Samantha Stainburn

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Interview: Higher Ground

(Teacher Magazine, October 2002)

Students at the Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan.

Students at the IRC-run school at the Jalozai refugee camp in Pakistan.

Recent headlines have teemed with news of the war against terrorism in Afghanistan, ethnic persecution in Chechnya, and civil unrest in Liberia. But in these places and others, huge numbers of refugees struggle to continue their children’s education despite the devastation.

By the start of 2002, an estimated 14.5 million people had fled their countries, and 20 more million were “displaced persons,” having abandoned their homes but remained within their nations’ borders. Relief organizations such as the New York City-based International Rescue Committee help by providing educational materials and teacher training.

The humanitarian-aid community increasingly recognizes that school is as important to refugee children as food and shelter, says Wendy Smith, a former teacher who oversees the IRC’s education programs. Her group, for one, has doubled the number of its initiatives in the past two years, expanding to 16 countries. The IRC’s 20 or so expatriate staffers—former teachers mostly from the United States and Europe—don’t head up classrooms, though. Instead, with the assistance of hundreds of local employees, they focus on “capacity building,” supporting community educators who want to reestablish schools.

Teacher Magazine talked with Smith—who spends much of her time on the road, visiting refugee communities from Kosovo to Kenya—about the challenges of teaching kids in regions torn apart.

Q. What are refugee camps like?

A. Refugee camps really vary based on the amount of support being provided by international and local institutions, the amount of time refugees have been in the camp—have they recently arrived, or, as in Afghanistan, have they been there for 20 years? Typically, if a camp is a new camp with people arriving on a daily basis, life is quite difficult. Multiple families or individuals might live under plastic, tentlike structures until sufficient sheeting and space has been organized for individual family housing. Displaced families seek shelter in abandoned factories, railroad cars, farms—literally anything you can think of.

Q. In a crisis situation, isn’t education a luxury?

A. No, not at all. A lot of people view education as a development activity, as something that’s only carried out in stable environments where there’s good governance. But in reality, education serves a really important psychosocial role in situations of crisis. If you look at a typical refugee population, half is children under the age of 18.

And what do children need? Children need to play. They need to be reassured. They need the opportunity to reestablish trusting relationships with adults.

Many of these children have been victims of violence themselves, or they’ve witnessed violent acts, and education provides the opportunity to pursue something that’s normal. You know, you get up in the morning, you put your backpack on your back, or you carry your stool to a temporary classroom under a tree. Their parents, in these situations, are often very occupied, whether it’s standing in food distribution lines or trying to build some sort of temporary shelter for their families. They don’t have the emotional resources to give to their kids that a school environment can provide.

And then there’s a protection component. If you look within refugee or displaced camps or communities that have been affected by crisis, unfortunately you see more and more children being recruited [into rebel armies]. You have kids as young as 8 years old being recruited into rebel forces in countries like Sierra Leone. Kids in a refugee camp with nothing to do, they’re ruminating and wondering, “What does life have to offer me anyway?” If we don’t take advantage of that kid’s time, I can tell you that a rebel force will. They’ll go to those children, and they’ll say, “I can offer you and your family riches beyond this mud,” and many of these kids get persuaded.

Q. Is providing education a new approach to dealing with refugee situations?

A. I’d say in the past five years, there’s been a real increased attention given to the role of education in conflicts, whether it be how education and schools contributed to conflicts—that can be certainly a part of it—as well as how education helps the psychosocial needs and protection needs of kids. If you go back in humanitarian history, it’s not that there were never education programs, but what it would typically be is: “Well, OK, we’ll get this community settled, we’ll make sure that there’s food, there’s shelter. Then maybe in a year or two, we’ll start an education program.” And the philosophy right now is very different. You don’t wait a year or two. You start right away, just as you are organizing food distribution lines; you start registration of children, you start recruiting teachers, you begin finding out who are the kids in this community.

