businesses shut down before being around for five years. only a third of them make it to ten years. what are the odds of a company being around 150 years, through five generations of the same family? you will love meeting the mcallisters. a new york family that knows how to beat the odds. >> okay, jeff, haul the line in. line's there and ellen's getting in position. okay. >> brian mcallister's family name has dotted the new york harbor since 1864. >> a company that lasted for 150 years in the family. and for that, you've got to be lucky. >> that was the year his great

grandfather, james mcallister started mcallister towing, helping big ships navigate to shore. do you tnk that it is business sense or pure luck that it's been in the family that long? >> there are several things that have to happen. one, you can't make too much money. if you make too much money, everybody wants to sell it and get rich. if you don't make enough money, they leave. >> you mayay he found a sweet spot for the company. somewhere between too much success on the one hand, and too much stress on the other. >> the most efficient boat in the world and the lines are like a yacht. >> not as official -- >> james mcallister started it in new york's south seaport as a lone immigrant with a single cargo boat or lighter, he launched a transport business which grew large enough to support himself and three brothers. >> here we have the mcallister lighterage towing. >> by the turn of the century the next generation expanded the

business beyond cargo to passenger ships, tugboats and towing. as the new york port expanded, the family diversified into new areas with different branches going into different maritime businesses, all with the mcallister name. >> when my great grandfather died, he left one of these boats to one of his brothers. all right? and my grandfather, who was his son, and had four boys, they got this. these steam boats with the paddle wheels were enormous business. >> in the great depression, the mcallisters nearly went bust. by 1938 brian's great-uncle died with just a few boats to his name. >> he watched everything go to pieces. two or three people left in the office. the only thing they took home was grocery money. that was it. there was no salaries. no more. this very, very successful business went to near zero. >> in his own lifetime, brian

mcallister says he's come close to losing the business several times. the first was when his own father and uncle threatened to sell the company to finance their retirement, rather than pass it on to him. back then, young brian complained bitterly. >> telling him he can't do this to me. you know. you can't sell this business. >> brian's generation eventually convinced them, but it wasn't easy. >> there has been a lawsuit every time this company got transferred from the first to the second and second to the third. >> by the late 1980s, brian's son eric faced a different threat. >> the company was basically bankrupt in 1981. i graduated from grammar school in 1982. and they just barely hung on. >> eric mcallister, who is now 43 years old, vividly remembers a twin set of crises that nearly cost the fifth generation its legacy. the first was financial. shortly after that, the second crisis was a violent union strike which also came close to destroying the business. >> sitting here at my desk.

in comes walking the president of the union. and he said brian, in a couple of weeks, i think you will understand, that your union contract is up. i said, look, al, if you go on strike, keep on walking because that's the end of your union and us. i'm bringing in replacements and they are heavily armed. so if you want to come aboard with your thugs, and the clubs, and the guns, you better know that every single one of our tugboats has got an arsenal, and we are ready to take you on. i got no choice. i may be dead either way. >> clearly luck has played a role in their survival. but it's certainly not everything. what is it about your family that has been able to hold on to this when so many other family businesses leave the family after the second, third, fourth generation? >> i think it's that irish mentality of tradition. the passion for tradition.

they just want to hold on to it. they just don't need that ch. >> 53-year-old jeffery mcallister is their first cousin and also a member of the fifth generation. >> a family business runs more on passion than good business sense. >> today, jeffrey is a harbor pilot. he boards the cargo vessels entering new york harbor and commands the fleet of mcallister tugs as they guide these massive ships safely to the docks. >> that's what we are going to do. >> we left the tugboat bridge and went back to the company headquarters to ask eric about the company's success. >> one of the things we observed about why this company has survived is that there have been pieces that you can break off. you know, if you own a little bit of your supply chain, and you have a relative who might be interested in some of that vertical work, something that's off on the side, you can break that piece off and, you know, keep the lineage going. we had those pieces over the years. >> at the age of 80, brian is last living member of the fourth generation.

and he's making plans to pass the company on to his sons. beyond that, however, he says the legacy is not his concern. in your dreams, how many more generations keep this company? >> hey, once you're dead, okay? i don't dream about what could happen two generations from now. that's my son's problem. earlier today at the "new york times" small business summit i hosted a panel called where's the money. where we talk about how you find funding and what you say when you're talking to someone who has money that they might be interested in giving you. i now have joining me here two of the people who were panelists of that. brian cohen is the chairman of new york angels, you've seen many, many entrepreneurs who have ideas to pitch to you. and brad harrison is the founder of bhb 33.

