COLD PROMO OPEN
Chase Pickering
It’s okay to get out there and explore and have failures every once in a while, because you can’t stand still. You’ve got to constantly be moving ahead.
Eric Becker
Was there ever a worry that you might have to sell the estate?
Chase Pickering
It was our grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit that saved Biltmore. It’s very much how we carry forward the work that we do as a family and how we operate Biltmore Estate.
Eric Becker
Ryan, you were talking about this sort of pivotal moment.
Ryan Cecil
It was kind of a shock to everybody.
Eric Becker
When I think of the term “mic-drop,” that might be the ultimate mic-drop story I’ve ever heard.
SHOW OPEN
Welcome to “The Long Game Podcast.” I’m Eric Becker. I’m an author, an entrepreneur, And I’m founder and chairman of Cresset, a family office that we built to serve founders, multi-gen business owners and their families.
For all the entrepreneurs and all the aspiring entrepreneurs, for leaders, and CEOs, the long game is for you.
It’s the practices, it’s the leadership skills, it’s the culture that can stand the test of time.
I’m Eric Becker and this is “The Long Game.”
INTRO
Eric Becker
Today I’m joined by Ryan Cecil and Chase Pickering, the great, great grandsons of George Vanderbilt and part of the fifth generation leadership team at Biltmore Estate, the largest residential home in the United States that spans 8,000 acres in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. This estate has been through it all, market crashes, wars, societal shifts, and the family has always figured out how to survive, adapt, and succeed. It is a living case study in what it takes to build something that lasts through relentless vision, resilience, and a strong sense of stewardship across generations
Welcome, Ryan and Chase. It’s so good to see you.
Chase Pickering
Thank you, what an honor to be here.
Ryan Cecil
Thank you, Great to be here. Yes, thank you.
Eric Becker
Super fun. Super fun. Thank you for joining. So let’s start at the beginning and perhaps you could tell us if we looked at a family tree, everyone hears the name Vanderbilt, thinks of, I’m sure, New York initially. How does the family fit into the broader Vanderbilt family tree?
Ryan Cecil
Sure, I’ll start us off. So we’re fifth generation on this side back to George Vanderbilt, but if we look at it starting with the common or Cornelius Vanderbilt, he would have been George Vanderbilt’s grandfather, and George Vanderbilt was our great-great-grandfather. So, George and Edith had a daughter Cornelia. She married John Cecil. That’s the name change, switched to Cecil. And then they had our grandfather and his brother, and then my parents and my dad and Chase’s mother. And then us.
Eric Becker
So the Biltmore estate comes into being in the late 1800s when George Vanderbilt somehow ends up discovering Asheville. How did Asheville come into play?
Ryan Cecil
Well, story goes as this: George’s mother had a bout of tuberculosis, and she’d been living in New York City for some time at that period. And he had heard of the kind of medicinal benefits of being out in West North Carolina, to become a place for recovery from such ailments. And he traveled down here in the 1880s with his mother and really just fell in love with the area, the mountains and the region.
Eric Becker
I feel like the same thing happened to me. I came down to Asheville and fell in love with it too. So Chase, the Biltmore is the largest residential home in the country. And anyone who’s a Gilded Age fan knows that it’s really the pinnacle of architecture from that time. 250 rooms, I think four acres is maybe inside the house. And it’s just really an incredible, incredible, what I call an American treasure. It’s an incredible place. But how did the scale come into being? What was the original vision? And then what did we end up getting?
Chase Pickering
Yes, it was George Vanderbilt who had this big dream to create Biltmore, and he pulled together two of his closest family friends, one being Richard Morris Hunt, who became the architect of the house, and the second being Frederick Law Olmsted, who is the landscape architect for the estate.
And it was really these three men who dreamed up this vision, the scale, the size. And it was the architect Hunt who really encouraged George Vanderbilt to create a house on the scale of the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains. And it was really through an iterative design process where the house got bigger, that he wanted more space for entertaining, and that’s where you ended up with this French chateau inspired home nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Eric Becker
So speaking of the Blue Ridge Mountains, when people hear the name Biltmore, I’m sure the image of the beautiful home always comes to mind. But the land is really special and has special meaning as well. Tell us a little bit about the land all around the house.
Chase Pickering
That’s right, Eric, you mentioned earlier the estate is now 8,000 acres, but back in George Vanderbilt’s time, it was actually 125,000 acres and George Vanderbilt owned as far as you can see from Biltmore House. And it was really at the advice of Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, that really suggested that George Vanderbilt had an opportunity to experiment, to innovate in the space of sustainable forestry and agriculture.
