"So.. how has it been working with your sister?"
We get this question SO much. I would want the tea too.
Going to set up family dynamics first:
Elise and I are five years apart. Meaning I was in little league soccer when she was learning how to walk. When Elise was starting high school, I was off in college figuring out how to be able to drink on a Thursday night and still show up for my 8 AM Italian class. the 5 year age gap is enough to be kind of unaware of what was going on in each others lives and avoid annoying each other.
We have a brother! We’re both two and a half years apart from Josh. We’re so close with him and when all of us are together, it’s a party. We drive each other crazy but also keep each other sane! He was always bugging one of us so we just had less effort to get into petty sister fights.
We don’t know any different than to work with family. Our parents were young when they had us–by the time they were 28, they had three kids and were about to start Munchen Haus. Working with family is the only thing we know–our parents did it, our grandparents (on dad’s side) did it, our great-grandparents even did it.
Elise and I always manifesting doing something together. We didn’t know what, and we never really talked about it, but when covid happened, it felt right to work on something together. It was all fun and games at the time.
While we have obviously had our times and fights, things work surprisingly well. You can tell pretty quickly if you’re business partner isn’t the right partner. As Hot Take (it was Gooey back then) started to take off, we were both told by our parents to remember through this journey that we are sisters first, business partners second. To this day, we kind of use that as our guiding light for how to be family and work together.
Being business partners is sometimes even more involved than being sisters. We talk every single day. We know where the other person is most of the time, we know each others schedules, we can tell when one person is having a bad day based off of how the texts are sent, how many coffees they’ve had, what’s annoying them, and each others walk schedule so we can call while getting steps in. It’s a lot. But it is also the best (for us).
Reality of working together as sisters:
We can be suuuper honest. There is no such thing as being passive for the fear of being confrontational. We’re quick to call each other out and have learned to just not take offense to very many things.
We talk every single day. There are so many moving parts in the business right now that we check in with each other once a day, if not twice or three times. It is mostly business but we almost always talk personal stuff too. It’s almost like speaking two languages–conversations just flow between business and life.
There is no separating. I’ve heard people talk about the separation of family and work, putting different hats on during the day, but that just isn’t a reality for us. We’re so integrated into each others lives that as nice as that would be, we are always sisters, and always business partners. We’ve had to make an effort to have times that are strictly Hot Take where we take off the “sister role” hats and just be co-founders. We’ve also had to say out loud, “no more Hot Take talk” trying to create separation–especially when we’re with the rest of our family.
Sisters!!!
Working with family only works if it is the right family. For us, it really works. Tgod for everyone involved.