For Charly and Richard Jaffe, Publishing Dad’s Memoir Is A Family Affair

When Charly Jaffe was growing up, she knew that her father ran one business, and then a second, and ultimately took them both public. Aside from seeing her father have to leave the dinner table to take calls and handle business crises, Charly, like most kids had little idea of what her father actually did all day long.

That changed quickly when Charly collaborated with her father, Richard, on his business memoir, Turning Crisis Into Success. Charly, a former Googler and current Columbia grad student, quickly learned from the project just what her father did all day long-and her admiration for him, always high, skyrocketed.

“I knew that he took two start-up companies public,” Charly says in advance of the book launch, which happens tomorrow. “But I never understood the constant crisis and true guts that it took for my father to accomplish what he did. I’ve always loved him, and now I admire him even more.”

For his part, Richard looks back on those interrupted dinners and says he has to laugh.

“That’s all building a business is,” he says, and you can hear his grin over the phone. “Just handling one crisis after another. The secret to happiness and success is how we keep our emotional stability through crisis!That’s it, right?”

Anybody who wants to know how to build a business from the ground up, or how to take a successful business and turn it into something spectacular, needs to read Richard and Charly’s book.

Richard had his first success in a field about as far from big business as anything you can think of — making Italian ices in Upstate New York, not far from where the Woodstock festival took place. With an aptitude for hard work and commitment to treating people with care and respect, Richard turned a small, failing concern into a publicly traded company.

“My generation,” Charly observes, “is not willing to sell our souls to make a living, and the thing is, we don’t need to. For my dad, the foundation that served his professional success was the same one the fueled his personal fulfillment. His mindset. That’s what this book is all about; building a life that feels just as good in reality as it does on paper.”

After selling his frozen dessert business to Coca Cola, Richard found himself hungry to create again. This time, he built a latex glove company during the height of AIDS crisis, going from start up to the number one medical glove company in the world.

“It just shows you that opportunity can come from anywhere,” Richard says. “I never dreamt I’d be in the latex gloves business! But everything I learned with the Italian ices applied here as well. Those are the business lessons, and character lessons, I try to present in the book.”

Richard is also an accomplished published poet. The memoir contains numerous examples of his poetry — not something you find in every business book.

“There’s a common misconception that business is a soulless endeavor,” Charly explains. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. Heart, soul and family fueled my father through his darkest business moments. More than allowed, they were absolutely critical to his success.”

“If we want to build the life of our dreams, we have to begin with the world inside our head. Our hope in this book to give you an inside look at how it’s done, so you can get more of what you want from your business, love and life. If that happens, then we would consider the book a great success.”