And that’s exactly what they did. They sought out to hire Gifford Pinchot, who became the first forester at Biltmore and created the first scientific management plan for forestry in America. And so Biltmore really became the birthplace of conservation and forestry in America. And that is such an important part of our legacy and work that we carry forward in the way that we manage the land today.
Gifford Pinchot, who I mentioned earlier, he went off to become the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. And a lot of the first generation conservationists who would go out and work in several different government agencies around our nation were actually trained at the Biltmore Forest School in the land that is Biltmore.
Eric Becker
It’s kind of interesting because when I think of the word conservation, I think of it as being a contemporary term, but it’s as if they made conservation cool before it became cool. I mean, it’s amazing that it was there right from the beginning.
Chase Pickering
That’s absolutely right. And it’s part of what we’ve always done from the beginning. And it’s very much how we carry forward the work that we do as a family and how we operate Biltmore Estate. Those values of sustainability and stewardship are very much alive and well in the ways that we manage the working farm and forests today.
Eric Becker
So the property originally was inspired by this idea of gathering that George wanted, family and friends to have a wonderful place to gather and to experience things together. So it wasn’t like getting together for dinner. It was getting together for a long weekend or a week. So after that, it was never really open to the public. So now we get to the great depression. And if I remember correctly, Cornelia opened the estate to the public. I’m imagining it was probably for the first time. How did that come about and what inspired that?
Ryan Cecil
Yeah, the estate at that time, it was about 1930 that they opened into the public, and Asheville and the estate were struggling from the Great Depression. The city council came to Cornelia and said, you know, it would be really great for the area if you guys would consider opening the house like some European manor homes have been done, and really encouraging tourism to the area and to the region. So they did this, and it was also good
for Biltmore because at the time, it was just struggling in the state and was, you know, going through the post-Great Depression just like everyone else. So the added income from tourism was much needed as well.
Eric Becker
And was there, I mean, it’s amazing to think that when we consider your kids, this has been in the family for six generations, was there ever a worry that they’d have to sell the estate?
Ryan Cecil
I don’t know if immediately at that time, but there was a concern that, you know, if it doesn’t, we can’t figure out how to make it profitable and at some point it would probably be split up and sold off. You know, luckily we were able, at that time, 1930s, we still had a profitable dairy and then later really leaned into the tourism element of it, and that’s really what saved the house, was making it this kind of a landmark for people to come and see.
Eric Becker
Which we’re going to talk about next, but there was one thing I was curious about. When I did a tour the last time there was a room, and the guide said these doors, or there were doors here, that made this a vault. And during World War II, some of America’s most precious art from the National Gallery was secretly sent to Biltmore to be protected during the war. How did that come about?
Chase Pickering
So this space that you’re referring to is the music room on the first floor of Biltmore House, and it’s a really incredible story, when there was the threat that Germany may bomb Washington D.C. in World War II.
Our great-grandmother, Edith Vanderbilt, was very involved in the National Gallery of Art and made this personal outreach to say, hey, let’s hide out some of the most important pieces of our nation’s collection of art in Biltmore House for safekeeping during the duration of the war. And that’s exactly what they did. There were curators that came down from the National Galleries of Art, stayed with the pieces.
There were parts of the room that were modified for the security, but it was a top-secret operation. Only our family and the National Gallery curators knew exactly what had happened. And the art was transported in the dark of night on train down here to Asheville and then went home after, went back to Washington, D.C. after the war.
Eric Becker
Well, as I said, I think of the home as an American treasure, and what a cool thing to think that America’s treasure was protected and stored in this amazing place.
So Ryan, you were talking about this sort of pivotal moment, something that I often call a moment of truth in a history of a family or the history of a business. And so your grandfather, William Cecil, I remember moved from New York back to Asheville. Tell us about that. What was it that had him make that decision that I’m kind of like, I’m going home to figure out what to do with the home, with the house?
Ryan Cecil
Well, yeah, he had returned from service in World War II. And then he went to Harvard University. And then he worked for Chase Bank in Manhattan. His father called him and said, you really should consider coming back to Biltmore, there’s a great opportunity here. And if you and your brother don’t figure this out, nobody’s going to manage it for us.
So, he came back in the 60s. And he really leaned into the idea of tourism through marketing, was also a hobbyist photographer, so he did some of our first marketing campaigns. But he really saw that as a great potential for the company. And at the time, as I said, we had a profitable dairy. And the question became, how long is the dairy going to continue to provide income to the house that’s losing money at that time? And so he really thought that the house was going to be the way of the future.
He and his brother, they disagreed on this point, and they actually ended up separating the business in 1978. The dairy on one side and the house and gardens on the other. And I think it took until about 1982 for him to turn a profit on the house portion of it.
