I Started a Business with My Brother and You'll Never Believe What Happened Next...

It seems like everything has its day these days and today is Siblings Day which as you can imagine is close to our collective, contented, hearts. People often ask if the founders are actually brothers and always seem to enjoy the fact we are. There’s clearly something about a family business that people like. The inevitable question that we then ask is “do you have siblings and could you work with them?” The answer is usually “god no, we’d kill each other”. This got us thinking. Why did people like it if they couldn’t imagine doing it themselves? Were lots of other siblings starting or running businesses together? What, if anything, was different about a business run by siblings? Were there certain types of siblings that worked well together? Could we condense and extract anything of use for people out of the answers to these questions? And why was it that we’ve always seemed to employee a disproportionate amount of only children?

We realised that we couldn’t answer all of those questions without doing a bit of research and then obviously we needed to document our findings. To that end we’re launching a series of films that tells the story of other siblings run businesses under the title Siblings Work. Each film will focus on a particular business but over the months we’ll be looking for trends and insight across all of the contributors and, who knows, if we get enough good material we might make something longer (that’s for you commissioners). Our first films feature designers (and twin sisters) The Yarza Twins, and the cult eatery owners (and brothers) from Cereal Killers Cafe.

Watch the first release of the series here, Yarza Twins. 

One thing that has cropped up early on in the process is that it does seem that a lot of siblings are starting businesses. This might be because we are attuned to it now or it might be early evidence of an important (to us) trend. It also seems that siblings like starting businesses that are broadly in the F&B and hospitality space. It is tempting here to draw some chocolate box stereotypes about communal meals and the like. One theory that we are developing in the office has to do with trust. Starting a business is a terrifying (and exciting obviously but really, really terrifying) thing to do. You need to trust your business partners completely and you need to know how they are going to react in a range of situations. The issue of trust seems to have been made even more relevant in recent years as it seems many of the public and private institutions on which we rely have been subject to an erosion of trust. As we’ve heard, not everyone could start  business with a sibling (in fact the majority would not) or in fact trusts their sibling but maybe those who do find a deeper level of trust and understanding that could only be achieve through a lifetime or time spent in each other’s company.

We’re also interested in how siblings work differently. From our experience working together has allowed us to specialise and play to our strengths. We are at our most effective when there is no overlap in what we are doing. We’ve already begun to notice this in the initial films we’ve made - siblings work best when their roles and skill are distinctive and complementary rather than competitive. Also we have noticed that rather than the closeness of the family relationship meaning that we are blunter and more forthright with each other, we are more respectful and more sensitive to each other’s feelings than we could otherwise be. After all no one wants a board room ruckus erupting over the Christmas goose.

We’ll keep you posted over the coming months as we talk to more siblings and release more films. We’d love to hear from you about sibling run businesses that you think we should talk to.