In the 1960s and '70s, the Leuong Jung grocery store was the place to shop and be seen in Montreal's Chinatown.
About the size of a convenience store, it sold Chinese candy, dishes, pressed duck and Chinese bacon and lap cheung, a specialty beef and pork Chinese sausage that David Lee made in his second-floor meat-manufacturing shop above the grocery store. His products were exported throughout Canada, the United States and England.
As a child, David Lee would go to school, and then head to the shop to work in the evenings. He spent weekends there, too.
Mr. Lee and his wife Phyllis later had four children of their own. One daughter went to college. His son and two other daughters went to university.
Like many entrepreneurs, Mr. Lee was so busy taking care of his family and his business that he didn't have time to talk about its future. "Being a grocer wasn't a glamorous job. It was a hard job," said daughter Mabel Onesi.
Canadian businesses, especially those run by immigrant families, are in a succession-planning crisis, says Pramodita Sharma at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal.
A first-of-its-kind Deloitte & Touche study from 1999, "Are Canadian Family Businesses an Endangered Species?", also found that two-thirds have no written contingency plans to guide them through a disability or death.
"These days, and especially with career couples, you can't just out of the blue say, 'Hey, let's talk about money,' after never having a conversation about money on any major issue for 20 years," Prof. Sharma says.
Prof. Sharma noted businesses haven't made much succession-planning progress since the report was published.
Ms. Onesi, who teaches elementary school in Newburgh, Ont., near Kingston, says she never considered a career at Leuong Jung even though she loved visiting it and has fond memories of her father giving her shaved barbecued pork from a spit. She sometimes weighed sausages and packed bags.
"We'd go there for fresh meat, firecrackers, cookies and treats," she said, recalling that at the back of the store there was also a Chinese pharmacy, which sold specialty items such as bark, bones and dried seahorse.
Her parents wanted more for her and her siblings. "Being a professional, going to school, that's what was expected of us. This is why they came to Canada - to get an education, to have a better life. I don't think it was ever assumed we'd work at the store."
Discussing succession planning with family members can be uncomfortable but it's necessary, says Prof. Sharma, a first-generation immigrant who was born in India and also lived in Africa and Europe before coming to Canada.
"Sometimes we see parents who think, 'There's nothing here to pass on,' but the children think, 'Actually, I'm quite interested in taking it on.'
"But that communication never happens. Usually, it's the assumptions of the senior generation that are prevalent and very, very rarely do the children get asked: 'What do you want to do?' "
While business at Leuong Jung boomed in the 1960s and '70s, sales slowed and the store closed in the early 1980s. Mr. Lee continued to manufacture deli meats, but he closed that part of the business in the 1990s. The niche for the product was small, the work was time-consuming, and the profits weak.
Mr. Lee didn't have a succession plan, but he had an idea. Thinking back to working in the second-floor meat shop, he recalled that after a long day, he didn't feel like cleaning the machinery. If only he'd had someone else to do it.
It was a light-bulb moment.
Mr. Lee's new business, an industrial machine-cleaning company, was born.
Join Prof. Pramodita Sharma today at noon (ET) for a live online discussion about succession
planning at: globeandmail.com/yourbusiness