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Closing ZipJack would be like telling me to put a padlock on my father’s coffin.”
The rest of ZipJack’s close-knit staff were also in mourning and felt uncer- tain about the future of the factory with Dubinsky gone. Shortly after her father’s death, Witkowski called a staff meeting. “I said, ‘I don’t know how we’ll do this, but we’ll figure it out. We’ll either sink or swim together.’ We just knuckled down.”
It wasn’t an easy transition. To start, Witkowski describes her father as "micro- managing” and says her more hands-off style came as a shock to staff. “I was really putting a lot of responsibility into their hands. When someone’s used to having dear old Dad tell them what to do, they don’t feel as invested in the work,” Witkowski says. “I’d much rather delegate and challenge my employees to develop their skills.”
Witkowski, too, wasn’t used to exercis- ing leadership. The first week she went to work after her father’s death, an employ- ee told a disgruntled customer, “Let me check with the boss.” It took Witkowski a second to realize the employee was referring to her. Though rattled, she took the phone, calmed the customer down, and solved the problem. “It was like I was channeling Manny through me,” she says. “I didn’t realize I’d been paying so much attention to his purchasing, nego- tiation, and sales skills.”
The business had already been in tran- sition, since ZipJack’s American-made patio umbrellas couldn’t compete on price with foreign competitors. Witkowski has further streamlined ZipJack to sell umbrellas to restaurants, country clubs, production companies, and other corpo- rate accounts. She also brought her hus- band, Michael, in to update its website and manage social media.
She thinks her father would be happy with the changes at ZipJack. Still, she says, “I’ve had very, very vivid dreams that I go into work in the morning and he says, ‘I’m here! And I put everything back the way I used to do it!’ I don’t know if it’s a dream or a nightmare.”
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