The other day, on one of our many dog-walks, Catherine and I were discussing her business. Next steps, designing a website, controlling costs, everything.
She stopped dead on the sidewalk, threw her hands up and said, "Mommy, owning a business is SO STRESSFUL."
I just laughed. For years, she's seen me struggle and scrape and work a million hours to get my businesses off the ground, but it took HER having to make decisions about logos and product mix and pricing to really feel a tiny bit of what it's like to be a business owner.
This is good. It's good for her to understand the pressure that both her parents are under all the time, trying to make a business or two work. It's good for her to see that owning a business isn't all selling product and going on podcasts and driving cars with billionaire doors (warning, that clip has some serious swear words in it, and no, Catherine has not seen it.)
Owning a business is the boring stuff, too. It's balancing the checkbook and shrink-wrapping soap and taking 200 pictures of the same bars of soap in different lighting so they don't look like chewed-up gum. It's fiddling with the font on your website and comparing hosting plans to see which one takes the lowest percentage of fees from your credit card transactions.
And yeah, that's a lot for a 10-year-old. But she's not alone. She has me. And I'm really good at the boring stuff.