Chase Pickering
If I can add a little bit, I think it’s my grandfather, or our grandfather’s, entrepreneurial spirit that really saved Biltmore in this critical moment in our history. And it is the mission statement that we continue to follow today. As a family, a business, our mission is to preserve Biltmore Estate as a privately owned, profitable working estate. And it was his vision and philosophy that we continued to follow, that we run Biltmore as a business. We take the profits and then we reinvest that back into the preservation of the historic structures, of the land, and making sure we have the best people in the world taking care of this beautiful place.
Ryan Cecil
That’s a really critical point, that profitability, because he had seen a lot of places, historic structures, that were a nonprofit model and that just didn’t keep up. So he was very adamant about that, that we make a profit in order to preserve Biltmore. That was the goal.
Eric Becker
Well, it’s because it makes it sustainable. And I know that in my own travels in Europe, I’ve come across these beautiful estates that are actually falling apart. And you’ll hear that the families have been trying to give it to the government just to get out of the losses that are just so hard to carry over time. That issue of, we talked about the beauty of conservation before it was a popular term, and then this idea of sustainability, that it was important that it be profitable so that that could be reinvested in its long-term preservation and conservation.
And so when we think about that moment of truth, was it your grandfather’s, that was the entrepreneurial spirit, but did he always have a sense of optimism, kind of like, I’ll figure it out. Did he have a vision and a plan, or was it a series of kind of attempts and experiments to figure this out? How did that come about?
Chase Pickering
I would say he definitely had vision. He probably didn’t always have a plan. And I think for those who worked for him, you know, Ryan and I obviously knew him as our grandfather, so very different way. But I think for those that worked for him, they often described him as always having a new idea every single day, and trying to figure out new ways to innovate and looking at new market opportunities, looking at how to…
Ryan Cecil
Yes, I agree with that.
Chase Pickering
…branch into new businesses, which is how we ended up jumping into the wine business later on in his career.
And I really think that he set that bar, that it’s OK to get out there and explore and have failures every once in a while, because you can’t stand still. You’ve got to constantly be moving ahead and trying new things and exploring these new ideas.
Eric Becker
That is an entrepreneurial culture for sure. But at the beginning, it must have been really challenging in that, first of all, to figure out that whole separation of the dairy, and that’s a family challenge to have a different vision and then have to make that difficult change. But I also remember a couple of other things that you told me. If I remember correctly, when he was maybe leaving New York, he bumped into, was it David Rockefeller or something? Did something happen with them?
Ryan Cecil
He did. Yes, yeah, apparently, I think they were together or something. I recall the stories, they were on a flight together somewhere. And David Rockefeller asked, well, Bill, what are you gonna do with that white elephant down there? And he said, well, I’m gonna make it profitable and we’re gonna open it for tours. And I’m gonna really lean into this. And apparently Rockefeller was skeptical that it would ever really turn much of a profit. But yeah, that was a neat bit of family history, that story.
I think that our grandfather called him Papa and folks in the company called him Mr. C. But I think he leaned into that. And I think that kind of motivated him to a degree.
Chase Pickering
He did.
Eric Becker
And then were there any ideas that he had that didn’t work? Was there anything that he tried that’s well known as, you know, Papa tried this and it failed, it just didn’t work?
Chase Pickering
My favorite failure is when he thought it would be a good idea to grow prawns, which is a large type of shrimp here in Western North Carolina, so that we could serve this in, at the time we had three restaurants on property. And so he dug these big ponds out in the field and raised all the prawns, and come to find out, all the prawns have to be harvested like
one time a year at a certain time. And so there was no way to kind of have fresh prawns throughout the year. And so all the restaurants had prawn-themed everything on the menu during that very short period of time. And very quickly, it became clear that the prawns were not going to be a profitable endeavor.
Eric Becker
Wow, that must have been tough.
Ryan Cecil
Yes, yeah. I also think folks didn’t really know what the prawns were at the time. Like, was it a shrimp? Where is this from? Another one he tried was trout as well. We raised on the west side after we’d put the vineyards in place. And trout need to be cold water mountain streams. And we had them in a lake about 10 feet deep. And the lake in the summertime got to 85 degrees. It was not conducive really for trout. But worth a try. We learned a lot.
Eric Becker
Right.
Chase Pickering
Yeah.
Eric Becker
Yeah. What’s amazing is that I think when people of course hear the name Vanderbilt or think of this incredibly beautiful property of Biltmore, they don’t realize that entrepreneurial journey and that that is the journey of the entrepreneur of trial and failure and reinvention, and to always keep going, to never give up. It sounds like Mr. C or Papa had that, had that strong, conviction that he could always keep moving forward.
