Steady as He Goes
Thomas Crowley deftly navigates Crowley Maritime through its third generation
“People like to remind me that it takes three generations to make and lose a family fortune,” laughs Thomas Crowley (BA 1989), CEO, president and chairman of Crowley Maritime Corporation, the shipping, logistics and marine services company founded by his grandfather and grown to international prominence by his father.
Crowley is keenly aware of the unique challenge of sustaining a family business on a global scale. In fact, he’s expanding it.
After nearly 16 years at the helm, Crowley Maritime is a $1.5 billion company with more than 200 vessels—mostly tugs, tankers and barges—and 4,300 employees across the world primarily engaged in container shipping and logistics; petroleum transportation and distribution; ocean towing; harbor tug services; vessel design, ship management, and marine salvage.
Expedited succession
Crowley first worked for the family business at age 16 as a ticket collector on its Red & White Fleet of passenger ferries in the San Francisco Bay—the same place that, back in 1892, a 17-year-old upstart named Tom Crowley invested his life savings in a Whitehall row boat and set out to make his fortune transporting mariners and provisions to and from ships at anchor.
Nearly a century later, Tom Crowley’s grandson tasted every aspect of the modern Crowley Maritime while attending the UW. He worked as a barge mechanic in Seattle Harbor, a deckhand on an Alaskan tug, a dock worker in Prudhoe Bay, and also interned in accounting, sales and marketing.
After graduation, as his roommates retreated to Sun Valley for a summer of fun, Crowley boarded a plane to Florida to begin a management training program at the company’s East Coast headquarters. “I don’t know why I didn’t go with them,” he says. “But in hindsight, I’m lucky that I didn’t. Because, as it turned out, I didn’t have a lot of time.”
His father, then CEO of Crowley Maritime, died after a recurrence of prostate cancer in 1994. Thomas Crowley, Jr., was 27 years of age and five years out of college when he was handed the keys to the kingdom.
Circumstances—and maybe fortune—prepared him as thoroughly as possible for his premature accession. After supervising stevedores in Jacksonville and managing ferries in San Francisco, he had joined the corporate office in Oakland. “The last two years my dad and I spent together were invaluable,” Crowley says.
Leadership, not finance
Crowley quickly found his footing, leaning on a strong and veteran senior executive team. He reorganized the company, refocused its existing maritime operations on the US West, East and Gulf Coasts, and strengthened the company’s position in Central America and the Caribbean with expanded container shipping and logistics services.
He also extinguished a major family crisis. After a sell-off by minority shareholders diluted the family’s control, Crowley Maritime was forced to go public in 2000. Faced with exorbitant accounting costs after Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted, Crowley executed the rare maneuver of taking a public company private again.
“Having consistent management over long periods of time gives us the patience and courage to carry out strategic plans,” he says. “We’ve certainly learned the value and advantage of being a family business, and built on that.”
He’s come to appreciate his firm financial foundation from the Foster School, which has allowed him to focus on building corporate leadership, strategy, culture and values.
Crowley: the Next Generation
Developing leadership across the company is also a form of self-preservation for Crowley, who found himself directing a billion-dollar family business so early in life.
It’s about pacing and priorities. And spending time with the fourth generation of the Crowley clan. Crowley’s father never pressured him to join the family business, and he’s determined to avoid piling ponderous expectations on his own children, age 10 and 12.
“One of my biggest challenges,” he says, “is to be as clever as my dad was at getting them interested without scaring them off.”
Fortunately, they love the business—at the dinner table they ask to hear the gory details of life at Crowley Maritime. “It’s a family business,” Crowley says. “It’s fun. It makes coming to work a lot more than just getting a paycheck.”
Thomas and Christine Crowley are among the consortium of leadership donors known as the “Founders” of Founders Hall.
Learn about Crowley Maritime’s efforts to support the recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Irma hit in 2017.
