MOUNT VERNON – When Liz Adams decided to open Skagit River Bakery in late 2005, she knew just who to recruit as her business partner – her mom.
After all, it’s Sue Adams whom Liz credits for instilling her with good values and a strong work ethic as a child.
Now the tables are turned as the flour-dusted duo whip up ornate cupcakes, cookies, pastries and breads at the downtown Mount Vernon bakery.
“I have to take orders from her,” Sue Adams said with a laugh.
The women are two of a number of local women who are combining what can be at times the closest and the most contentious of personal relationships with business partnership.
Both say the recipe for a successful mother-daughter business is simple: lots of laughter and a little time apart now and then.
The Adamses live together in Oak Harbor. And they admit that occasionally the mother-daughter business can put a strain on their relationship.
“Sometimes we get angry and carry it home after work,” Liz Adams said.
But there’s some advantage in knowing a business partner so intimately, mothers and daughters say.
Clear Lake resident Joanne Pfeil and her daughter, Karen Comp, say they make good business partners because they can anticipate what the other will want, even if they don’t always agree. “We think alike,” Comp said. “We can bounce ideas off each other, and I know what she’s going to think.”
The pair run Gifts Created 4 U out of Pfeil’s home. They produce collectible handmade dolls and bunnies sold in gift shops as far away as Chicago and New York and recently launched a Web site to market their dolls and other people’s crafts, at www.giftscreated4u.com.
The women say their interests and experience complement each other. Pfeil handles marketing, sales and managing subcontractors. Comp, a quilter and self-described “fabriholic,” oversees design and ordering fabric and supplies for the dolls and production.
Pfeil and Comp say the secret to any good business partnership comes built-in to the mother-daughter relationship.
“Trust,” Pfeil said. “We get mad at each other, tell each other off once in a while, but we always trust each other.”
For some, a business relationship would be a recipe for disaster. But some mothers and daughters have found that the family business can be a tie that binds.
Margaret Johnson and Patty Luellen spend most days side-by-side in a small kitchen, where a long row of bread loaves rise above an industrial-sized stove. The Eagle’s Nest Cafe in Concrete is open seven days a week, but Johnson and Luellen say, believe it or not, tensions don’t simmer along with the soup.
“My parents always said, ‘If you’re mad at us, tell us,’ ” said Luellen, whose husband, Fred, is also an owner of the cafe.
Though the Eagle’s Nest just opened last summer, restaurants have always been a family affair for Johnson and her daughter. They used to run A Cup Above in Sedro-Woolley with Johnson’s mother, Mary Runyon, who died in February.
Both Johnson and Luellen grew up in Seattle restaurants Runyon owned, where they learned the skills they use at the Eagle’s Nest. Johnson remembers standing on a stool to flip pancakes as a 5-year-old. Luellen was about the same age in the 1960s when her grandmother started letting her set silverware on the tables. By the time she was 20, Luellen was manager.
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