Carnation Golf Course once succeeded smoothly from father to son. The next generation's baton pass might be dropped despite a family's tireless efforts.

by Rich Skyzinski

THE GOLF COURSE is virtually all Dan Tachell has ever known. It's where he worked as a kid, ringing up green fees and helping serve sandwiches and sodas, pulling weeds and changing cups, jumping behind a mower to cut greens. If it had to be done, he did it.

It's where he hung out with his dad, all day on the weekends and every afternoon following school. It's where he picked up enough bits and pieces of his dad's life to one day realize that's exactly what he wanted to do with his own. Be like him.

But now, as he lies awake at night and runs the figures through his head, trying to determine if income outpaced expenditures this month, he wonders if his children, Stephanie and Chad, the third generation of Tachells involved in the operation of the family business, will one day look back and pose the same question he's asked himself innumerable times: Are we really going to make it?

Carnation (Wash.) Golf Course is not only a small business (Strike 1), it's a family business (Strike 2), so in many ways the Tachells have already beaten the odds. More than two out of every three family-run businesses in the U.S. fail before succession to a second generation, and of those that survive, less than half ever make it to a third.

"Sometimes the founder has no intention of passing it on to the next generation," explains Nancy Upton, director for the Center of Entrepreneurship at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. "That's one of the first problems -- there's little or no planning. And this just doesn't happen by itself. They've probably spent the past 20 years not talking about these things, and then, when it becomes time to retire or let someone else in the family take over, there's no plan to follow."

A number of factors conspire to the reduction of the family business in America. Fewer young boys seem to have an interest in running the farm. The Wal-Marts of the world have overrun the corner hardware, and the mom-and-pop grocery can hardly compete with the superstores that offer everything from car batteries to birthday cakes.

Almost everything about Carnation Golf Course, an 18-hole layout sitting flush by the banks of the Snoqualmie and Tolt rivers, about 30 miles due east of Seattle, is old-fashioned. That is a reflection of its founder, Bob Tachell, and the simpler, bygone era when it was conceived.

A million-dollar architect didn't create the course in hopes of placing it atop a magazine's Top New Courses listing. There are no $100 green fees. (In fact, that amount can cover a group of four in weekend prime time.) No mandatory carts equipped with satellite-relaying yardage gizmos. No tuxedo-clad waiters serving $10 hamburgers. The highest-priced shirt in the golf shop runs $35.50. The clubhouse, so appropriately positioned against a mountainside of majestic firs, could easily pass as a hunting or ski lodge.

But there is -- or should be -- a Carnation in every golfer's past. The place where a 7-year-old makes his first par on a real course. Where he and his other pals can spend hours on the practice putting green, making up games as they go. Where a young grandmother and her grandkids can go without distraction from Power Rangers, X Men or Mortal Combat. Few clubs do as brisk a business in rental clubs and pull carts as does Carnation.

It survives because of a dream, careful planning and, most of all, hard work. It is a prototypical family business, which serves as the very foundation of the American economy and, depending on the interpretation of analysts, represents as few as 4 million or as many as 20 million businesses in the U.S. Thus far it has warded off a number of threats, among them Mother Nature, poor geography and high-fee, corporate-managed competition.

When Bob Tachell decided he wanted to begin to ease the day-to-day operation of Carnation onto the shoulders of Dan, one of his four children, they flew by the seat of their pants to handle the transfer. Now, as Dan, 54, contemplates passing the operation to Stephanie, 31, and Chad, 26, they're trying to be prepared for the myriad of legal and financial pitfalls that annually wipes out tens of thousands of small businesses.

"We've done quite a bit of estate planning and looked into as much as we could do to this point," Dan said, "but Chad's only been in the business a short time -- for what, a year or two? Both kids are married now. The last estate planning we did was three or four years ago, but we definitely need to do a little revamping under estate planning, come up with new and better ideas."

Of course, they are not alone. "A lot of it is communication," Upton adds, "and we don't communicate about these things. In our culture it's not acceptable to talk about money and wills and what's going to happen after mom and dad. Do you want to ask them what's in their wills? I don't."

Long before that day in 1980, when Dan bought the stock of Carnation's other partner and the golf course became a father-and-son operation, he had witnessed firsthand the risk of running a small business. Back in the '50s his father built and ran Meadowbrook, a nine-holer in the northern end of Seattle. Local government condemned the property in 1961, however, to build what is now Nathan Hale High School.

"I had a dream of going into business with my dad," Dan says. "And Dad wanted me in the business, too. When we lost the course in '61, it kind of changed my plans and my dreams." Confused about the direction he should take, Dan went into the service, attended college -- in short, became a lost soul of the '60s.

Bob Tachell knew one thing better than anything else. So with the ever-present backing and blessing of his wife, Eva, he built another course, Brookside, and a few years later rounded up two partners and went to work on the course at Carnation, which opened in May 1967.

Bob died in 1989, but Carnation has been a family-run business for the better part of those 30 years, and as the Tachells and countless other families have discovered, there's nothing quite like working with kin. It's one thing to discipline a family member on the job. It's another to also live with that person or sit across the Thanksgiving Day table and make like the Waltons.

"Stephie and I," says Dan, shaking his head, "it's real hard for us because we're a couple of hardheads. She gets upset at me and takes it home, and I'm sure her husband suffers. I'll get upset at her or Chad, and it's difficult because I can't go home and say, 'This SOB did this or did that.' I can't do that with my kids.

"Because they're my kids, I expect more from them. The family thing has carried right into the business thing, and I don't care what they say, you try to separate them as much as you can, but it's real hard."