Q. How does a relief organization like the IRC get an education program off the ground?

A. Every conflict seems to be different, [but] a lot of the times you’ll find that refugee populations or displaced populations have already started something on their own. They may not have tables and chairs and soccer balls and crayons, but they’re doing singing, clapping, dancing. When you enter a new situation, you find out who the teachers are in the community. Sometimes you have a lot of highly trained teachers who were displaced. Sometimes teachers were the fortunate ones who escaped and left their communities earlier. Or sometimes, teachers were the victims of violence—they were the ones who were targeted because they’re part of an intellectual elite—so you’ll find you don’t have many teachers left.

You usually start with nonformal education because there [may be] no books, and you’re not going to be able to get books for quite some time. So you bring teachers together and put together an ad hoc curriculum development group, and you just ask them to start writing what they remember. You take what you’ve got, and you move forward as quickly as possible.

Q. What’s it like for the local refugee teachers in the camps?

A. Everything is different for the teachers. They find themselves in situations where they have multiage classrooms. They may have a former child soldier in their classroom. They may have a pregnant girl sitting in the classroom, and that would have never happened before. It’s not the same as it used to be. That’s why teacher training is so important.

We try to work with teachers on child-friendly pedagogic practice—what does it mean to engage with children and ask them what they want, how are they feeling? Kids are not just extra baggage that show up in these refugee camps. They have ideas about what happened to them, on how to make the world better. Adolescents can positively contribute to what is essentially a reconstruction period after a conflict. The training the teachers are receiving—yeah, it’s different. But teachers around the world tend to be curious individuals, so I find them to be a pretty receptive audience.

Q. Do you find your job as a relief worker depressing?

A. It’s a humbling job. When you go to these communities, you see what people have been through, you listen to their stories, and you recognize in them this resilience, this hope for the future. I know of a couple of kids who actually graduated from our education programs in Guinea and who got scholarships to come study in the United States. Those are the exceptional ones, and maybe they’re not the ones who even should be referred to all the time, but you do have these amazing success stories, even if it’s not always permanent and might be taken away tomorrow.

Q. How can an American teacher grasp what it is like to be a refugee teacher?

A. I think September 11 really showed America that we’re part of the world. Having to respond to the events, having to explain it to their children, American teachers, for the first time, had a glimpse at what some of these refugee teachers experience.

Image by Ned Colt/IRC.

Is Now a Good Time to Start a Private Foundation?

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 25 January 2010)

Starting a private charitable foundation when you inherit a small fortune, sell a business or take your company public is one way to minimize taxes while doing good. Although the recession has made such windfalls less common, entrepreneurs are still finding reasons to get into the giving game.

Attorney Denis Pierce, 65, an owner of Pierce & Associates P.C. in Chicago, planned to start a family foundation two years ago with money from the sale of his interest in the law firm. When the sale fell through, he launched the foundation anyway, but with less funding.

The Pierce Family Charitable Foundation, which helps non-profits working on housing issues, started in December 2007 with $1 million. Thanks to Mr. Pierce, it now has about $3 million in assets and provides technological, fundraising and bookkeeping assistance to 10 organizations and gives operating funds to 10 more. “I’m moving into semi-retirement mode, and it gives me a whole other area to think about,” he says.

Interested in hanging out your own foundation shingle? Proceed cautiously. “A common misconception is that a family foundation is just like a checkbook,” says Melissa Berman, president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors in New York, a non-profit that advises private clients and foundations. “In actuality, you’ve started a non-profit company, and you have to file a tax return and make sure your financials are in order.”

Foundations are required to donate at least 5% of their assets a year, and their investment earnings may be subject to excise tax. For these reasons, many experts suggest that starting with less than $1 million in assets is not worth it, unless you’re planning on pumping in significantly more money.

“Why would you want to start a new corporate entity and go through all of that math to give away less than $50,000 a year?” Ms. Berman says.

To run a foundation properly, you need plenty of legal and philanthropic advice. Laws governing non-profits are not always obvious, like the rules against self-dealing, which prohibit cousin Fred from renting his office space to the family foundation at a discount, even if it saves the foundation money.

