Thank you for downloading the bottom line. In this edition, Evan Davis and guests explore the

ups and downs of doing business with your relatives. Hello and welcome to the programme and we

enter the world of the family business today. Family and firms are perhaps the two most important

institutions in much of the world and they are often entwined. Indeed,

the majority of businesses are family controlled from millions of unsung, modestly sized firms

to commercial giants such as Ford, Samsung and Hyundai. Well, we'll hear about some of the

merits of working with your relatives as well as the downsides, as if families didn't have enough to argue about.

But let's start by meeting my three guests. And actually what I'd like to do from each of you

is hear what you do, what the business does, and where it all started. And first up is Ian McLean,

managing director, and I think seventh generation, Ian, of the luxury knitwear company, John Smedley.

Tell us about the company first. People may well have heard of it, of course. It's a very old company,

one of the oldest manufacturing factories in the world. We're based in Derbyshire in the cradle of

the Industrial Revolution, which started in about 1771 with Richard Arkwright's factory.

Our factory started in 1784, so just after that.

Are you latecomers?

Yes, I know.

The history of John Smedley is in essence the history of manufacturing.

We've converted fibre into yarn and then yarn into garments. And those

garments in the 1800s and the early 1900s were sold under the names of wholesalers or other

retailers like Harrods or Selfridges, for example. In the 1930s, my great-grandfather took the

decision to, which was a very, very important decision

in the history of the company, to change from selling exclusively through wholesalers to

...