From Daughter to Business Partner: The Story of a Family Business

I'm the youngest.

Often, people assume I was born the eldest, but as the youngest of four siblings I suppose those "eldest sibling traits" can start over again.

But I'm not just the youngest daughter, I'm also the business partner.

From the time I was in high school, I started to notice the happenings of my father. His personal office that sat at the front of the house. The early mornings I'd wake up and find him already at his desk typing. The joy of grabbing lunch in the middle of a weekday because he kept his own hours.

The glow of the computer screen on his face when the entire house was dark, but he was still hard at work.

And the imagination.

Always with the ideas... one after the other. My father has never once been short of an innovative, interesting, or intriguing idea.

And at just 16, he brought me into the excitement.

Without a high school diploma, he and my mother were already helping me buy my first "real" computer (the household desktop wouldn't quite cut it for graphic design). He was giving me design work and helping me find new small business clients.

And in college, I wasn't dreaming up the best kind of employee I could be.

That didn't even occur to me.

I was dreaming up what kind of coffee shop I could own. Maybe one that would also be a church?

I was itching to be a business owner, just like my Dad.

And for a few very short years, my brand new degree and background in graphic design got me a job in a university where I helped shape and design marketing materials that would recruit new students.

But even then, I was the squeaky wheel trying to innovate new ways of helping a very old system serve the campus better.

Young and naive, I didn't have the wherewithal to realize that nothing innovative would ever happen in public university administration.

And then there was my father, once again, inviting me into his work.

So, I became his business partner.

And business started to take off.

I had to quit my job, join the team full-time, and act like I knew how to be a boss and run a business.

I didn't.

I didn't know jack.

But there I was, hiring and firing, working with clients, making "big girl" decisions.

And in my youth... in my arrogance... I forgot to treat my father with the respect he very much deserved.

My own set of God-given gifts were precisely the right kinds to rub my father the wrong way. His gifts were exactly the kind to send me into a frustrated spiral.

We would argue.

We would yell... politely.

We would lead meetings while butting heads the entire time. Team watching. Employees waiting for us to calm down and agree on something... anything.

We had become the toxic, family-owned business everyone expected from us.

We were kind to each other, generally, and tried to do well by our team. We tried to love on them and pay them well. We attempted to get along and make good decisions.

But, we were in a constant cycle of arguing, calming down, agreeing, and moving on. Every day it seemed like a new argument would crop up and send us both storming off to our desks.

My husband and my mother joined the party. Even my older sister brought her own amazing skills and book of business to join the fun. 

And it was fun, sometimes. But it was colored by a lot of strife. A lot of striving. A lot of stress and anger.

And we ran things like that for a long time.

But eventually, business was struggling. And without knowing it, my father and I were struggling as well.

Our mental health wasn't great. Our stress was constant. And we both knew that the environment we had built for our team was not healthy. Not godly.

And then I became a mother.

After years of waiting for the Lord to give us children, my husband and I had twin girls.

We were (are) smitten. 

And with every difficult parenting moment my heart was softened. After every challenging night caring for *two* crying infants came my father with compassion. Giving me grace where I didn't deserve it. Loving on my family in a way only "Grandpa" could.

And things started to shift.

By now, we had significantly down-sized. We had given up our brick and mortar, and COVID solidified a life of working remotely.

And we were asking ourselves some deeper questions:

• How did God design us to work together?
• Could we come to work as whole people?
• What does it mean to be a Christian at work?
• What does it mean that our business actually belongs to God?

You see, my parents used to be church planters. They were pastors. And my love for the Lord had been constant from the age of five.

It's not that we were far from the Lord. It's that our business and our faith had not found a way to collaborate. Not really.

The sacred-secular divide was still very real for our family and our business.

But, as that line blurred between work and worship, our own strife dissolved.

The Lord humbled us and then changed our hearts. And it was like a brand-new partnership.

I became my Dad's biggest fan. I started to listen better and appreciate more about how his mind worked.

I started to apologize and calm down faster, not letting myself spin into such a rage.

We began to seek Jesus as a family and as business partners.

We started reading scripture in the middle of our work, praying together in the middle of our work, and taking risks that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with God's calling in the marketplace.

What I wish I had known earlier as a daughter and a business partner:

I wish I'd known earlier that I am the child and he is the father.

My father deserved respect that I did not give him the early years of our partnership. He had a lifetime of experience before I was even putting real sentences together. If I'd come into the business with more humility, things would have been different much earlier.

This isn't about men vs women. This isn't a declaration that men lead and women don't.

This is about the order of the family. And even while he treated me with respect and like an equal, I should have come into our partnership ready to listen, learn, and seek his advice.

I wish I'd known earlier that we were gifted with different abilities.

I spent much of my time as his business partner feeling one of two ways: 

1. He was wrong and I was right.
2. Why didn't my brain work as brilliantly as his did?

But if I had a deep, Biblical understanding of his skills compared to mine, we could have operated in a culture of appreciation and honor. We are designed with very different skills and priorities, and to understand those is to have a new level of strength and fullness in looking like Jesus.

I wish I'd known earlier that work does not clash with worship.

As deeply as I have loved Jesus, I have never loved Him more than when I saw my daily work as an act of worship. Knowing that time "at the office" is sacred has transformed the way I view my life and my ministry.

If I had known that the day I came on as a business partner, my work would have had so much more meaning and fruit.

I wish I'd known earlier that family is an ideal way to run a business.

This cliché has been so utterly ruined by our culture, it's hard to talk about family and business in the same sentence. But the truth is that family and business were always meant to be intertwined. If I had understood the *gift* of family business back then, maybe we would not have wounded so many employees and contractors by our own toxic issues.

My Dad is my business partner. He's my ministry team member. And he's my fellow dreamer.

Every day I get invited into what God is doing. And I get to do that work with my father.

And my prayer for you is that your family business would be so redeemed by Jesus that it would be an expression of the family of God wherever you go and whatever you do.

That your work would have so much meaning and purpose that it would be an extension of God's adoptive character, as He invites each of us into His family.. into belonging... into a little piece of Heaven on earth.