thanks for joining us. we talked to a lot of people who were in different stages of their companies. some looking for start-ups, some a little bit more mature. what is something -- when somebody comes to you and asks for money, what's the one thing you always look for? >> i would say a deep insight into how the customer will benefit from their idea, from their process, whatever the service they 345i be providing. how well do they know their customer? have they spent enough time with them? >> someone who comes on the show a lot said to us once, you should describe not the benefit that your company is doing, but the pain it's solving. does that make sense to you? >> absolutely. the opportunity comes from people creating products and services that solve a problem. in today's day and age where it is more digital and more interconnected, there is more opportunity to figure out how to use the data to solve problems that have been plaguing us for lots of years. >> how much of your decision has to do with the idea versus the

person? >> i think you know my philosophy is 110% on the people. and i think you know within the first couple of minutes if that person exhibits the values that you will look for in somebody you will work with for a long time. >> i say 75% of the time, the company isn't doing what we invested in them a year later. they've it rated, they've listened closely to the needs of the customer, they figured out, they did the fine tuning. we certainly look to the leader. they are the ones doing the itterating. they're the ones doing the listening. so they've got to be able to adapt quickly. >> i'm a person and i have a fantastic idea. i'm going to talk to you. what can i do to show i'm a smart person and iterate. >> i think the biggest thing is doing your homework. so make sure you know what we invest in, how we invest, what other companies we've invested in. the beauty of being an entrepreneur today is that you have this amazing resource in the internet, and you have all of this information available to

you. i look for somebody that comes in peopled and knows a little bit about me and what i've done and what i look for. >> you know, i'm so driven by the relationship to the customer always. they get some deeper insight that they learned something. have they adapted their business to some unique capability that no one else has recognized? i'm not sure i believe in the issue of pain. there's a certain easy way of saying pain. the best companies are the ones that look at the challenging problem and figure out how to solve it. it doesn't have to be painful. they just have an easy way of adapting to better ideas to be in a position to offer customer better, cheaper, faster solution. >> we used to talk a lot. i know when i was in business school, we wrote so many business plans, you know, and they were this thick. today, are people handing you business plans? >> they still do because they are coming out of business school and they are told to. so we do get a lot of them, but we don't read them. we'll look at them after we decide that there's a possibility of investing, to see

more depth to the concept of their idea. but we generally look at the decks that we create. those may be 12 to 15 pages and that's it. >> i'm the same way. we focus on the power point and what it says in there. i think what's important about the business plan is not actually what's in it, but going through the business planning process so you identified your competitors, your market, your product, your revenue. all of the critical things. a business plan is just a structure to help you analytically think through all those things. >> in some ways, it is for the entrepreneur. >> exactly. >> you get a ton of e-mails. i know. you get approached all the time. you guys have money, you're ready to give it. a lot of people out there want money. if i were to send you an e-mail, what is something i could say in the subject line or in the first line of my e-mail that would get you to say oh, this is worth reading on? >> i figured out how to fix a problem that exists. i figured out how to execute on that problem in the easiest way.

i think it is a big problem. it got my attention. >> i think it is having some sort of number or something that shows some tangible traction in whatever ty are proposing. >> my best investments so far have been in companies that had no traction. finding pinterest, they had no traction. >> thank you so much for participating on the panel, coming on the program and we'll see you back in the studio hopefully sometime soon. >> thanks. >> we've spoken a lot on this show about how to create a brand. but then once you create it, how do you gain traction with the brand? it is one of the big topics at the "new york times" small business summit. we have a panel to talk about it here. adam rich is the co- founder of the popular online shopping and restaurant site thrill list. and maria ross, founder of branding strategies website. great to see both of you guys. >> thanks for having us. >> when you started thrill list, which has become a very

well-known, popular brand, obviously gaining traction, how much did you think about brand? >> you know, i think without even really knowing to call it brand, it was something we were really very focused on out of the gates. i started it not as an entrepreneur but as the audience. it was a product that i wanted. it targeted city information for the post-college guy. i was living in new york and feeling the lack of things that were evaluated and filtered for my interests. a lot of what i took that position to be ended up becoming our brand. >> that seems almost easy. the brand is you. your desires and likes and your interests. if you have a company, maria, that is not so reflective of yourself, how do you think about what the brand should be? >> it's exactly right to do it that way. you have to think about first and foremost your customer. who is your ideal customer? what do they want and care about and what do they desire? always being empathetic and put

