I Work For My Parents

Hi everyone. For purposes of this blog, my name is Will. I’d share my actual name, but I’m in the highly (and annoyingly) regulated financial services industry, which means if I were to share my name and company I’d have to include all sorts of boring disclosures. I’d also have to submit each post to the compliance department of a completely separate company, only to hope that within a week it would be “approved” by someone I’ve never met in person.
Will, you say, could you share your real name and not say the name of your company and avoid the compliance requirement? To which I’d say yes. But the purpose of this blog is to talk about my company, and about business in general, so I’d rather just go by Will and talk about things in high level terms and write whatever I want (kind of) whenever I want.
So again, the name’s Will, and I’m 31 years old. To the dismay of my parents, I don’t yet have a wife or kids, which is surprisingly common within my close group of friends who are around the same age, surely something to be analyzed by those who study generational differences and seek to find something to blame for them. What’s most important for you to know about me, however, is that those same parents who yearn to hold my non existent offspring are also my bosses. I work for my parents; I report as an adult to the same people I reported to as a child. Albeit I’m the Chief Operating Officer of our firm and one of the five members of our executive team, but nonetheless my world starts and ends with the two people that brought me into it. Oh yeah. I’m also an only child.
Don’t mistake my tone for unhappiness or bitterness. I love what I do, I love my parents, and I love working with them. I’m extremely fortunate in many ways, not the least of which is the opportunity at a relatively young age to have the autonomy to run a 50 employee company on a fast growth path. Not to mention I’ll be able to look back on this stage in my life and appreciate that I got to see my parents every day and form a deeper bond with them during a time in life when most people are miles away from their family. So I’m very happy and grateful.
But there are DEFINITELY nuances to being an only child, working with your parents, all while balancing everyone’s perception of me. That includes our employees, our clients, my friends, and even my parents. Which is why I named this blog Shoulder Chips. Depending on your level of self awareness, if you’re the second generation in a family business while the first is still present, you can either be 1) entitled and lazy or 2) ambitious and motivated by the need to prove yourself to everyone. I’ve always felt I’m a very self aware person, and assuming I’m not completely wrong, I feel I possess the second of those two sets of traits. Over the course of my tenure at our firm, I’ve found that I’m always worried, focused, or concerned with making sure none of our stakeholders think I take things for granted or assume I don’t need to be held to the same expectations as anyone else just because of my last name. So I call those thoughts and concerns my shoulder chips.
In this blog I want to share my thoughts on operating a business, the ups and downs, and sprinkle in the sometimes emotional, sometimes humorous, and sometimes difficult aspects of running a family business. The ultimate hope is to provide, as often as I can, perspectives, insights, ideas, and tips for anyone operating a business. There have been so many times at work, and there will continue to be, where there are fires to be put out everywhere, and you think to yourself, there’s no way anyone can relate to this or understand how to solve these problems. The reality, and what you start to realize after putting out fire after fire, is that every business is in a constant state of balancing successes with utter failures, and that no business owner or operator is alone even if they feel like they are.
So I guess the ultimate goal for this blog is that by sharing my perspective, experiences, struggles, triumphs, and everything in between, anyone reading who is in a similar position can find a solution to a problem, a new and needed perspective, a useful tip, or at the very least some comfort that they aren’t the first person to encounter whatever issue is ablaze in their world. If nothing else, hopefully a few people can have a few laughs at my expense.
I’m going to try to post my thoughts here once a week. Sometimes it may be more often or less. Regardless, each time I’ll aim to provide value in some way. For now I’ll end this inaugural post by sharing something I personally just started doing at work that I should have been doing long ago (and something a lot of people already do).
Historically I would take my laptop into every meeting I had throughout the day. The idea was to take notes and keep up with anything urgent that may pop up in my inbox. In reality, nothing was ever urgent enough to be worth the distraction of having an ever growing list of emails in my face while in a meeting with other people. Instead of taking notes, I was half paying attention to the most important thing in the room, our employees, and responding to emails instead of jotting down important action items and ideas. So a few weeks ago, I decided to trade the laptop for a notebook and a pen. I already had a growing pile of brand new notebooks in my desk drawer, one of the perks of vendor relationships, so I took the top one, grabbed a writing utensil, and headed to my first meeting as a changed man. Just in the past few weeks I’ve become more focused in meetings, which has made them more productive because people can tell I’m more focused and engaged. I’ve also become more personally productive because any time an action item or idea comes up in a meeting (or elsewhere), I write it down in the notebook and address it later at my desk when I have time to focus on it. I also don’t leave work until the open items in the notebook are addressed in some form or fashion. So the bottom line is, if you feel like you’re constantly struggling to keep up with the myriad thoughts and to-do’s that pop into your head, and you don’t have a systemized way of synthesizing those thoughts and ensuring no balls get dropped, try grabbing a notebook and a pen and see where that takes you.
That’s all I’ve got for now. I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts each week. And hopefully all 14 people that currently follow this account feel the same way.
Until next time,
Will
