Any married eldest daughters here with an old-school run provincial family business?
Hello. I want to hear advice, stories, anecdotes from people who are or have been in the same/similar situation (and honestly be friends/can u be my mentor huehue). I just want to know it can be done, you know?
I'm in my 30s, married, thinking of having kids. My family is filchi af: think hardware in the province, paper receipts, manual everything, no existing inventory nor SOPs, all the important work revolves around me, my parents, and my younger sibling. The business can't be open without a minimum of two of us there, and even then, the two left are left very tired end of day. Fairly traumatic childhood, toxic parents. Overall parents are still in the business and are micromanagers.
For some context: dad is a typical filchi and wants to work til he can't anymore but he's 70ish already. Unlimited drive to work but has no vision to set up systems that don't revolve around the family. He does not work smart, just hard. Mom wants the business to stay small forever so that she lives a simple life (she says tswe ka siew so much it's a trigger phrase for me at this point). My younger sibling has been floundering for years now and although there's been *some* progress, I can't wait another 5-10 yrs for him to get his shit together.
I've spent my 20s just trying to improve things little by little, but progress has been slow because of the ff reasons:
We are so bogged down by the dailies (cashiering, endless checking of goods that go out ourselves, checking bank deposits, etc) we don't have time to think big picture nor plan and act for it
I regret this a lot now, but in my 20s, whenever I tried to suggest things that can permanently improve the fambiz, my mom would put me down and I wouldn't push through since I know she'd rag/get mad at me if I did. I wish I did it anyways earlier but it took me years of therapy to be in the headspace that I am in now.
I have been married for a few years. My husband also has a family business so malabo namang he helps with ours. I think theirs is bigger than ours pa nga, it's just that it's been properly set up so they're not bogged down in the daily. He's a city boy through and through so we've been in a half ldr half of the work week since we got married. We're now thinking about kids and he's told me he'd want me to be more around if we did. I don't think it's sustainable for me to still be in the family business in this capacity if we did have kids. We also started our own business on top of that and it seems quite promising. It's not been much easier to grow since it's just us deciding things and no parents to answer to.
My husband tells me I can just leave if I'm really miserable here. Hell even my parents say so (they only agreed to me leaving once I got married btw, the patriarchy), that they'll try to make it work but otherwise isasara na lang raw nila yung business. They tell me that after raising me on guilt and shame. The business makes good money but I don't want to be bogged down by it. It does make me miserable on the daily but I dislike giving up without a fight.
I've told myself I'll try systemizing/overhauling the family business within 2 years. Til 2027. If it doesn't work out, imma bounce. I can't keep wasting my years on this. Idk I'm scared and stressed out about this decision. I'm posting now to hear if anyone's been in the same predicament as me before. I just want to know it's possible, you know? Or am I wasting my time and I should just focus on our own fledgling business and family? I also feel like if I quit, my parents would disown me. Is that even a bad thing if they're toxic though?
Tldr: ang hirap maging filchi mamser. Pagod na aq. Asking for stories to give me hope.