His father gradually eased Dan into the role of decision-maker. Ever so slowly he began showing up at 9 a.m. instead of 5. He began to play more golf. And when he was ready to move aside completely, the transition had been so gradual it was hardly noticed.

"Dad let me step into the business and make decisions," Dan recalls, "but he had a lot more tolerance. He never got upset with me more than a couple of times, and he never said too much about it when I did make a mistake. He let me have full reign and I basically never had the problem I'm having with my kids. It's probably because of the personalities; my dad was different. I'm the overbearing one."

One of the difficult decisions in the continuance of successful family-run businesses is making the commitment to surrender power to the next generation and step out of the picture. "It's usually not an easy thing to do," Upton says. "There comes a time when you must address the question: At what point are we going to hand off control from one generation to the next?"

Dan Tachell admits that moment, when he no longer could rely upon the reassuring comfort of his father's wisdom, was a bit scary. "Everything's personal," Dan says, "and you look at things much differently than you did before. You sit there and work an extra four or five hours a day 'cause you're doing it for yourself and your family. You're not doing it for someone else.

"You also notice where the buck is going. Now you're an owner and you see there are a lot more bills out there than you thought about. The course, any course, is only taking in so many dollars, and there's money going out, money that has to go out whether you're having a good revenue day or a bad revenue day. The whole perspective of suddenly being an owner is incredible."

Bob Tachell had always hoped his son would want to take over the family business. Dan wanted his children to do the same, but he let Stephanie and Chad, both of whom have a formal business education, decide whether their futures rested with Carnation.

"You ask yourself the same thing: Did I go back because it's a family business or did I go back because I love the business?" asks Chad. "Probably the family business, but I'm fortunate the family was involved in something I really do care about. And I know if something happens to the family business I could go off and make a good living working in a business that wasn't family owned and operated."

With her college degree in hand, Stephanie was all set to go to work as a game warden -- "I wanted to go out and save Bambi," she jokes -- before deciding to go with her heart. "Don't know what it was," she says. "Something attracted me back home."

Downturns in business have offset some of the successes the Tachells have enjoyed. Although rounds are up -- they'll probably turn close to 40,000 in a season that only runs from May to October -- they've lost players to new courses in the area, some of which charge green fees nearly double those at Carnation. But the suburbs east of Seattle are booming at such a tremendous rate there are plenty of new golfers moving into the area. Additionally, recent renovations on many of Carnation's tees and greens turned out nicely. A new driving range is beginning to show a profitable return on investment.

But whether Carnation Golf Course will continue to be run by future generations of Tachells may not be their decision at all.

When Bob Tachell and his partners built the course 30 years ago, the Snoqualmie River, which meanders 45 miles or so through west-central Washington, on the fringes of the Snoqualmie National Forest, never seemed to inundate King County with an annual rain of terror as it does now.

While everyone in western Washington expects to live through a 100-year flood once in his lifetime, the Snoqualmie Valley has been ravaged by three in the last seven years. The one that struck over Thanksgiving weekend in 1990 was particularly brutal; 20 rivers in the state overflowed, two people died and an estimated $40 million in damage was inflicted. The river has been forced over its banks, creating wetlands where none previously existed. Many are near Carnation and the golf course. If Carnation G.C. didn't exist and you wanted to build it on its present site in 1996, environmental regulations would quash the plan at the permitting stage.

Every October the Tachells pare the course of anything not tied down -- benches, signs, ball washers -- to prepare for the inevitable. "It's a matter of basically stripping the golf course in October and going back in April and putting it back up," Dan explains. "People don't realize the magnitude of the water we have out there on this flood plain. Your typical golfer comes out in May or June and sees these areas that are basically thrashed from the flooding all winter long, and they're probably wondering, What's going on here? It's real hard to get the golf course back in shape before you get all the golfers. We're losing some rounds in the spring because we can't get the course back in shape as easily as some of the other courses."

Twelve to 15 feet of water covered the entrance to the golf course in 1990. That was the same flood in which raging currents picked up the bridge at the second hole -- the bridge chained and anchored in 55-gallon drums -- and carried it downstream to Everett, more than 15 miles away. With a little more luck, Seattleans could have awakened one morning to discover they didn't need a ferry to cross Puget Sound.

Every winter, almost like clockwork, the water rises and the entire golf course, with the possible exception of the practice putting green -- the highest point of land on the property -- is submerged. The water comes in such force that it creates rivulets, foot-deep furrows in the earth that ramble crazily across the terrain. And every spring, when the river again flows in its rightful place and the course reappears, the Tachells and the grounds crew clean by hand the sprinkler heads covered by inches of silt brought by the encroaching floodwaters.

"It's just not a good place to have a golf course, really," Dan admits. "Environmentally, it's all wetlands. We have the Snoqualmie River going completely around us, and most of the golf course is played right along the river."

King County is weighing the fate of much of the Snoqualmie Valley. Some officials would like to turn the area into a permanent flood plain, which has the Tachells undecided about the level of their commitment to the property and the fate of the family-run business that soon may be handed over to its third generation.

"We'd love to be there in 20 years," says Chad, "but we don't know if we'll be able to. We're kind of waiting on the county, and we don't know what they're going to do. We're in a bad situation."

As much as he may not like it, Dan is able to deal with the realization of an uncertain future for Carnation. "I grew up wanting to go into my dad's business, and in the back of my heart I hoped my kids would come into the business, too," he says reflectively. "I left the door open for them. I always said, 'If you want to come in and work with me, great. I'd love it. But feel free to do your own thing.'"

And so they did. Just like Dad.