Thinking About Father and Daughters and Business on This Father’s Day

By Lori Perkins

What do we inherit from our fathers?

I have had my own business since I was 22. I’ve actually started four, and three are still going strong (sold the first one).

I spent a recent weekend with a girlfriend of mine who also has her own business. She too has been self-employed since graduating from college. We were talking about our children and how they are both free-lancers and how we taught them to set up their taxes. She turned to me and said, “You learned all this from your dad, didn’t you?”

And she was right.

My dad had a small business. When I grew up and we would hang out together as adults, we talked business like fathers and sons talk sports. It was our love language, in a strange way.

My friend said that she thought that the reason she has always been so confident that she would do well as a business woman was that she had seen her dad do it.

When my son graduated from college and informed me that he was going to take a stab at making a living free-lancing, I told him he was going to have to work really hard. He told me he understood that because he had seen me do it. He literally created his own job from nothing.

When we read articles and memories about what people say they got from their mothers and fathers, it’s often personality traits or physical characteristics, but I definitely got my business acumen from my dad, and it is so wonderful to pass that on to my own son.