“Advice is seldom welcome,” Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son, “and those who want it the most always like it the least.” And yet generations of fathers have, like Chesterfield, offered words of wisdom (sometimes fatuous ones, admittedly) to sons starting out in their careers. We think one of the best examples of a business owner's advice to a son who was to succeed him was penned after World War Il by Martin L. Davey Sr., president of the Davey Tree Expert Co. The year was 1945 and 29-year-old Martin L. Davey Jr. had just returned from service in the war.
The company was founded in the 1870s by John Davey, Martin Sr.'s father, who virtually introduced the science of tree surgery in the United States. As a small boy growing up on a farm in Somersetshire, England, John Davey was continually urged by his father to “Do it right or not at all.”