Building a Business With Your Kid (Whether You Meant To or Not)

My son was five years old when we ran our first camp pilot.

He didn't know it was a pilot. He just knew there were kids, and costumes, and that his mom was in charge of something exciting. He ran around with the campers like he belonged there — because he did. Perfectly Me was never just my business. From the very beginning, it was our world.

What I didn’t expect, when he was still a baby and I was just beginning, was that building this business would become one of the primary ways he learned about life. And watching him learn it would teach more something too.

He's eleven now. And in six years, he has seen everything.

There's an old expression — living above the store — for the families who don't just run a business, but live inside it. That's us. Perfectly Me isn't something I go to and come home from. It lives in our house, in our conversations, in the energy of whatever week we're in.

My son hasn't just watched from the sidelines — he's been in it. He's been a camper from the beginning, experiencing the programs the same way our kids do, feeling the magic of what we build from the inside. His face is in our comic books — literally a hero in the Perfectly Me universe, printed and in kids' hands. He has grown up knowing, in the way that children know things deeply and without question, that his mommy is trying to change the world.

That's not something I sat him down and explained. He just absorbed it — from the conversations, the late nights, the families who found us, the kids who came back summer after summer. He lives inside the mission.

My son has seen all of it. Not the highlight reel. All of it.

He's seen me cry. Real tears — the kind where you work hard and do your best, but your new location doesn’t work, or a camp didn't fill, or a moment when you wonder if you are building something that can scale or just running very fast and going nowhere. He didn't look away. He couldn’t look away. He “lives above the store.” But, he'd sit with me, or quietly encourage me, or just be nearby the way kids are when they know you need a witness more than advice.

He's also seen me celebrate. From the moments when camps filled up and when a parent stopped me to say their kid finally found somewhere they belonged to when we signed a new school partnership, and I did a little dance in the kitchen. I love a good dance party! He absorbed all of it. The excitement, the relief, the quiet pride I tried not to make too big a deal about but absolutely did.

He is part of our business in the truest sense. And he knows it. He already talks about running Perfectly Me when he grows up. Not as a vague "maybe someday" but as a plan. His plan. Like it's already his inheritance, waiting for him.

But he was also there for the hardest losses — that sting most.

In 2024, we tried to expand to a new location. We did our research. We built the plan. We marketed! We thought we did everything right. And then the enrollments just... didn't come. It was one of those failures that doesn't announce itself dramatically — it just quietly doesn't work, and you have to sit with that. I sat with it a lot.

So did he. He was 9. He notices things.

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This summer, we're expanding again, trying to prove the model is replicable. New location, new energy, new everything I've been pouring into since I decided I wasn't going to let one failure be the last word on what Perfectly Me can become.

But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't scared to look at the numbers.

There's a particular kind of fear that lives in the space between trying again and finding out if it worked. It's not the same fear as the first time. It's heavier because now you know exactly what failure feels like.

I pulled up the enrollment data. And before I could even process what I was seeing, I called my son downstairs. I don't know why, exactly — habit, maybe. I started to show him the numbers.

And without missing a beat, he looked at me and said:

"I hope it's not like the last time."

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I had to laugh. And then I almost cried. And then I laughed again.

Because he remembered. He remembered when we tried and failed. He remembered what it felt like in our house when we realized it wasn't going to turn around. He had filed it away, the way kids file away the things that matter to the people they love.

He wasn't being cruel or anxious. He was being honest — the way only an eleven-year-old who grew up watching you build something can be honest. He had skin in the game. He always has.

He's learned that plans don't always work, and you make new ones. That failure has a name and an address, and you can say it out loud without it destroying you. That the numbers matter, but so does the reason you're looking at them.

He's learned resilience not from a worksheet or a lesson plan — but from watching me try, lose, grieve, and try again.

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The enrollment numbers this summer? Better. Genuinely, surprisingly, better.

I showed him. He nodded like he'd expected nothing less.

That’s what I want for every kid who walks through our doors. Not just the herovalues we teach – kindness, resilience, teamwork, community – but the lived experience of what it means to be a part of something real. Something that can fail. Something worth fighting for anyway.

This summer, we’re adding a new chapter to the story he’ll tell someday. I can’t wait for him to see how it goes. I can’t wait to see how it goes.