The founder of a family-owned consulting firm announced Tuesday that her daughter and business partner’s desire for a two-day weekend represents a fundamental threat to long-term growth.
Susan Sterling, 64, chief executive of Chicago-based Sterling Strategies, told investors that the joint venture with her 31-year-old daughter, Chloe, has been "one of the most rewarding experiences" of her career, largely because she can now use quarterly performance reviews to critique her co-founder's dating history. However, the CEO noted that navigating the differing work ethics of Boomers and Millennials has required significant downward revisions to the firm's forward guidance.
The friction reportedly peaked on Friday afternoon when the younger Sterling declined to review a Q4 strategy deck, citing a prior commitment to attend a friend's wedding. The CEO immediately issued a memo to the firm's two employees, warning that the millennial co-founder’s refusal to lean in was creating severe operational risks for the brand and forcing a strategic re-evaluation of the firm's Thanksgiving seating chart.
When Chloe told me she was logging off at 5 p.m., I had to explain that the broader market does not care about her Pilates schedule,
The elder Sterling added that despite the cultural friction, the partnership’s burn rate remains exceptionally low, as the firm has successfully replaced its traditional compensation structure with a series of vague, open-ended threats about the co-founder’s future inheritance.
By late Tuesday, the CEO confirmed she had successfully optimized the firm's internal communications by bypassing corporate messaging apps entirely and simply yelling the quarterly revenue targets up the stairs.