Also, notes Valerie Lies, CEO of Donors Forum of Chicago, “people don’t understand how difficult it is to give money away thoughtfully. It requires a fair amount of due diligence. For any issue, there are hundreds of non-profits.”

The options for managing a foundation include hiring staff; dividing tasks among family members; paying a community foundation, bank or adviser to take care of administrative details, or opting for some combination of the three. All can be effective, but if grants account for less than 65% of annual expenses, your administrative costs are too high.

Philanthropists often start foundations with expectations that giving as a group will promote family unity. But that doesn’t happen without planning, especially in families not particularly harmonious to start with.

One way to avoid conflict is to find a focus agreeable to all family members, like protecting the environment, before writing the first check, even if that means giving up long-held plans to support stem-cell research (it upsets sister Linda) or scholarships to Notre Dame (one son-in-law went to Michigan).

It’s also essential to define who has the power in the venture. “If dad established the foundation, is it the adult children’s role to support dad?” says Virginia Esposito, president of the National Center for Family Philanthropy in Washington, D.C. “Well, sometimes dad’s hoping that other people will take a lot of the initiative.”

“The best way to do a good job is to have trustees who can give the work the time it takes,” Ms. Espo-sito says. Be honest about how much time each person can devote. Let offspring with children or demanding careers step away if they must.

“Say to your daughter who’s an intern at a hospital, ‘We understand you don’t have time now, and we’ll welcome you back later,’ ” Ms. Esposito says. “It’s much better than making her feel she’s letting the family down because she can’t come to board meetings.”

©2010 by Crain Communications Inc.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Follow the Money

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 22 September 2008) 

A few years ago, Rick Rein got a call from a Chicago-area bank that had lost $1 million to a con artist who cashed a fake check that looked so authentic it easily passed through the bank’s computer system.

The fraudster wired the money to an obscure bank in Florida, then out of the country before the bank realized a month later the check was phony.

Mr. Rein, then a lawyer with Schwartz Cooper in Chicago, immediately filed an action in Florida state court to gain access to the Florida bank’s records. He also requested the court gag the bank so it wouldn’t inform the account owner.

The records showed the money had been wired to a bank in the Bahamas. Mr. Rein prepared the pleadings and hired Bahamian lawyers to get a local court to freeze the fund. The con artist was never caught.

“I don’t even know who he was,” says Mr. Rein, 52, now a lawyer at Dykema Gossett PLLC in Chicago. “We found the money, so it didn’t matter to us who was conning the bank.”

As an asset recovery specialist, Mr. Rein has spent 10 years chasing money from banks and hedge funds that has disappeared overseas — a common problem, even as banks have improved their ability to stop smaller-value crimes, like debit card fraud.

“Bank secrecy laws in certain countries and the fact that a wire transfer might not have a high degree of information that helps you track those funds still impede us in trying to ferret out high-dollar crime,” says Doug Johnson, vice- president of risk-management policy at the Washington, D.C.-based American Bankers Assn.

ROBES AND WHITE WIGS

Mr. Rein’s cases take him to far-flung places like the Caribbean island of Dominica and the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea. He and his colleagues, such as New York lawyer Eugene Becker, who’s licensed to practice in several countries that use English law, have sweated through hearings in courtrooms without air conditioning in the Cayman Islands, Barbados and other sweltering former British colonies where judges and lawyers still wear heavy robes and white wigs.

Regardless of the location, Mr. Rein’s strategy is the same: find the money, freeze the account, then file a lawsuit or wait for the con artist or his associates to come to the bargaining table.

Lawyers unschooled in the ways of overseas fraud often go the traditional route of getting a judgment in the United States and then trying to get it enforced overseas. But that, Mr. Rein says, is a mistake. Suing first alerts the fraudster you are coming, giving him time to hide the assets.

Of the 20 cases he has worked over the years with a network of private investigators and foreign lawyers, Mr. Rein says he has recovered some money in every one. In his biggest case so far, he recouped more than $10 million.

