Snickers, Skittles, and the Woman Who Kept a Global Candy Empire in the Family

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. Mars Incorporated is best known for making candy such as M&M’s, Milky Way, and Skittles. The company also makes Ben’s Original rice and pet food, including Pedigree and Whiskas. Victoria Mars is a fourth generation of the Mars family, whose great-grandfather Frank Mars founded the company in 1911. Today, the company has net sales of $55 billion and employs over 150,000 associates in 78 countries. This includes a significant presence in the United States, with 60,000 employees across 33 factories. It’s one of the largest family businesses in the world. Victoria began working for the family one summer as a young girl, packing M&M boxes in the factory, and in 2017 she stepped down as chair of the Mars Board of Directors. Here’s Victoria with the story of how the family legacy and their products have persevered.

00:01:15
Speaker 2: Our brands speak for themselves. So, my grandfather was very passionate about, “It’s not about the family. It’s not about who we are. It’s about our products, and each of our products should stand on its own.” And so, if I go way back in the beginning, you know, you wouldn’t even know that that a Snickers bar was made by the same people who made M&M’s, or that we were also in pet food and we had Pedigree brand and the Whiskas brand. You wouldn’t have known that, nor would you have cared. So, you know, it came from a history of—it was about our brands, and they need to stand on their own two feet, and they spoke for who we were as a company. We are a family business. We are a private family. So, we’ve been diversified as a company for a long time. And my grandfather was a true entrepreneur. Think about true entrepreneurs. It’s people that do things by the seat of their pants, have an idea, and just go off and do it. And that’s really what he was about. So, you know, whether he was selling ties, or whether he was taking the $50,000 and going, starting our business and taking it over to Europe, or whether he happened to be wandering around the UK and saw, “Huh.” You know, “I see an awful lot of waste coming out of these factories, and I put this waste… I can put it in a can and make dog food.” Is how kind of the pet and food world opened up. So, for a very long time, we were in the pet food, and what we’ve evolved to is now a pet care.

00:02:36
Speaker 3: One of the big advantages…

00:02:37
Speaker 2: of being a family-owned business is that we can think long-term, so we can make decisions and “hang in there,” if you want to call it that, versus quarterly having to say, “Oh, we can’t invest in that because our numbers aren’t looking right,” and so constantly being pulled back and forth by the stock market. We don’t have to deal with that. And if anything about Mars—and one of the things I’m proud of—is that we are very much a principle-based organization. We have five principles that really are the family values. Though they weren’t written down until the ’80s, these are the values and principles that we’ve grown up with, and so they sound very simple. Quality, efficiency, responsibility, mutuality, and freedom. Very simple in some ways, very easy to deal with if you’re doing each one individually. The real magic that makes Mars tick and really makes us work is you have to—you have to use all five at the same time. You’re not allowed to trade off and say, “I’ll focus only on quality and everything else.” Now, that’s not going to work. It’s the magic of making them all work. And it’s not just like nice words up on the wall, or a booklet says, “Here you go, not put it in your drawer.” You’re actually expected to live them. So, anybody that thinks that a family business work world is simple and easy, just imagine that, you know, you all have your family over for Thanksgiving and you have a lovely time, and then you all say goodbye and you may not see them for another year. Or you may imagine that, you know, in a family business, those are the people you have to work with.

00:04:21
Speaker 3: Those are the people you see.

