🔒Following untimely death of patriarch and co-founder, family-run BioSafe’s next generation thrust into leadership

It wasn’t supposed to be Rob Larose’s time.

“My dad was never going to retire,” said his daughter Lauren Crane. “We all thought for sure that if anything was going to happen, he’d have at least 10, 15 years still. And he thought that way too. I mean, none of us were expecting this.”

Just a day after attending a big family birthday celebration for his son and granddaughter one weekend last September, Larose died peacefully in his sleep, at age 64.

He was the president and CEO of BioSafe Systems, a 25-year-old, family-run chemical company headquartered in East Hartford that he had founded with his father, Rene Larose.

His untimely death left Crane and her brothers Matt and Mike Larose — all executives at BioSafe, which has more than 70 employees — with more than just their own personal grief to process.

“He passed on Sunday and that Monday we just said, ‘We have to go to work,’” recalled Crane. “We have to go talk to everybody and make sure everyone’s comforted and knows that we’re going to keep the business going. He was like a dad to a lot of people here.”

On top of all that came another pressing issue that couldn’t wait: There was no company succession plan.

“Because my dad was never going to give up control, it really wasn’t talked about, it wasn’t planned,” said Crane.

So, it was left to the three siblings to figure it out.

“We sat in the conference room there and everyone was like, someone has to be the leader,” said Crane.

“He’d be very proud if he saw the way it was handled,” said her brother, Mike Larose.

“We decided it as a group,” added the third sibling, Matt Larose.

And that was how Crane — at 38, the middle child of the three — became president and CEO of BioSafe.

According to the numbers, it’s a crisis that has the potential to happen in many family businesses in Connecticut and beyond.

Only 27% of U.S. family businesses have a fully structured succession plan, according to a recent survey by the First Bank Center for Family-Owned Businesses, a privately-owned bank.

Similarly, a recently conducted Connecticut Business & Industry Association survey found that 27% of family businesses in the state have a comprehensive succession plan.

Successful formula

BioSafe’s origins date back to the 1990s, when the siblings’ grandfather, Rene Larose was tinkering with a chemical formula he hoped could be used as a non-toxic pesticide and disinfectant.

A microbiologist with degrees from UConn and UMass, Larose had a long career as a laboratory director and research virologist at poultry breeder Arbor Acres in Glastonbury.

“My grandpa’s job,” Crane said, “was making sure that they stayed clean and healthy and free of infection and disease. And so, that’s where he came up with the idea of using” peroxyacetic acid, or PAA.

PAA is essentially a combination of hydrogen peroxide and acetic acid or vinegar, both common and safe household chemicals. It can kill pests, fungi and bacteria on contact, and then breaks down swiftly, leaving no chemical residue behind.

The mixture had been around since the 1970s, and previously used as a hard-surface disinfectant, but never before for the types of applications Rene and his son Rob developed, notably to battle plant diseases in the greenhouse industry.

“Where BioSafe’s milestone is, or what made it a revolutionary company, is that no one had ever taken this chemistry and applied it to plant tissue, or a lot of the applications we now use it for,” said Mike Larose.

Its lack of toxic residues appealed to Rob Larose’s personal focus on environmental responsibility.

“My father emphasized to us a lot that he wanted our company to be all about sustainability,” said Matt Larose. “It’s not something that we just dabble in, that’s what we do.”

While Rene had the chemistry expertise, Rob had the business acumen to recognize they had come up with a widely marketable idea. BioSafe registered its first product, ZeroTol, in 1998, and from there it was all hands on deck for the Larose family.

Rob’s brother, Steve Larose, at that time working in the restaurant industry, was recalled, along with a cousin, Mike Abbott.

“That was the four of us,” Steve Larose recalls. “And we sat around a table like this with four phones and a map and a phone book. And we just started calling people and trying to get someone to try it.”

The kids — then in grade school — also got in on the ground floor.

“It was truly a grassroots effort,” said Crane. “We used to help fill product in the basement. Then my dad would drive around and try and get people to take a sample and try it out and get testimonials from customers.”

Horticulture was their first successful market, among greenhouse growers who wanted an alternative to toxic pesticides. From there they branched out into field agriculture and soil remediation.

While the company has always remained headquartered in Connecticut, first in Glastonbury and then in East Hartford, many of its biggest customers are elsewhere in the country, in regions with a bigger agricultural presence.

Steve Larose moved to Florida for a while, to get the business off the ground there.

“Let me tell you, it was not easy being a Yankee trying to sell to the growers down there. They did not want to talk to me,” he smiled. “When we started to broaden our sales force and we started to hire people native to Florida, sales really took off.”

Now, once a new territory is identified and opened up, BioSafe will hire local sales reps to connect to customers. Manufacturing, too, has been decentralized.

“We started building manufacturing facilities and warehouses where our major growing areas are,” said Vice President of Sales Jeff Kline. “It fit our sustainability mission — less carbon footprint, obviously, than trucking across the country.”

“Building plants where our sales are, allowed us to have a shorter response time to our customers,” he added.

BioSafe has manufacturing facilities in Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, along with warehouses in California and Washington.

Meanwhile, other applications have also joined the lineup, including disinfecting bodies of water, ranging from small ornamental koi ponds to large municipal water systems.

Animal health applications now include foot baths for cattle, and water line treatments to keep livestock pens supplied with safe drinking water.

In fact, the success of multiple new applications for a while meant the company grew well beyond its horticultural roots, until the advent of the cannabis industry brought it full circle back into the greenhouse.

“When it was underground, they were using some pretty gnarly pesticides, which were actually hurting people,” said Kline of cannabis growers. “And with our chemistry being no residual, it was perfect for medicinal cannabis, right? So now, we’re pretty much the top name when it comes to crop protection in cannabis.”

As a privately held company, BioSafe does not disclose financial information, but it has seen consistent year-over-year growth, and over the last 10 years has grown revenues by 140%, officials said.

New horizons

For the future, Kline said he sees growth potential in the U.S., as well as in new international markets. Already in Canada and Mexico, BioSafe is looking at expansion into Central and South America.

And Kline also sees more potential in the retail market. While BioSafe has grown principally as a business-to-business company, it does sell to retail customers through independent garden centers and on Amazon. Kline said the company is working on partnering with high-profile brands to get further into the retail space.

BioSafe recently patented its Restorative Soils Program, which works to improve soil health for crop production, and opened a new innovation center where an all-female lab team is at work.

As for Rob Larose’s children, they’re also continuing to re-imagine the company without their father’s guiding hand.

“We’re still processing it to some degree,” said Matt Larose. “We did not know how the company at large would react. And there were a lot of questions. But I’ve got to say, it’s been very encouraging.”

They say while the management style may evolve a little with a new generation, the core vision will stay the same.

“We got a lot of phone calls from people looking to purchase the business,” said Crane, “and we could have gone that way. But we don’t want to, because that’s not what he would’ve wanted or what he would’ve done. My dad’s biggest tagline was, ‘complete the mission.’”