But Mr. Rein is selective. He turns down half the requests he gets each year, usually because the money has been wired to countries like Liechtenstein, which doesn’t have bank fraud laws, or Belize, where the legal system is so backward it’s nearly impossible to seize funds. He usually avoids cases in the Middle East, where politics and Islamic law keep banks from revealing account-holder information.

Mr. Rein, who works on a fee basis rather than on contingency, also rejects cases in which the assets are under $1 million and won’t justify recovery costs, which can run from $50,000 into the millions.

“Rick is one of the most tenacious attorneys I’ve ever dealt with,” says Steven Snyder, a private investigator who has chased money for him since the early 1990s. “He sinks his teeth into a case and doesn’t let go.”

Persistence is essential because money can elude Mr. Rein’s grasp for years, even when he gets a lucky break. In one such case, the owner of a Chicago-based juice distribution company wired $2 million from his company’s line of credit out of the country and fled to Switzerland. Mr. Rein traced the money to a bank in Uruguay and was trying to get it back when U.S. Department of Justice officials intervened.

The U.S. government had recently signed a mutual legal assistance treaty with Uruguay, and the department wanted to test it. The feds got a Uruguayan judge to freeze the money and send it back to Illinois, but on one condition: The Uruguayan judge said a U.S. criminal judge had to rule that the money was stolen. That case couldn’t go forward without the appearance of the defendant, who refused to leave Switzerland.

So Mr. Rein and his colleagues got creative. They persuaded courts at home to dissolve the juice distribution company by proving that it was out of business and its owner had fled the country. The court appointed a receiver to collect company assets, pay its debts and, as part of a plea bargain, enter a guilty plea to fraud charges to satisfy the Uruguayan court.

It took three years, but the bank got its money back.

©2008 by Crain Communications Inc.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Do You Really Need Your Bank?

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 16 July 2007)

Banking may not be the world’s oldest profession, but it’s close. The earliest banking records stretch back to the 18th-century B.C. in Babylon, where temple priests made loans. Greek bankers in the fourth century B.C. perfected sophisticated financial transactions such as taking deposits and exchanging currencies. Two hundred years later, Roman administrators created public notaries to discharge debts.

Plenty has changed over the past few millenniums — particularly in recent years. There’s the advent of ATMs and electronic banking. Globalization has sparked a host of new services in the areas of international finance and risk management. Toss in revolving lines of credit, “lifecycle leases” for equipment financing and other new financial service products and businesses are faced with a bewildering array of choices.

But are these new services meeting all the demands of small and mid-sized businesses? Put another way: Do businesses still need a traditional bank for all their financial needs?

Increasingly, the answer is no.

According to the Federal Reserve, small-business use of non-depository institutions for financial services jumped 29% between 1987 and 2003. While commercial banks are still the dominant supplier of checking accounts, credit lines, loans, capital leases and financial management services like credit card processing, 54% of small firms now obtain some of these products from non-bank entities.

The beneficiaries of the trend include companies such as American Express Co., Merrill Lynch & Co. and GE Corporate Lending, as well as smaller, more specialized commercial lenders around the country. In 2003, a quarter of small businesses in the United States had credit lines, loans or leases with finance and leasing companies instead of traditional banks.

“When you go below $50 million (in annual revenue) you get no respect from a bank,” says Gary Marcus, managing director of New York-based Ecoban Finance Ltd. LLC. “There’s a gap, and we non-bank financial institutions fill that gap.”

THE ALTERNATIVE

Take, for example, Amelia Case, owner of a Chicago chiropractic clinic. When she applied for start-up capital for her company, Universal Health Institute, the first 46 banks she visited turned her down, put off by her student loans and lack of collateral.

To meet her financing needs, Ms. Case got a $45,000 line of credit from American Express and arranged a five-year, $35,000 loan at 8% interest from a trader who works with her husband. “I don’t consider banks particularly helpful to my business or to helping me grow, so it’s made me seek out alternative financing,” she says.

