sisters are my sisters. I won’t say much about it but one made her own way in life and has done fairly well and the other is the cliche.
I now have the chance to do something special for this family. I just need people to trust me, and I need to stop internalizing other people’s failures as my own. This is a rebuild and it follows the same pattern as any other rebuild. We trade heavy, overburdening assets, for cheaper assets with more upside. If people like Jon Daniels can transition investing into building a baseball team then I can use my baseball knowledge to go into investing. I am ready to prove myself. I just need the runway to do so.
David Huzzard Writes 