We've Starved Together. We've Won Together. That's What a Decade in Business With Your Family Actually Looks Like.

I don't talk about this enough publicly, but the people I work with every day aren't just colleagues. Keenan is my brother. Darryl is my dad. Lori is my mom.

FRANSiS is a family business in the most literal sense of the word. And I've been thinking lately about what that actually means — the beautiful parts, the hard parts, and the parts that are both at the same time.

The Part Nobody Prepares You For

The hardest thing nobody prepares you for is the loss of privacy. When your family is your business, there's no clean separation between Sunday dinner and Monday morning. My parents know what my calendar looks like. They know the revenue numbers. They know when a client is struggling and when I'm struggling. There's no version of "I'm fine, everything's great" that holds up when the people you're saying it to were in the same Monday meeting.

At first that felt like a lot. It still does sometimes.

What Transparency Actually Buys You

But I've started to see it differently. That transparency — as uncomfortable as it can be — is also what makes us move fast. There's no politics. There's no positioning. When something isn't working, we say it. When someone disagrees, they say that too. We've had arguments. Real ones. The kind that don't happen between people who are just being professional with each other.

And every single time, we've come back to the same thing we promised each other early on: we are family first. The company is something we built. The four of us — Keenan, Darryl, Lori, and me — that's not something we built. That's just what we are.

Growing up, it was always the four of us. Not a lot of extended family in the picture, not a big network of cousins and holidays with thirty people. Just us. A pack of four. And somewhere along the way, building FRANSiS started to feel like the most natural extension of that — like this is actually how it was always supposed to go.

The Weight of It

There's also the weight of it. When it's just you and a business partner, the pressure is professional. When it's your family, the pressure is personal in a way that's hard to explain. I'm not just thinking about my own financial future. I'm thinking about my parents. About what this company means for them. About the fact that my dad and my mom have put real trust in something Keenan and I are building, and that trust means more to me than any investor or client relationship ever could.

That's a lot to carry. I won't pretend otherwise.

But here's what I didn't expect: watching my family grow inside this company has been one of the greatest gifts of my adult life. I get to see my brother step into his vision and lead in ways that genuinely surprise me. I get to watch my parents — who are getting older, as parents do — show up every single day with energy and investment in something we're all creating together. Time I would have spent in a different office, for a different company, building someone else's dream — I get to spend it with the people I love most.

You don't get that back. I know that.

And then there's the thing that's hardest to put into words: we've been doing this together for over a decade. This isn't something we jumped into. I'll be honest — when we first started, I used to get embarrassed when my dad would refer to me as his daughter in a professional setting. I was young, I was trying to establish myself, and I wanted to be taken seriously on my own terms. I didn't want to be somebody's kid. I wanted to be somebody.

But as the years went by something shifted. Watching my dad counsel me, guide me, pour everything he knows into helping me grow in this — I stopped being embarrassed and started being proud. Genuinely proud. Not everyone gets to learn from someone who also happens to love them unconditionally. That's not a liability. That's one of the greatest advantages I've ever had.

The Lows and the Wins

We've been in it long enough to have experienced real lows together — the moments where the business was hard and the uncertainty was loud and we all felt it at the same time, around the same dinner table, in the same group chat, carrying the same weight. There's something about going through that with your family that bonds you in a way a normal team never could. But the flip side is just as true. When things are good — really good — we get to feel that together too. The wins hit differently when the people celebrating with you are the same people who were starving with you. We've done both. And honestly, I wouldn't have wanted to do either one with anyone else.

So yes, there are hard conversations. Yes, there are moments where being family makes everything more complicated instead of easier. Yes, sometimes I wish I could just leave work at work.

But I also know that what we've built is real, and it's working, and the people who built it with me are my family. We're not just getting started — we're hitting our stride. And doing that with the people I love most, who have been in it with me from the beginning, is something I don't take lightly for a single day.

I wouldn't trade it for anything.

Are you building something with people you love? I'd genuinely love to hear how you navigate it, feel free to reach out here.

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