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n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 9 | n e w h a v e n B I Z 15 As an adult, Barbara Pearce discovered she had far more in common with her risk-taking father Herb than she once thought. F a t h e r / D a u g h t e r "He said, 'Maybe you'll marry someone who will take over the business,'" Pearce recounts. She responded by getting out of the car they were driving in and slamming the door. "I felt insulted," Pearce says, even though "Women who are my age weren't brought up to think they could do the job" of helming a company. At the time, Pearce (now 64) wasn't much interested in the family business, the H. Pearce Real Estate Co., which her father founded in 1958, aer spending two decades at legendary New Haven toy manufac- turer A.C. Gilbert. Aer earning the trifecta of a BA, MBA and law degree from Harvard, Pearce took a job at high-powered Boston law firm of Skadden, Arps, where she specialized in securities and mergers/acquisitions. It was an ambitious, if predictable, career choice for someone with intellect and ambition. But by 1981, Pearce was ponder- ing how she could have children "within a balanced life" given her all-consuming schedule at a law firm with (up to then) no female partners, and whether the family business might be the better choice for that "balanced" life she envied. In her young adulthood she had discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that she and her father had more in common than she'd first imagined. is was partly confirmed based on their participa- tion in a father/daughter university study. "e person in charge of the study said we were not supposed to share answers," Pearce says. "We didn't — but 92 percent of them were the same." And that discovery precipitated a conversation about succession planning in earnest. "At that point, my father was turning 65," Pearce says. "He told me, 'People in our family don't live long, and I have to have an exit strategy.' Little did he know he would live another 30 years." Herb Pearce passed away in 2011, three days shy of his 95th birthday. Pearce joined the company in fall 1981, as head of the residential division. She was 26 years old. "My father was more interested in commercial [properties]," she explains. So Barbara Pearce focused on houses, apartments and condos. "We mostly did different things, and where we overlapped was marketing." Pearce's sister, Diane, did commercial real estate work for the company before moving on to become a teacher. In 1986, Pearce fille was promot- ed to president, taking over day-to- day operations, and subsequently was named chief executive officer as well. Over the decades, Pearce became a hands-on mother with two chil- dren while expanding Pearce's real estate services and expertise. e company remains a major presence in the Connecticut real-estate in- dustry, its footprint extending from "Rocky Hill to Milford to Clinton." Pearce pere was a legendary risk-taker, whose most successful and enduring projects include the retail plaza off Exit 9 on Universal Drive in North Haven and Whitney Grove Square, a mixed-use develop- ment in downtown New Haven. "He kept mortgaging all our assets, over and over, and took out insur- ance policies," Barbara Pearce recalls. Her own style of doing business is a little closer to the vest. Nevertheless, "I can put a lot on the line, and fall asleep without a problem," she says. Today Herb Pearce's paperweight sits on his daughter's desk, embla- zoned with the slogan: "e harder I work, the luckier I get." Pearce believes the most endur- ing lesson she learned from her father is the importance of giving back to the community. Renowned for his philanthropy, Herb Pearce served on the boards of directors of many local non-profit orga- nizations, as has his daughter, who has chaired countless boards including the Community Foun- dation of Greater New Haven and Long Wharf eatre. She is widely respected as a leader who would never simply lend her name to a board — but a mover and a shaker. In a good way. "We're strongly wedded to the development of our community, to make it a better place," Barbara Pearce says. 'Mission Over Self' E ven when she was a little girl, Cindi Bigelow knew she wanted to run the family business. Her grandparents founded the Bigelow Tea Co. in 1945, based on a recipe for Constant Comment, a blend of spiced black tea con- cocted by her grandmother, Ruth Campbell Bigelow. An entrepreneur whose interior design firm had failed during the Great Depression, Ruth Bigelow was determined to develop a non-perishable product for the consumables market. Ruth Bigelow's husband (and ' I c a n p u t a l o t o n t h e l i n e , a n d f a l l a s l e e p w i t h o u t a p r o b l e m . ' - Barbara Pearce Continued on next page

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