What It’s Really Like to Run a Business With Your Mother

By Angie  |  Co-Founder, Little Zi

April 2026  ·  6 min read

People always say one of two things when they find out I work with my mom. Either “oh, how sweet!” or “how do you possibly do that?” The funny thing is — both of those people are right.

Two Reactions, One Truth

There are no neutral reactions to “I work with my mother.”

Half the people light up. They picture mother-daughter brunches, the warmth other family businesses don’t quite have. They tell me how special it is. They mean it.

The other half ask, gently or not so gently — how can you possibly do that? They picture every Sunday dinner that ended in tears. They picture the things their own mom does that drive them up a wall, multiplied by forty hours a week. They mean that, too.

Here is the honest version.

It IS sweet. It is also absolutely chaotic. Both things, every single day.

How We Actually Work Together

My mom — Zizzi — is the vision person. She has the idea. She sees the thing the rest of us cannot see yet. She knows what she wants and she goes for it, and she has been that way her entire life.

I am the doer. The executor. The problem-solver. Years in finance and a lifetime of watching my parents run family businesses taught me one skill above all: when something needs to get done, you figure it out. You don’t agonize. You just solve.

So in a way, we complement each other. She dreams it, I build it. On a good day, it works beautifully.

But it took me years to get here.

I Used to Just Do What She Said

I grew up in an Asian household, and I want to be honest about what that meant. The relationship between parent and child wasn’t equal. It wasn’t supposed to be. My parents were my parents, they were above me, and that was simply the order of things.

So when I started working with my mom, I never thought of us as partners. I never thought to disagree. Even when I had a different opinion — even when I could see a more efficient way to do something — I would say nothing. I would just execute.

And honestly, in the beginning, that was easier. The hierarchy was clean. The decisions were made. My job was to deliver.

The Shift

What changed everything was growing up.

I got married. I had Sophia. I had Checa. I started running my own household, my own family, my own version of “the way things should be done.” And along the way, somewhere between motherhood and a career, I developed something I had never really had with my mom before.

Opinions.

Speaking up in a corporate job is one thing. Speaking up to your mother — who is your boss, your business partner, the woman who raised you, and the keeper of decades of business experience all rolled into one — is something else entirely.

The Hardest Conversation We Ever Had

Last year, we had The Conversation. The capital-T one.

It was emotional. It was heavy. It was, honestly, a little dramatic. We sat down and said: if we are going to keep doing this together, we have to be honest with each other. We have to listen, even when we don’t want to. We have to say the thing.

That conversation changed how we work. We still disagree — pretty much every single day, on something. But now we say it. We talk it through. We get to the other side. We don’t go at each other. We discuss strongly.

It is not always easy. But it is honest. And that is so much better than the alternative.

What Family Business Really Teaches You

If you are working with family — anyone, your mom, your dad, your sister, your cousin — here is the lesson I keep learning, over and over.

You don’t have to agree. You do have to listen.

You have to agree to disagree. And then you have to actually do the agreeing-to-disagree part — not just say the words.

And every time you hit a hard moment, you have to ask yourself one question: what is more important right now — the business, or the relationship?

For me, the answer is almost always the relationship. She is my mom. The business is something we are building together. The mother-daughter part is the foundation everything else sits on. If I sacrifice that for a quarterly number, I have lost the whole point.

So we find common ground. Always. Even when it takes a while.

The Real Reason I Keep Doing It

Could I go back to banking? Of course I could. There are days I think about how clean and orderly that life used to be. The disagreements at a bank are just normal disagreements — they don’t come home with you to Sunday dinner.

But I would never trade this.

I get to spend time with my mom every single day. I get to listen to her thinking. I get to watch how she sees the world, how she dreams something into existence and refuses to back down until it is real. I get to learn from the person I admire most.

And one day, my daughters are going to know that the brand they grew up around was built by their mother and their grandmother — together. That is not nothing. That is everything.

A Note If You’re Building With Family

Keep going.

Yes, it is hard. Yes, you will have the capital-T conversation, and probably more than one. But this isn’t just a business. It is your family’s legacy. And legacies are not built around the hard conversations — they are built through them.

Be kind to yourself. Be kind to her, too. And keep going.

A Question for You

If you work with family — what is the hardest thing about it? And what is the best?

I would love to read your story in the comments.

Until next time, mama. 💛

— Angie

Co-Founder, Little Zi

littlezi.com