yourself in their shoes and then you can bring the service or the product that's going to fulfill that need and offer the benefithat they need. >> as you have grown, have you changed the brand at all? has it evolved? >> well, we've changed the brand quite a bit. i think that we've had some really exciting evolutionary moves. but it's been interesting because our tack has been a little bit different than i think a lot of companies take. we've stayed really laser focused our audience. and on the sort of lifestyle that we were always serving. we found new ways to access and support it. about two years ago, we bought a men's shopping club because we found that our readers were similarly kind of lost on the internet trying to find places to buy clothing as they had been lost on the internet trying to find information about the city before we started our editorial. it was sort of an extension of that initial promise to help whittle things down and curette the internet and filter it into something that they cared about. about a year ago we launched

sort of a local experiences platform for about the same reason because we saw all of these deal sites popping up and we realized our audience didn't care about $15 worth of domino's pizza for $8. they wanted to deal with other things. they wanted experiences more than deals or discounts. >> this makes me think, maria, if you start something pretty focused, you start a company and you are laser focused on whatever that is and you launch that and you have a brand around this thing. >> right. >> and then you extend to offer other services, and other products, how does that work? it seems to have worked with you. do many people then have to kind of jigger their brand? and how do they do that? >> absolutely. i work with a lot of clients that do that. you can come at it from two ways. they are serving the same target audience but offering them different products or services, sometimes you may continue to offer what you offer a value, but you might be targeting a different audience. in that case you've got to evolve your brand. you've got to evolve your messaging and perhaps your visual identity to speak to that new audience and communicate

those benefits to a new group of people. it depends on if you're going off a new audience or giving away new products and services. >> i think as a small business person diving into the discussion of brand is petrifying. right? because you have something, it may be working, maybe not as well as you think it is, but when you change it you're being very deliberate and saying, okay, what am i changing this to, and uh-oh, i hope it works better than what i have right now. >> sure. >> how do you decide it will work better? >> maria and i were talking about this before we came up here. there are a million exercises. you can do focus groups and data and market information. at a certain point, there are so many variables. it is petrifying. at a certain point you just need to decide you're going to commit to trying something and recognize that there's a chance that it may not work and be ready to pivot and shift and continue refining. there are so many things to consider, that you are at a certain point that you go with

your gut and give it a shot. >> especially if you are an existing business, talk to your customers and use them as a resource. your best customers. what do you like about us? why are you buying from us? why do you keep coming back? why do you talk about us? but then you can faulk to those that are maybe not as satisfied and say, what didn't we provide for you? what else could we provide a value? that can help you make destations on if you need to evolve the brand or not. >> thank you so much. i said we have an office across the hall from you. i have seen you gorom this much space to this much space. congratulations on your company. >> thank you very much. >> thank you for your advice. enjoy the rest of your day here. >> thanks, a lot. when we come back, some of the movers and shakers here at the summit answer questions posed by attendees. and the sweet sound of success as ron losby, president of the new york institution steinway pianos shares his wisdom in this week's "learning from the pros."

not many musical instrument manufacturers have become household names, but surely you have all heard of steinway & sons pianos. we recently sat down with ron losby, the president of the company, in their new york headquarters to talk about the wisdom he has used to guide this brand. in this week's learning from the pros. steinway & sons builds a piano through a standard and not to a price. that's a very unusual approach to marketing these days of products. everything is centered around this particular quality of the piano, and i can talk about many piano companies, and other

consumer product companies who have deviated, had a great brand and deviated from that course and then the quality kind of went down and then unfortunately it wasn't a very good scenario for their demise or where they ended up in the market. but for us, we build this strumgt, always to improve it, to make it better, but not to build it to a price point. a new york based company has been a blessing for us. this is a very large labor market. very large immigrant market. they would have the ability to work with their hands, and because steinway is based here it allowed us access to all of these individuals. they actually brought with them good woodworking skills. but it boils down to creating a culture of excellence for everyone who builds our piano, whether they are sweeping the floor, or the tone meister at

the end, because these individuals can play any piano that they wish to play and we don't pay them to play our piano but they choose the steinway piano because they believe it to be the best for their craft, for their art. but by listening to this influential group of institutions we try to improve our pianos incrementally every year we build them. the quality level of the steinway piano. steinway, whether it was 100 years ago or it was today is