So, Ryan, when we studied 100-year businesses in The Long Game, one of the concepts that came up over and over were moments of truth and moments of trust. So William Cecil had trust in his gut that he could find a workable business model, but there were these moments of truth, the first one being the separation of the dairy perhaps, or maybe it was coming out of World War II and the Great Depression.
When you think back over the family history, what are some of the other moments of truth that come to your mind where, you know, taking action and making a good decision really made all the difference that we still have this amazing place today?
Ryan Cecil
I would say the next one would have been the creation of the winery, building a winery in Western North Carolina. He built that really to help diversify, in case tourism doesn’t work out, can sell a bottle of wine and be a winery. I mean, it helps with tourism that we can sell the folks that came and visited the estate a bottle of wine on property. But that was our first real diversifier away from just tourism, into kind of a manufacturing of wine. I would say the second one was really turning us from a roadside attraction, a day visit, into a multi-day destination. Really, it was just toward the tail end of his career, actually, after he had retired, but he was still somewhat involved at a chair level. And that would have been the creation of the Inn on Biltmore Estate in 2001 that made us an overnight destination. So those two were very large leaps forward for us.
Eric Becker
And again, people tend to think of things as an overnight success. If we look back, how long did it take for the property, the estate, to turn its first profit?
Ryan Cecil
It was 1982, think it was $16 and some change, was the first profit that he took from tourism on just the house side. That took years in the making. I would say, you know, we didn’t, our business is much different today than it was even in the 90s and early 2000s. I mean, the end and becoming a multi-day destination was a big game changer for us from a profitability perspective.
Eric Becker
So, it was decades in the making to really get to where we are today, which is again, incredible and something that people probably just don’t generally know. They tend to think of something as either an overnight success or that it always was successful. And I think there’s just an amazing arc of story there of what it took in terms of ideas and entrepreneurship. It’s this beautiful thread through the story.
Chase Pickering
I think it’s really important to note that, you know, George Vanderbilt’s vision required him to spend most of what he inherited.
Eric Becker
All right, so let’s shift from history and some of these moments of truth to what’s happening with Biltmore today. So starting with you, Chase, you left a career that you had been pursuing to return to North Carolina and join the family business. How did that happen? What was it that you were doing and how did that tie into coming back to the family business?
Chase Pickering
So, I had an amazing opportunity after college to go work for the Walt Disney Company in Orlando, Florida, and had a wonderful experience there. But I always felt inside of me that I wanted to come home and be a part of Biltmore long term. And I always felt the mountains were calling me home and that that’s where I wanted to raise a family. And so I came back, now about 12 years ago, and it’s really been a lot of fun to be here, to see the growth here at Biltmore, to be a part of that and to be challenged personally and professionally through my career as I’ve stepped into different roles, from marketing to guest experience and a bunch of things in between. So it has been a wonderful decision, and I love being a part of a family owned and operated business. I think it’s something really special about it.
Eric Becker
And Ryan, what has been your journey to where you are today with the business?
Ryan Cecil
So, I went into investment banking right after college. I went and I studied finance and banking. It started out as something when my grandfather and parents would ask me, what are you going to get into? I said investment banking and they said, oh, wonderful. And I was thinking about some diversification at that time because I saw Biltmore was kind of fragile and dependent upon tourism. And I thought, in about the late 90s, early 2000s, we started cash flowing pretty well. I said, well, maybe there’s an opportunity to manage that money that’s not going right back into the business immediately. So I thought the best way to learn, that would be through investment banking. And then I had the idea to go into private equity after that. But after about three years in banking, I thought, you know, I’m itching to get home and get to work. And work on our investment side of the business was relatively new still.
Eric Becker
Awesome.
Chase Pickering
I think it’s been really fun to see, you know, Ryan and I and our cousin Aubrey, we’ve all been a part of this business and all three of us that are involved from Generation 5 have very different interests and I love how we kind of play off of each other, you know, with Ryan’s expertise and investments. My love for, you know, the guest experience and Aubrey has her own creative pursuits with her jewelry. I mean, it’s a really wonderful dynamic that’s starting to take shape here in the next generation.
Eric Becker
So, I love hearing that and let’s talk about that a little bit more. When I hear the word that dynamic, it makes me think about what are the practices when you were kids that actually could contribute to that great working relationship today. How did that happen? Do you think the seeds were planted in some of the things that the family was doing when you guys were kids?
Chase Pickering
Absolutely. And I think we have to credit my mom, Dini Pickering, taking a huge step forward in developing our first family council. When Ryan and I were 15, Ryan? Yeah, we were 15 years old. Yeah. And we remember sitting around the table. And we were also talking about what are our values as a family? What is our mission as a family?
