People ask me how I "balance" running companies and raising three daughters. I don't.
There has never been a traditional work-life balance for us. I'm not sure that really exists when you and your husband are the sole owners of something. The phone call eventually comes to you. An employee needs you. The landlord calls. Something breaks. Payroll is due. Someone quits. Or a break-in happens at 2 AM, the alarms are going off at one of your stores, and you have to get dressed, leave the house, deal with police, board up windows, and somehow make sure the kids don't wake up knowing Mom and Dad just disappeared in the middle of the night.
Yes, that has actually happened. Sadly, more than once. :(
There isn't always someone else to call when you own the company. You are the someone else. And for more than a decade, that has been our life.
My kids grew up with the company
I started Rad Coffee in 2015, and since then almost every part of my life has changed. We opened locations, tried new concepts, hired people, built things, closed things, made mistakes, had great years, had horrible days, and learned approximately 400 professions we never intended to learn. At the same time, we were building our family.
Now we have three daughters, so when I think about motherhood and business ownership, I don't really know how to separate them into two different stories. I grow with the company. My kids grow with the company.
We've always been at different stages together: babies, pregnancies, toddlers, school schedules, new locations, construction, expansion, financial stress, exciting opportunities and scary decisions. Sometimes the company needed more from us. Sometimes our kids did. There was never a point where everything became perfectly organized and we finally figured out "balance." We just kept adjusting.
My husband and I talk about work constantly because work is part of our life, but we've become very conscious about trying to keep the stressful conversations between us. Our daughters don't need to carry the scary parts of owning a business. They don't need to worry about money, landlords, attorneys, leases, employees, construction problems, break-ins, or whatever disaster Mom and Dad are trying to solve that day.
Of course, sometimes they hear things.
My oldest once overheard us talking about a construction issue at one of our locations and completely freaked out. To us, it was another business problem. To her, it sounded terrifying. So suddenly I'm sitting there giving my daughter a crash course in commercial real estate, explaining landlords and tenants, what each person is responsible for, what was actually happening, and why we were going to figure it out.
And she wanted to understand all of it.
Afterward I looked at my husband and said, "She's going to work for me. I can't wait."
That moment made me realize my daughters are growing up understanding how things work. Not because we sit them down for entrepreneurship lessons, but because this is the environment they've grown up in. And I actually love that.
I want them to know they can figure things out
I genuinely don't care if any of my daughters ever own a business. What I want is for them to believe they can figure things out, because that's basically what I've been doing for the last decade.
I didn't magically know how to negotiate a commercial lease. I learned. I didn't know construction. I learned. I didn't know HR, insurance, health departments, permitting, payroll, roasting, manufacturing, websites, marketing, or most of the other things I've had to understand over the years. Now I'm building a software company and learning an entirely new world all over again.
You ask questions. You find people who know more than you. You make mistakes. You Google things. You ask more questions. You figure it out. Then the next time something happens, you know a little more.
That's how I've built companies, and weirdly enough, that's also how I want to raise my daughters. I want them to ask questions and understand how things work. Most importantly, I never want them to think they're disqualified from doing something just because they don't know how to do it yet.
None of this is very glamorous
Owning businesses gets presented online in such a strange way. It can look like freedom, success, opening-day photos, big announcements and getting to be your own boss. Sometimes it is those things.
But we've sacrificed business for our personal life, and we've sacrificed our personal life for the businesses. Both are true.
There have been opportunities we couldn't take because our family needed us. There have also been family plans interrupted because something happened at a store and there was nobody else who could handle it. There's no inspirational quote that makes leaving your house at 2 AM because somebody smashed a window feel glamorous. It's just part of it.
Being the owner means eventually the problem rolls uphill until it reaches you.
That's also why I've become obsessed with systems. I have three daughters, employees, locations, a marriage, a house, existing businesses, a new company I'm building, and approximately 900 open tabs in my brain at all times.
"My brain cannot be the system."
If something happens repeatedly, eventually I want a process for it. If an employee needs information, there should be somewhere to find it. If something needs to be ordered every week, someone shouldn't have to magically remember it. If I have to personally remind everyone of the same thing over and over, something is broken.
People might assume I'm naturally insanely organized. I'm not. My life requires systems.
That's a big part of why I'm building DeskPanther now. After more than a decade of running stores while raising a family, I know exactly how much mental space gets eaten up by tiny things an owner is expected to remember, check, text someone about, follow up on, or worry about. I don't want my brain responsible for remembering all of it anymore, and I don't think other owners should have to live that way either.
They're watching me start over again
My daughters are now watching their mom learn an entirely new industry. Again.
They see me building DeskPanther. They hear me talking about software. They see me learning things I didn't know six months ago and turning an idea into something real. I hope they remember that more than any success that comes from it.
I don't want them thinking adults eventually reach some magical age where we know what we're doing. Half the time, we don't. We just get better at figuring it out.
Our family has had so many businesses and tried so many things over the years. Some worked. Some didn't. Some became something completely different from what we originally imagined. I hope watching all of that makes "anything is possible" feel less like something printed on a poster and more like something they've actually witnessed.
So, how do I balance three kids and companies?
I don't.
Some weeks the businesses get more of me. Some weeks my daughters get more of me. Sometimes we sacrifice an opportunity because our family needs us. Sometimes we sacrifice family time because the businesses need us. We change plans, work weird hours, build systems, ask for help, handle whatever is on fire, and wake up and do it again.
There isn't a perfect equation where everything gets an equal amount of us. There is just our family, constantly moving the weight around so the whole thing doesn't tip over.
The businesses grow. My daughters grow. I grow.
We've been doing all three at the same time for more than a decade.
When I think about what I want my girls to remember from growing up this way, I don't want it to simply be that Mom and Dad worked a lot. I hope they remember that we built things. We tried things. We took risks. We screwed things up. We changed our minds. We learned. We kept going.
And when we didn't know how to do something, we figured it out.
Because someday one of my daughters is going to have some completely ridiculous idea of her own. When that happens, I hope her first thought isn't, "Can I do that?"
I hope it's:
"Okay. How do I do that?"
If growing up inside all of this gives my daughters that mindset, then I think they got to see one of the best parts of this crazy life.
The stories and opinions shared here are based on my personal experience as a business owner and mom. Nothing on this site should be considered legal, financial, HR, parenting, or professional advice. Every business, family, and situation is different.