linked to the fabric of societies around the world. i'm often just heartened when i travel around the world and to find out that the steinway brand means the same thing in new york as it means in beijing, what it means in kazakhstan or in rome. it means a stamp of excellence and we have really stuck to what we do. how many companies who started back 159 years ago building a particular product are still building that same product today. that, in my words, speaks volumes. throughout the day here at the summit, we've been collecting questions from the attendies and the questions they have about running their business and now we have our panel here to answer some of these questions. reeba is one of our regular panelists and alexa is the leading personal finance and personal finance website for

women. the first question comes from annette. >> if you have a dynamite branding story, but the company does not have strong enough distribution, do you resist the temptation to go out with your story a about a first and only? >> this is tricky. when you start a company, you're excited to get it out there. if people can't wait to buy your product or service, do you wait? >> a lot of people have branding up front and have nobody to sell that brand to. a lot of wasted money. also, if you spend a little bit on branding, it will help you get more distribution because you won't hear about it and you will say, i want part of that. it's the balance of throwing it all not in too quickly. it's the thing about disappointing people and everybody orders it and they get the thing, okay, we don't have enough and they'll never order it, again. >> you can always he a website that people can go to. >> that's right.

i would take it differently and say if you have a fantastic branding strategy and your distribution is not ready to go. you're not leaving the office. so important that your customer have a fantastic customer experience and you don't run out, i think it's important that you hone in on your distribution strategy. how are you literally going to sell your product to your customers and then branding, then it's important to focus on branding strategy. >> all right, let's move on to the next question. this is about social media and marketing. >> if you think there's such thing as too much involvement in social media without annoying your customers. >> is there a point where -- >> you have to be really careful because there are so many networks out there. so, today, i think the problem a lot of people automate their social media feed. you're not even aware of how much you're bombarding your

customer. >> i would add to that, you can't sell on twitter. it's really important. twitter is a place where people go to consume consent to learn. it's important you're sharing good content with your customers. we're in the press today, here's what we're doing. here's discounts. it needs to be the important content. we're a personal finance site so we're making sure our customers on twitter are up asand discoun they should know. >> how do you know if it's too much or not enough? >> they recommend you tweet 15 to 20 times a day. >> finally, a question about working with corporate clients. >> how do i get the corporate communications, departments of these consumer goods companies to allow us to issue a press release saying we're getting new business from them? >> so, if you're working with a corporate client, it might be a

big deal for you, a smaller deal for them. how do you get them excited about releasing something? >> learn something that is totally the opposite. instead of getting the big companies to issue a press release, i think, you know, particularly given what's happening in new start ups and media, the media is interested in what the younger companies are doing. maybe focus on your own pr strategy about you release something. >> here's the other side of that question, then, how do you get it to approve it fast enough? >> that takes time and i think if you, i always start everything when we work with big companies months in advance so we have the time and i'm not up until the hour trying to get them to approve something. we would get them approved weeks before. >> we always learn about targeting is high up in the organization and means you can go, in this case y would target as low down in that department as someone who either has the right to say yes or has the path

to the person who will. and if you engage with them, make them feel important and make them feel invested in the whole opaeration, they will run that mile for you, get that approval and you're not going to bother people who don't really care. high up, they don't care. >> alexa and reba, thank you for answering the questions, enjoy the rest of the day at the summit. >> thank you so much. after a conference like this, you're sure to come home with a pile of business cards. to make sure they don't get lost in the shuffle, check out our website of the week. helps busy entrepreneurs manage their contacts, track relationships and save valuable time. you can add personal notes to every entry so you can never forget where you met them or what you talked out. it will send you daily task reminders so you won't forget those meetings you set up with your new contacts. >> to learn more about today's show, click on our website.

openforum.com/yourbusiness. you'll find web exclusive content with more information to help your grow. also follow us onwitter at msnb.biz. don't forget to become a fan of the show on facebook. i'm j.j. ramberg. remember, we make your business, our business.

good morning from new york. i'm chris hayes. mitt romney is expected to pull in as much as $3 million from a series of fund-raisers in the hamptons today, including a $50,000 per person event at the estate of conservative billionaire david koch.

first sitting member of congress to enter into a same-sex marriage yesterday. a ceremony officiated by daval patrick. congratulations to them both. life in the desister era. they lived in a house in colorado springs for the last 24 years. the wildfires there are expected to be fully contained today after burning for more than four weeks. when the waldo canyon wildfire exploded out by his house, they evacuated. the fire reduced their home to a foundation of ash. here's what he said about it in a video produced by climatedesk.com. >> hard not to think about the 23 years lost in that house