Ryan Cecil
15, that’s right, 23 years ago this year.
Chase Pickering
How does that connect to Biltmore? And she really started introducing some of these ideas and conversations in a very structured format at a very early age. And I love that she had this formula to the meetings where we’d have a third of fun. We’d always have a fun component. We’d have a third focused on policy development. And then the other third was an educational topic where we were constantly learning something together as a family. And I think that structure of the family council has served us so well as our family continues to grow.
Eric Becker
Well, and the idea that she was doing it a few decades ago is incredible and visionary because that would be a best practice now, but I don’t think it was known 20, 30 years ago. And then I think of the show Hamilton and that concept of being in the room where it happened, what an amazing thing to be kids in the room where it’s happening. I mean, that’s the best.
Chase Pickering
Yes, indeed.
Eric Becker
So, we have great, great relationships and a wonderful family business. We have a history of confronting challenges. As I think of more contemporary recent history, COVID hits and here we have a business that’s based on visitors coming and now suddenly everybody had to stay home at the beginning.
When did the family realize this is a crisis? And then how did the family mobilize to get through COVID?
Ryan Cecil
Yeah, you know, that was a very interesting and difficult time. If you made a scenario and said, what is the worst case scenario for a business that’s dependent on tourism? The global pandemic would be at the very top of the list, I would think. And if I recall correctly, it was like March of 2020. It looked like this was getting very serious. By, oddly enough, April 1st on April Fool’s Day, we had to furlough most of our employees and pretty much shutter operations for until May 16th, we were able to open back up with a grounds and gardens pass. But it was a very difficult time, but we learned how to become much more efficient and how to optimize some of our operations. There was a lot of learning out of that period. And our guests were also very gracious with us once we were able to get back open that May of 2020 for just the gardens and grounds, because they didn’t want a crowded experience and we didn’t know we no longer had a crowded experience. Really let us lean into some of these areas of gracious hospitality and the estate as an oasis, that we’re still using those lessons learned today that have really helped us improve some areas of our business.
Eric Becker
I camped out in Asheville during a large part of COVID. And one of the special things that Jill and I used to do was to go visit the property, take long walks with the dogs. I’d get on my phone with my earbuds and just walk this beautiful land and try and do my best to operate my business at that time. So, I think it became a really special place that people, a safe place that people could go and enjoy themselves almost as if we weren’t in a pandemic. And I think that’s pretty special.
So, we survived COVID and we start to thrive again as an organization after that. But now suddenly Hurricane Helene comes along in 2024. I mean, something that if someone had said to me, there’s going to be a hurricane in the mountains of Western North Carolina, I would have said, you’re kidding me. But it actually did happen. And it was just devastating with flooding and mudslides.
And it just, you know, I happened to be there when it hit, I was at home and because I had Starlink, I was actually on Zoom calls and people were like, aren’t you in the middle of a hurricane? You know, what’s going on? But it was, it was really scary. And, and I know that there are many, many tragic stories of neighbors that lost everything. But Biltmore again, rallied both to recover as a sustainable ongoing business. And also as an important member of the Asheville community. So let’s talk about that. How did Biltmore find itself when Helene hit, and then how did Biltmore rally and start to come back and how did Biltmore play a role in the recovery of Western North Carolina?
Chase Pickering
Yes, so it was a devastating hurricane that hit this community.
Quite a bit of loss of life in Western North Carolina and the surrounding region. And this is a moment where I’m just so proud of how Biltmore stepped up to prioritize the safety of our guests and our employees. We obviously had a huge amount of work to do to clean up the estate. We were closed for five weeks following the storm so that we could clear literally hundreds of thousands of trees that had been blown down across the 8,000 acres. Had flooding that impacted the front entrance.
Fortunately, the house and where it was built had very minimal impact and was really ready to go. But we knew that we had to work as quickly as we could to get open for our community. And we had to do that safely. But I remember that day when we opened five weeks after the storm. It was November 2nd, which is when we were supposed to open for Christmas.
Eric Becker
So, let’s talk a little bit about culture and team. My family was in the Christmas business, and my dad and his team were so passionate about Christmas when my partner, Avy, and I started Cresset. We told the first 10 team members that we were in a 100 year journey together and our team has incredible culture and passion for what we do. When I visit Biltmore, I sense in the employees, the team members that I talked to, this great sense of culture, of commitment, of service. And how did that come into being and how does Biltmore maintain that incredible culture and the incredible people there? How does that come to be?