00:04:23
Speaker 2: Those are the people that you have to come to alignment with. So, it’s very complex, and many family businesses fail when they get to about the third or fourth generation. And it’s very much about size. I mean, so it all depends on where you are in the evolution. But, you know, you start with one, and that’s easy, okay, and make all the decisions. And then, by the time you get to the sibling partnership, so then you’ve got some brothers and sisters that are trying to work together, and okay, you still have a small enough group that they can talk to each other on a regular basis. And then you start getting into the cousin groups. And once you start getting into the cousin groups, of course, you had different parents, so you have different views and different input that it even gets more complicated because as your cousins begin to marry other people, of course, they come with all their views. So, a family system, it’s very complex. And the advice that we’ve gotten—no guarantees here—but the advice that you really get is the sooner you can do two things. One, you need to create family engagements. Now, you know, for my father and my uncle and that generation, it was like, “What’s the problem?” “Why do you need to do this?” You know, “Can’t you just talk to each other?” “Why do you need to have these meetings?” “Just pick up the phone and talk to you.” Well, it’s easy. Your brother, you sat next to each other, that’s easy. Okay, we’re not. We’re spread all over the world, so we need to have these meetings. You know, “Why do you need to do this team-building stuff?” “Why do you need to do out hugging trees?” You can imagine, you know, that routine, because we need to learn to communicate together; we need to learn work differences. So, you know, when I started working, there were no family employment policies. Now, for the next generation, there are family employment policies. Here are the rules of the game if you want to be employed by the business. And the business has said that having family members work in the business is better than not having family members, even though they’ll put up with all the crap that goes with it, but they’d rather have them than not have them. But we have some policies that say, “Okay, here are going to be the rules of the game,” because, “What happened to families?” “That’s not fair!” “How come he got that and how come she didn’t get that?” This is what you’re dealing with. So, the more you can prepare yourself with policies and systems—that people may roll their eyes up—but you need them because something will happen. There will be bad things that happen, and you need to be able to do the best job you can to manage through it. So, keeping the family engaged. Then the next part is—and people have talked about this, and I’ve come to realize even more. The further you get away from the original founder, the less emotional connection the family has to the business. And so, how do you keep that emotional connection? So, you know, I knew my grandfather. I—you know, I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, so I have that emotional connection. You know, my children knew him—first, very short, with my older children knew him for a short while. So, the further you get away, the less the connection. So, how do you keep the connection back to what is this business? What does it mean to you? And so, I talk very much about the importance of keeping our five principles going. It’s not just for the associates in the business, but that’s the emotional connection for the family. That’s what makes us proud of Mars. It’s not about how big we are. It’s not about, you know, how much money we make. It’s a piece of it. But what makes us really proud is when you read things or you hear things, even if you’re not involved in the middle, about what we do well. Where are we having an impact? Where we’re having a positive impact. So that’s what creates that sense of pride and connection. So, keeping a link and a knowledge base with family members, even though they aren’t employed or maybe at a distance, is really absolutely critical to keeping it going forward. So, our view is—and then the other thing, the other piece that happens as you go from one generation to the next, is you’ve got to start separating, clearly, separating responsibilities and decision-making. So, when it was my father and my uncle and my aunt, they were both the board and the owners and the operations leaders. So, it’s all in the same place. Who cares? As you get bigger, that separates out. So then we need to make sure that everybody knows it. Just because you’re a family member doesn’t mean you can go tell management what they should or shouldn’t be doing. You know, we have the board. So, if you’re on the board, well then, what education do the family members need to be qualified to be able to serve on the board? What do they need to be qualified, you know, to work in the BI business? So, things become much more structured.

00:09:03
Speaker 3: Education, education, education; communication, communication, communication; bringing people together. We’ve done a great job, I think, with the fifth generation. We started them really early on, just basic communication training, team-building training. Now, these do go, “Do we have to do one more of these team exercises?” You know, “How many times do you want me to put together a little something, or how many times do you want me to climb over that wall?” But I can now see all that time we spent invested in them when they were young teenagers, too. Now you see that group, you know, works together. They know how to communicate with each other. They know how to deal when—when.

00:09:39
Speaker 2: They disagree, they can disagree with respect and work their way out of it. My generation, it’s a whole different generation. So, we didn’t have that training. So, you have to invest in the next generation. You have to. So, our goal is to remain a privately held business. I can’t guarantee it, but that is my passion. For your publicly trading business, I would lose total interest. Then I can’t influence it in the way that I can influence it now. I can influence it to be the best company. Once it’s publicly traded, it kind of loses its appeal to me.

00:10:15
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Victoria Mars of the Mars family, the fourth generation. She talked about that connection between herself and her grandfather, who she called a true entrepreneur, but noted that the further you get from the founder, “How do you keep that emotional connection?” And that’s why the Five Principles keep that family brand together, that family name together, the family products together. The story of the Mars family is told by Victoria Mars here on Our American Stories.