Take your daughter to work day

One of the warehouses we rent at FS Supply is in Farmers Branch, Texas, about 30 minutes from my house.

This warehouse is starting to get a lot of action. And while sometimes we have part-time staff help ship out orders, most of the time, we’re the ones boxing and shipping them. It helps keep costs down, and you’d be amazed what you can discover about inventory kitting when you’re actually doing the work yourself. (Really, I can bore you for hours on this subject.)

There’s typically a big ship over the weekend. And on the last few Sunday afternoons, I’ve brought my two-year-old daughter along.

This is an action partly borne out of necessity — the orders need to get shipped, and my wife is slightly preoccupied with keeping the one-month-old alive — but it’s partly due to something else… an entrepreneurial lesson I’m trying to teach a toddler who’s currently unable to form long-term memories. (I like to play the long game.)

Warning: some minor “thought leadership” is coming… stick with me!

I’ve come to think that taking a more non-traditional career path — like, say, starting a restaurant supply business — forces you to figure out how to best blend the personal and professional sides of your life.

You can choose to treat this as bad: it can feel like boundaries don’t exist and you’re always “on,” figuring out how to balance multiple competing and overlapping responsibilities.

Or you can view it as a gift: Work feels more like play, and packing orders on a Sunday is just an action in a game you get to play every day … preferably with the people you like spending time with the most.

I was probably wired when I was my daughter’s age to eventually think this way. Growing up with an entrepreneur dad meant zero barrier between the business and the home. Super Bowl parties were filled with people from the office; among my earliest memories are endless car drives to store openings in Eastern North Carolina.

Those memories are happy and unique and if they linger on in any way, they’ve perhaps made me not dread the work or view it as a hindrance to my “real life.”

So: is my two-year-old daughter going to remember watching “Sesame Street” in a warehouse while I weighed cases on a postal scale? Probably not.

Did she hurt our COGS by disappearing with multiple packing envelopes, ripping them up, and bringing them back to me as “trash?” Undoubtedly, yes.

But maybe Sundays at the warehouse will stick with her some other way… at some point down the line.