Ryan Cecil
Well, I think part of it is our long-term vision and being a family business. I mean, we talk a lot about what’s the 500-year vision. Sometimes people joke a thousand-year vision. Now, you have to be relevant enough to do things in the next few years and maintain that entrepreneurial spirit.
But I think that helps our culture a lot. Everybody fully understands the mission that’s here and working for us. And it’s a real family that every day we strive to achieve that mission for Biltmore, to deliver it for Biltmore itself, but for our guests and for our employees as well.
Chase Pickering
I will say too that this goes all the way back to George and Edith Vanderbilt. And they set a very high bar for all of us to follow in how they treat people, how they show up for one another, and how they share care and compassion towards other people.
And that is something that we haven’t lost sight of even as our business has grown. How do we take care of our people? How do we make sure that we’re developing the best talent to run this business in the future? And how do we make sure we are surrounding ourselves with people that we enjoy being around and have fun with? Because at the end of the day, we are about making memories and immersing people in this beautiful place. And that is such a privilege and honor to be able to do that.
And I think that so many of our employees here just take such a huge amount of pride in being the facilitators of those experiences and of those really cherished moments that friends and family spend together here at Biltmore.
Eric Becker
So, Ryan, when we first met, we talked about stewardship, which is one of the themes we see in the long game with these great long-term families and long-term businesses. And you really are so passionate about stewardship. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about where that passion came from and how you think about stewardship.
Ryan Cecil
Sure, yeah. It’s certainly one of our core values. You know, I look into this, the original word for stewardship was Middle English 16th century or so, something like steward, which was a hall warden. And when I first read that, it didn’t really resonate with me until I realized that, you know, back in that time, an agrarian manor home was, would be considered a hall. So Biltmore in this time would have been considered a great hall. And what a steward was responsible for is the care of property, people, and place.
It is really enhancing and improving through the generations, these wonderful assets we have the opportunity to take care of, to provide that care. So it’s a very robust definition of stewardship and it’s a proactive definition of stewardship. It’s not just keeping everything the same, it is really enhancing it and improving through generations these wonderful assets we have the opportunity to take care of.
Eric Becker
Amazing. And this whole idea of stewardship, we think of that everything in the hall or the property, and in this case, Biltmore. It’s all for the future. It’s all being stewarded into the future and no one person is bigger than that. That is bigger than any one of us. And I think that’s one of the beautiful ideas in stewardship.
Ryan Cecil
Yes. Yes. Yes, it’s for future generations and it’s for future generations of folks who come and visit Biltmore to see this passed down, this legacy passed on.
Eric Becker
But a key part of that is conservation and preservation. And so tell us your views, how you came to that, and what that means to you.
Chase Pickering
So, I love that stewardship is now one of our core values as a company because it really does extend beyond how we care for the company, how we care for the buildings, to how we care for the land and the community. Ryan and I and my brother and our cousins, we all grew up on Biltmore Estate and had this amazing opportunity to have nature in our backyard all the time. And it had a huge impact on me. I think many of us.
And so we really do have a deep connection to the land and how we conserve it and how we continue some of the practices that started here over 130 years ago as far as how we farm the land, how we forest the land, how we take care of the view sheds, and protect the beauty that has become now known by so many that is the mountains around us.
And we’re so grateful now that a large majority of the original Vanderbilt tract of land is protected for the American people for the rest of time as part of Pisgah National Forest. And that is really something that is an important part of our legacy as a family to ensure that that place was protected, that land was protected, and can continue to be enjoyed by people to this day.
Eric Becker
It’s amazing and it requires investment. I know when I visited, and people don’t see behind the scenes, but that there’s an incredible facility that you recently opened that is specialized in conserving and restoring some of the amazing treasures that are there.
Chase Pickering
Yes, we have amazing disciplines around how we conserve the furniture and the archival drawings and photographs in our collection and that branches all the way out into how we conserve the land as well.
So, it’s one of my favorite parts of Biltmore, is that we work on so many different things every single day. It is just really inspiring to see the people and spend time with the people who are, you know, everyone from conserving a piece of furniture in the house to how we care for the animals out on the farm. And we have the talented team that makes that work.
Eric Becker
Amazing. So, when I advise multi-generational family business clients, I always talk about succession planning and how critical it is and that it’s never too early to start. Ryan, I know that there’s a legendary story of when your grandfather transitioned the CEO to your father. Tell us that story and really what was learned about it.
