When people ask me what it’s like to grow up in a family business, my response is usually the same:
“What’s it like not to?!”
All kidding aside, being raised in a family-run company shapes you in ways you don’t even realize at the time. From an early age, I learned the value of hard work, teamwork, and pride in our family’s heritage — not through lectures, but by living it day after day.
Some of my earliest memories involve tagging along with my dad on trips to Pearl Paint, helping take physical inventories and learning how products came to life on the shelf. I spent countless nights and weekends assisting with office projects, absorbing lessons about business and relationships just by being present. As I got older, those memories grew to include NAMTA shows, consumer events, and road trips — usually with a baseball game or two worked in along the way.
One moment that stands out was working the Comic-Con show in Chicago with Pentel in 2009. There I was, speaking with customers, educating artists about new products, and representing our company. That experience became the foundation of my communication and selling skills — lessons that have carried me through every role since.
After graduating from the University of Miami in 2016 with a double major in finance and marketing, I joined the family business full-time. I started as an account representative covering the Southeast, building my routes, planning trips, and learning the art of selling from the ground up. Many of the customers I called on had known me since I was a kid — but now I had to earn their professional respect. That challenge pushed me to grow faster and work harder than ever before.
Over time, my role evolved. I began taking on sales and marketing projects for our largest accounts, supporting my dad and learning the nuances of managing complex relationships with major partners. Around that same time, I collaborated with an engineer to modernize our outdated, static database — transforming it into a dynamic Salesforce platform that gave us better visibility and decision-making tools. (The second-generation update is coming this summer!)
Those projects sharpened my analytical thinking and strengthened my confidence as a next-generation leader. Today, as we guide the company into its third generation of leadership, I often reflect on how proud I am — not just of what we’ve built, but how we’ve built it.
Supporting family- and locally-owned businesses isn’t just a strategy for us — it’s in our DNA. The world may look very different from the one my grandfather, Bob Hammer, envisioned when he started the business in the early 1970s, but our values, principles, and sense of purpose remain the same.
Because while industries evolve and technologies change, the heart of a family business never does.
By Abe Hammer