Ms. Case’s business today employs seven clinicians and this year is on track to bill $1.8 million in services. But she says her dealings with traditional banks have not improved. The bank has told her her credit score is not high enough to qualify her for the $100,000 credit line she needs to increase her staff and handle emergencies. “I make a point to visit my banker regularly,” she says. “But even though she believes in this business and she knows me, she still has to sit there and say, ‘We can’t do anything for you.’ “

‘QUARTERBACKS’ OF FINANCE

Bankers argue that alternative financial services companies are no substitute for the breadth of resources at a traditional depository institution. “What they offer is credit, and that’s about it,” says John Compernolle, senior vice-president for middle-market banking at Bank of America Corp. “We love loans, but at the end of the day, we look at our relationships with businesses as more multiproduct and advisory in nature.”

“A bank is a one-stop shop vs. a specialty market,” agrees David Pfeiffer, senior vice-president for commercial real estate at Harris Bank N.A. “It provides a business owner one primary contact who will act as a quarterback to make the delivery of those services easy. The alternative is that a business owner can go to four different institutions — one for deposit and cash management products, one for equipment financing or leasing, one for real estate transactions and one for personal services — and educate four different individuals.”

While more businesses are looking beyond banks, some are happy to stick with tradition. Robert Masulis, owner of RM Design Studio Ltd., a Bartlett-based company that creates photo-realistic images and animation of buildings for architects and builders, moved all of his business accounts to J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. after a banker there came to his rescue with a commercial real estate loan when another bank bailed on the transaction.

Mr. Masulis’ banker also suggested he open a higher-interest-earning account for business savings and recommended a line of credit for emergencies — advice he values too much to leave. Well, almost. “They’ve got me forever,” Mr. Masulis says of his bank. “Until they screw up.”

©2007 by Crain Communications Inc.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business.

Ride it Out or Get Out?

(Crain’s Chicago Business, 08 December 2008)

Gary Heidt didn’t see the recession coming when he decided in 2006 to sell Heidt’s Hot Rod Shop Inc. so he could spend more time with his wife and four grandchildren at home in Palatine.

“Two of them live two miles away, and they were growing up without me,” says the 56-year-old entrepreneur, who was working 12-hour days, six days a week at the company, a maker of parts for classic cars, that he started in his garage in 1986. “I’d come home at 10 o’clock at night, and they were already asleep.”

Sales were strong for most of 2007, and three prospective buyers checked out the business, which had sales below $10 million. But in late 2007, one of the bidders — whose initial offer was so big Mr. Heidt almost dropped the phone upon hearing it — cut that offer by a third.

The bidder was concerned that end-of-year sales were down from a year earlier, Mr. Heidt says. Earlier recessions had slowed sales only slightly — muscle car enthusiasts tend to cut back on other luxuries first — but conditions had changed.

“I said to my wife, ‘We should probably sell now because if we stall and wait to build it up even more, it might be five years before we get back to this point. If I have to wait five more years, I’ll have a heart attack in the back of the shop one night.’ “

Mr. Heidt was up against a dilemma facing many entrepreneurs, particularly baby boomers, who once imagined they’d be selling and hitting the golf course in the next few years.

Many entrepreneurs approaching retirement would rather sell now than slog through a recession. But chances are, if they sell now, they’ll be settling for less than they would have gotten as recently as a year ago — and that’s assuming they can even find a buyer in such a brutal market.

“It’s a Catch-22,” says Dennis Hansmann, a business broker with American Business Acquisitions Inc. in Chicago, who’s been fielding inquiries from entrepreneurs who are out of gas.

“People are calling, wanting to put their business on the market but running up against their own losses,” he says. “To get the highest value, a business owner may need to take time to increase their sales or get their profitability back in check, which could involve layoffs and cutting their inventory.”

Mr. Heidt eventually reached out to entrepreneur Frank Happ, who had shown interest in the business a few months earlier. Mr. Happ and partner Marc Prince bought Heidt’s Hot Rod Shop in February.

Their all-cash deal didn’t match the high offer that fell through, but Mr. Heidt is thrilled nevertheless. “I can’t afford to buy five houses, but it’s enough that I don’t have to work,” he says. He’s back in his own garage, rebuilding a 1932 Ford Roadster.