Ryan Cecil
It was 1995, so that was 100 years of Biltmore, the centennial. And my grandfather, he had a big centennial dinner in 1995 inside of Biltmore House. And Biltmore House had the ropes up and was our business. And we didn’t use it as a home very often. And this occasion was a special occasion. There was a dinner hosted there. So as a little kid, I got to participate for photographs. And then we were sent back off home, Chase and I did. But this was a big event. And he said some opening remarks and then basically said after brief remarks for him, you know, now my son Bill, that would be my father, your CEO of the business, good luck. And just turned the mic off and had the dinner and my dad was unaware of that coming. And my grandmother was unaware of it being announced that night. And so, it was kind of a shock to everybody.
And he actually never came back to the office after that. My father kept my grandfather’s office, or our grandfather’s office, the same for two years. But that was his way of succession planning. It makes for a good story, but now we joke, let’s not do that again. He did leave my dad with a good team of executives in place of his peers, but it presented challenges to just, you know, my dad at the time was 35 years old. And then all of a sudden he’s in charge of his peer group right there. And so there were challenges and room for improvement on that.
Eric Becker
Yeah, in fact, when I think of the term mic drop, that might be the ultimate mic drop story I’ve ever heard. Just to announce that right in front of your son who’s not expecting it at all, in front of, you know, the who’s who of Asheville celebrating 100 years. I mean, it’s just, all of those pieces together make for such an incredible to visualize that moment is just incredible.
Ryan Cecil
Yeah, yeah, very much so.
Eric Becker
But I do like it as, first of all, it’s an amazing family story, but it’s also an incredible kind of cautionary tale or something that can be repeated to future generations to say, like, this was amazing, and we got through it. But let’s not do that again. And I think that’s, that’s powerful.
Ryan Cecil
Yeah. Yeah, our succession planning is so much more robust now. Chase and I, my sister, who are directly involved in the business, have been through a lot more training, a lot more of a plan through the company, career development. And it’s been fantastic. The support we’ve gotten through succession planning has been really helpful.
Eric Becker
So, Chase, let’s talk about the family council again. And we talked a little bit about it earlier, but you know, other families have family meetings or family council. And often a lot of those conversations might be focused on financial matters in a family, but your family has been so intentional about prioritizing relationships and values and unity of family alongside the business.
You know, let’s talk about that. Like how did that come into being and how does the family do that?
Chase Pickering
I mean, it goes back again to my mom identifying this as a real, a really important opportunity for our family and our business long term. And, you know, I think when it was very clear, you know, that Bill was going to become CEO, he and my mom worked very closely together to create a very productive working relationship that continues to this day, one that is really rooted in mutual respect for one another. And I think that this has served them both really well, as Bill has been able to focus on leading the business and my mom really focused on the dynamics of leading the family. And so they really became incredible partners on that mission together. And my mom has a very high level of emotional intelligence, and she knew that these kind of foundational relationships were going to be very important for all of us to work together long term. But it was more than just the relationship.
It was also about making sure we had process in place around how we could resolve conflict when it comes up. It’s a family. There’s always, there’s naturally conflict, right? And so, how do we have processes where we can have the right forums to have the conversations to solve those in really productive ways? She also was very thoughtful about what policies we needed to have in place to help guide us forward as a family.
And she really encouraged us to put together policies that encouraged family members to work outside of the company before entering the family business as an example of one. And a whole process for kind of learning the company through a series of internships. So there were many different things put in place that we could work on together that were really rooted in this idea of let’s put in some structure, some policy, so that this could be guided and the same rules could apply from one generation to the next.
Ryan Cecil
And I’d add she’s also, she was always ahead of the policy need by a couple of years, which she did really well, I thought. Instead of it being a crisis and we need a policy quick, let’s draft one because we’ve got a situation or problem, it was she had good foresight into when we would need these, which I always, looking back in hindsight, I really appreciate now.
Eric Becker
No, that’s brilliant. And that actually leads into something that you mentioned earlier, Ryan, that I’m curious about. You said a 500 year plan. And not many people I think would be able to let that roll off their tongue and be serious, but it is serious. Tell us what a 500 year plan means and what that mindset is and how it affects what we do day to day.
Ryan Cecil
Sure. Well, you know, it’s rooted in preservation and stewardship, and it’s rooted in keeping it a working estate. We don’t, you know, looking 500 years down the road, that’s, it’s a long time frame. It’s around 20 generations, but the decisions we make today, you know, they have to serve that longer term goal. And so if you’re thinking of, it helps us stay on brand in the shorter term. So, you know, no giant pink roller coasters on the front lawn or anything like that. It keeps us narrowly focused enough to stay within mission and our core values. And it also stops us from hurrying.
And there’s a double edge to this. You could also putz around too long when you should have taken action. But I think all in all, it serves us well that we can slow down, and we don’t have to rush to a quarterly result or even an annual result. We can take a much longer term perspective on this. So I think you make better decisions when you’re not rushed.
