Editor’s Note: Three generations of family leadership drove Luck Stone to its centennial milestone in 2023. Now, the company is in its fourth generation of family leadership, as Richard Luck was named Luck Companies president.
Luck, who succeeds his father, Charlie Luck, in the role, visited with P&Q last month to share his experience in the family business, the preparation tied to his new role, and how the company is transitioning into its next generation of leadership.
The content presented here represents Part 1 of a two-part Q&A with Luck that will continue in P&Q’s March edition.
P&Q: Tell us what it was like growing up in the Luck family? Did you always want to be part of the family business? Did you ever feel pressure to work at Luck?
Richard Luck: Growing up in a family business is such a unique, special opportunity. When I think back on my childhood, it was filled with exposure to our business.
When I think about my parents, they brought us around the company all the time. In the summers, if Dad had something going on I would ride with him. They’d drop me off in the scale office, and I would pass tickets out the window to the haulers. When my sisters and I were super young, we’d come over to the quarry on the weekends and climb up and down the piles with Dad. There are all these snapshot memories I have of growing up and being at our locations, and I think the thing my parents really did a great job with us on was exposing us to our people.
When I was young, I always kind of felt like a lot of the associates at our company were like distant aunts and uncles to me. I was always running through the hallways at the office and knew many people who worked at Luck, which created this emotional connection for me to our people. That is where my love for the company started.
As a little boy, it’s easy to be excited about the equipment, the processing and the blasting – all those things that we do. But it was really the people and their connection to me personally – their mentorship of me or feeling like extended family – that helped me to fall more in love with the company.
My parents did a phenomenal job of exposing us to the business. I have two sisters, and throughout our childhood and into adulthood, my parents talked a lot about the two paths we had: one being ownership and the other being leadership. They said: ‘Because of the place you’ve been born in, you have a responsibility that is around ownership – and we need to develop you for that responsibility. However, leadership and/or working in the business is a total choice.
Growing up, my parents always told us that it is their job to raise responsible, independent, productive citizens of the world, and that if we are doing something that we love, it will lead to independence. They said it was their responsibility to support us in finding what we love to do and what we’re passionate about, and allow us to chase those passions and our dreams – and if those dreams were to work for Luck, that would be great. But if not, we all knew that was okay too.
We worked hard to come up with family rules around working outside of the business before coming back to Luck to really drive toward individual independence for each one of us. For me, I always just loved our company. I loved our people. I wanted to be here, even during those times away – after college [and] away from the business.
I never really felt pressure until the day I started at the company. When I came in the first day, that’s when you could kind of feel the pressure, and with that comes a certain expectation.
P&Q: What were your work experiences like aside from the family company, and how do you feel those prepared you for when you joined Luck?
Luck: Growing up, my parents had us working with a family business consultant. With that, our family went on this journey around how we think about the company, and that was really where my personal development started.
We worked with the consultant to talk about all of the different things about our company – how we think about working in the company, about spouses working in the company, about consolidated ownership versus members of the family owning it who don’t work in the business – and we started talking about these things when I was in middle school.
As a family, and as we’ve grown up, we’ve defined these beliefs and philosophies. These conversations were really some of my most developmental experiences, because they grounded me in the belief that we’re here to serve the business [and that] the business isn’t here to serve us. When we were young, that was the development work we were doing. One of those beliefs or philosophies is that we would be best prepared to come to the business if we had worked elsewhere.
When I finished college at Virginia Military Institute, I joined a program called Teach For America, which places you as a teacher in a Title I school. I was a high school precalculus and algebra II teacher at a Title I school in Charlotte. After that experience, I came back to Richmond, [Virginia], and started a nonprofit that worked with low-income entrepreneurs to help them become self-sustaining, independent business owners.
For me, those two experiences were highly developmental. When I think about why I chose them, it was because I believe so deeply about the mission we have at the company to ‘Ignite Human Potential.’