NOW OR LATER

Forty percent of family business owners, most of whom won’t be passing their companies on to their children, expect to retire by 2017, according to the Family Firm Institute Inc., a Boston-based membership organization. And 42% of CEOs of fast-growing companies surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in 2005 expected to move on by 2010.

With the economy sputtering, buyers are offering less cash. But if business owners hold on, their last years on the job could be their most difficult, dominated by cutting staff, chasing delinquent customers and working with smaller lines of credit. What’s an aging entrepreneur to do?

Chief among reasons to stay is that it’s not a great time to sell, particularly for businesses in sectors that are deteriorating, like the automotive industry and luxury-goods manufacturing.

“You’re going to be getting out at a price that will be lower to reflect the depressed conditions we’re facing and the increased uncertainty about how that business will do,” says Scott George, a managing director at mid-market investment bank P&M Corporate Finance LLC in Chicago. “Even in July and August, an owner of a business would have been able to get a better price.”

Owners who choose to tough it out likely will have to work harder than they have since launching their businesses. But there are potential rewards, notes Thomas Livergood, CEO of Family Wealth Alliance LLC, a Wheaton-based consultancy. In fact, healthy companies with cash on hand can not only survive but grow in a time like this.

“Fortunes are made during recessions,” Mr. Livergood says. “If you have the cash, this is a great opportunity to snap up companies that are forced to sell.”

On the other hand, weak companies tend to get weaker during recessions. If it’s likely that a bumpy journey through the recession will diminish the value of your company over the next few years, it may be better to sell now.

“If you’re thinking about retiring, and you’re healthy and your business is doing relatively well, it’s a good time to sell because you don’t know what’s going to happen 12 months from now,” says David Kauppi, president of Hinsdale-based investment bank MidMarket Capital Inc.

Exiting early also will help you avoid the glut that’s coming as boomer entrepreneurs sell en masse. “There’s going to be a robust deal flow over the next five to 10 years,” Mr. Kauppi says. “If you’ve got a buyer who has 30 different companies he can buy, he’s going to say, ‘Compete for my dollars,’ and that six times EBITDA goes down to four.”

OVER AND OUT

For some business owners, the answer is in their gut, not their spreadsheets.

Among many of Ryan Linenger’s older clients at Itasca private wealth management firm Balasa Dinverno Foltz LLC, “the bigger question is, ‘Am I ready to take on this slowdown?’ ” he says. “It’s not that they can’t do it, because they’ve been through recessions before. But you have to gear up mentally. Maybe you don’t want to do it again. Maybe your family is a bigger priority.”

Mr. Linenger says his clients often are content to exit for less than top dollar — say, $8 million today rather than a possible $12 million in a few years — if the sale price covers what their financial planner has determined they’ll need to fund the kind of retirement they want.

Another way to get peace of mind about selling now rather than waiting for a bigger payday down the road: “Find other ways to measure your success besides the check you walked away with,” says Gail Golden, a management psychologist with RHR International Co., a Wood Dale-based management consultancy. “Think, ‘I supported my family all these years,’ or ‘I provided excellent service to customers.’ ”

Four Signs That You Don’t Have the Stomach to Hang in There

1 You’ve run out of ideas. Burned out, you don’t know what to change in your business to keep it growing during the recession. But before hanging out the for-sale sign, “take a vacation for a week,” says Todd Cushing, principal at business brokerage and investment banking firm EBIT Associates Ltd. in Barrington. “Most sellers who rejuvenate and relax get new ideas and energy.”

2 You haven’t got time for the pain. Forty-seven percent of small-business owners plan to cut back on the work but maintain their involvement in their businesses as they approach retirement, according to a Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index survey last March. Unfortunately, a business needs a full-time captain to steer it through a storm. If you’re not willing to devote that much time to your company — perhaps you can’t because you need to care for an aging parent or sick spouse — it’s best to go.