Eric Becker
I agree. It’s this really interesting balance of just the right amount that when there are these moments of truth, we’ve got to take action, and the family has an incredible history and track record of doing it. But then it’s also knowing how to be patient and thoughtful and even look around a corner wherever you can. So it’s just the right amount.
We’ve got some fun questions to wrap this, awesome fun podcast up with. The first is, you know, with the success of shows like Downton Abbey and the Gilded Age, and I know that Biltmore has served as an incredible and beautiful location for multiple movies. But if there was going to be a movie about Biltmore, what part of its history might be featured in that movie or what?
What might that movie look like if there ever was going to be one about Biltmore?
Chase Pickering
Well, Biltmore has a long history of filming movies. We filmed about 12 movies here at Biltmore. And we just wrapped one. So coming this holiday season on Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas, you can see a grand Biltmore Christmas, which we are very excited about. Ryan and I have a small little background role in it. And I think to answer your question directly, what is important about a movie to us? And for me, it’s about how do we bring Biltmore House and Biltmore Estate to life through movies. And the movie that Ryan and I are in is time travel. And so we really do get to step back into what it would have been like at a ball in the grand banquet hall of Biltmore House. These are the kind of moments that I think really help people envision Biltmore House as a home. And I think that that’s the ultimate goal of movies like this.
Eric Becker
I remember, Chase, when we first met during COVID that we took a walk in the gardens. And so I’m curious if both of you had the opportunity to walk with George and with your grandfather, William today and take a walk in those beautiful gardens, what do you think they would be most proud of, of Biltmore?
Chase Pickering
I would, I often think about, you know, what does George Vanderbilt, what does William Cecil, what are they thinking about these decisions we’re making? And I think that both of them would be incredibly proud of how we have carried forward this place and preserved it and kept it together. And I think you would be very proud, they would both be very proud of our families, and just how we have been there to support our community and how we have been there for each other as well through some of these trying times.
Ryan Cecil
Yeah, I think they would both be very pleased with where it is today. I think in particular, they would say, thank you, you haven’t overdone it. I think that would be one thing they would both share. And secondly, I think they would say thank you. You’ve diversified it. It’s not all your eggs are rolling in basket right now. That was always a fear. If something happens to tourism, which has happened a couple of times now, COVID, Hurricane Helene, you know, you’ve diversified it a bit so the legacy can continue.
Eric Becker
So years ago, I ran this contest with 80 board members of companies and 20 CEOs. And I asked, what’s the best question you’ve ever asked or been asked? And this wonderful guy named Gary Keasling was the winner of that. And he said, every day, I ask myself, “What am I tolerating, but shouldn’t be?”
And that question really has had such a great impact on my life. I try my best to ask myself that every day. Some days I forget, but most days I ask myself. I’m curious, the two of you, young leaders coming up and really important roles in the future at Biltmore. What’s the best question that you either like to ask or that someone’s asked you over the years?
Ryan Cecil
That’s a really good one. I’m going to write that down because I think about that often when I get over-scheduled.
Eric Becker
That’s right.
Ryan Cecil
For me, I had the opportunity to meet Steve Schwarzman a couple years back. Actually, at Biltmore. I gave him a tour. And he said, this is more of a comment than a question, but don’t hesitate or shy away from doing big things because oftentimes the big things require about the same amount of work as small things. And I really resonated with that. The asymmetry of that, I resonated with that if you’re to put in the work, if it’s generally similar work and about the same. Go for the big one.
Chase Pickering
And I would say a question, one of my favorite questions is, what’s your purpose? And I often try to ask myself this in the context of my life personally and also professionally. And I think it’s so important that, you know, we feel motivated to be a part of something bigger than us, right? And I think as we’ve talked about today, Biltmore, protecting it, preserving it for 500 plus years into the future, that is a purpose worth investing in. And that is something that I get motivated about every single day. Hey, what can we do as a family? What can I do personally to make sure that this thing is preserved for generations to come?
Eric Becker
And that is a wonderful way for us to bring this fun interview to a close. And I want to leave our audience with this thought, which is for anyone who hasn’t visited Biltmore, I encourage you to make the trip and step back in time, explore this spectacular landmark, this American treasure and experience its rich history. It’s truly a testament to playing the long game and a lesson in enduring vision, resilience, and stewardship across generations.
Ryan and Chase, thank you so much for sharing your family story with us. We really appreciate it. It’s nice to see you both.
Ryan Cecil
Thanks for that, being here. Yeah, thank you.
Chase Pickering
Thank you, Eric. Lots of fun. Thank you.
Eric Becker
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