Every Tuesday morning, Jason Willis, who manages sales of Volvos and Jaguars at the Betts Auto Campus, meets his father and boss, Rich, at the Iowa Machine Shed Restaurant.

Rather than discuss auto sales, servicing or other business-related issues that would help them gear up for the day, the two stick strictly to topics unrelated to the work. The routine and the rules, Jason says, helps them both better define their relationship and keep their roles as father and son and as manager and employee distinct.

“You’ve got to separate things,” he said. “Sometimes you’ve got to bite your tongue at work, where at home you’d say something.

And so it goes for the children of business owners and managers who want to follow in their parents’ footsteps. There are moments of resentment and jealousy from fellow co-workers and times when respect on the job is hard to come by because of concerns over nepotism. There are positives to counterbalance the negatives, however, including near-constant access to the boss and the obvious leg-up that comes with being the offspring of the executive in the corner office.

“There are a lot of SOBs out there – sons of bosses,” said Jim Immel, owner of Immel and Associates, which provides business, personal, financial and legal consulting services to business owners and executives.

“Employees are really watching to see how they are at management and how they grow. There are a lot of great stories out there about fathers making kids learn every role within the office. There’s an equal number of bad decisions that have been made by bosses.”

At Adventure Lands of America Inc., which owns and operates the Adventureland amusement park in Altoona, Chairman and owner Jack Krantz has worked to ensure his three sons have been involved from the ground up. His eldest son, John, literally helped build the business. One of his first jobs was putting together picnic tables for 280 campsites that was the family’s business before the rides and other amenities were built.

He learned to handle reservations, purchasing and maintenance while managing the campground. In 1979, he started working in the amusement park. John’s brother Matt started working in the park’s games department and now runs the Adventureland Inn. Both Matt and his sister, Beth, earned law degrees from Drake University, partly at their father’s urging.

“He strongly suggested their further their education,” said John, who studied business at the University of Iowa.

At the Wittern Group Inc., which manages farms and develops land, provides money management services and manufacturers vending machines, members of the Wittern family have been active in management for three generations. The family wants to maintain ownership and oversee day-to-day operations.

To do that, the company’s chairman, Art Wittern, and his wife, Carol, have worked to make sure their children got a variety of experience throughout the company.

Most of the couple’s five adult children, including son Chip Wittern and daughters Misty Herr and Heidi Chico, and some of their spouses, work there.

A combination of gentle nudges from their parents and an effort to let each child find his or her own niche within the diverse company has led to a situation in which family members have developed different specialties, Herr said.

Herr began working at the company at the age of 21 as a farm manager. In the years since, she has continued to focus on the company’s land management business and today heads that department. Chico started at the Wittern Group’s vending business in its parts department and is now No. 2 at the parent company.

“My father, particularly, is gifted at having the ability and foresight to let us all take different parts of the business and succeed at them,” Herr said. “We went through the school of hard knocks. My father and mother always were very strong and supportive, and they didn’t give us a lot of breaks. But the greatest gift they gave us was self-worth.”

For Jason Willis, the auto dealership business is the only one he’s known, and his progress at Betts has been steady and deliberate. He started working there when he was 14 years old, pulling weeds around the building and performing other odd jobs. During summers when he was in college at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, Jason handled vehicle deliveries and sold used cars.

After graduation, he started at Betts full time as a service adviser in the Cadillac division, where he served as a liaison between customers and the technicians who repaired their cars. From there, he began selling Hummers, the civilian model of the military Humvee built by AM General. When Betts added Volvos and Jaguars late last year, Jason slid into a management role, and now oversees four employees.

He wants to take over the business, which he father acquired majority ownership of in 2000. He is cautiously optimistic that will happen.

“If I don’t mess up, I might get there,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to learn. It’s one of those things that’s assumed, but it isn’t.”