3 You’re not willing to take risks. It’s how you grew your business. But “what happens is, as owners get older, they want to shelter and protect everything they’ve built,” says Clifford Deremo, president of Stevenson & Co., a mergers and acquisitions advisory firm in Evanston. If you’re 65, it’s hard to go all in for new equipment that you know you need but may never get paid back for, he says. But it may be necessary. “Once you stop taking risks, you open up opportunities for your competitors, and you’re not coming out of the recession in the best of shape,” he says.

4 You can’t handle the truth. When it seems like all the news is bad, it’s tempting to avoid looking at all the issues your company has, says Richard Ackley, a professor at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Bad idea. “You see less and less,” he says, including opportunities. Hire an executive coach to help you get your entrepreneurial mojo back and consider selling if you can’t adjust your attitude.

©2008 by Crain Communications Inc.

Read this article at Crain’s Chicago Business. 

What Works as Play?

(The Wall Street Journal, 18 June 2001)

Karen K. Dils, 53 years old and co-owner of Four Corners Rafting, a river-tour operator in Buena Vista, Colo., spends much of her time on the beautiful Dolores and Arkansas rivers. So when Ms. Dils has time off, what does she do? Surprisingly, she often goes on river-rafting trips — but with family and friends instead of guests. It’s a vacation because “you don’t have to entertain them,” she explains. “You all pitch in, help wash the dishes.”

Other travel-industry entrepreneurs make similar confessions. Vacation doesn’t necessarily mean leaving work behind — just changing their state of mind.

THE ZOO DIRECTOR: As general manager of the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in St. Augustine, Fla., William E. Puckett, 64, works in a lush park surrounded by large numbers of rare reptiles, exotic birds — and tourists. In the summer, “the population of St. Augustine doubles with vacationers,” he notes. So, Mr. Puckett says, he tends to head for sparsely populated, “wide open spaces” on his own vacations — states such as New Mexico, Montana and Colorado. Bu, “wherever I go, I check out the local zoos,” he says.

THE TRAVEL-GUIDE PUBLISHER: Lonely Planet Publications Inc., the series of books for adventurous travelers, keeps Tony and Maureen Wheeler on the road six months out of the year. Tony Wheeler, 54, admits that he fails miserably at separating work and vacation. “Even just in day-to-day life at home, I wouldn’t think of eating out at a restaurant without taking notes on it,” he says. In January, the Australia-based Wheelers spent a week lazing at a beach house they rented outside Melbourne. “That would have to be defined as vacation,” says Mr. Wheeler, “but then I also did some scuba diving there, and I’m working on a scuba-diving guide.”

SURFING INSTRUCTOR: Living in a surfer’s paradise, Jeremiah J. Dillberg, 26, a former professional surfer and co-owner of the Kauai Surf School in Kauai, Hawaii, is able to catch the waves when he’s not teaching students or helping to manage the business. So, Mr. Dillberg says, when he goes on vacation with his nonsurfing wife, he looks for a different experience — culture shock and city life, such as he’s found on recent trips to England and France. Still, Mr. Dillberg admits he rarely leaves his surfboard at home, even when visiting a destination like Europe, “because you never know” when you’ll stumble across a good beach.

SPA MANAGER: True, when he’s tense, Mark T. Wilkinson, 44, the general manager of Dr. Wilkinson’s Hot Springs Resort and Mud Baths in Calistoga, Calif., can take advantage of the de-stressing treatments — including volcanic mud baths, steam rooms and massages — offered at the family business. But, he says, “it’s like the chef going to his own restaurant — your ears are always open, you’re noticing things” about the enterprise. To really relax, he vacations at other resorts with spas, like the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif., which has a massage center. “I’m a firm believer in the concept,” he says.

BED & BREAKFAST HOSTESS: Karen Spell Shaw, 42, innkeeper at the Governor’s House Inn, an 11-room B&B housed in an 18th-century mansion in Charleston, S.C., makes it a point to “put the day together” for her guests — suggesting sites to see, organizing boat charters for them, making dinner reservations. When she has a few days off, she heads for South Carolina’s Folly Beach — “an old, hippie beach,” as she describes it, where there’s very little to do, and “when the phone rings, it’s not for me.”