To be perfectly honest, I’m writing this blog post for SEO reasons. Very few people are writing anything for the phrase family-owned web design company, which makes it the kind of juicy, underutilized keyword I can’t pass up. Lucky for me, this one happens to be entirely true – we are family-owned. And maybe not in the way some people imagine, but I think that makes the story even better.
When people hear “family-owned,” they may picture a group of people all clocking in together – three generations folding T-shirts in a shop somewhere or making killer grilled cheese at a diner. And hey, that’s one kind of family business.
Ours is different.
My family doesn’t sit next to me in the office (and to be fair, my office is in my house, so that would be weird). But they are absolutely a part of this business, just not in the “send them a W-2” kind of way.
When I started Sharp Guys Web Design more than a decade ago, it wasn’t a sure thing. I was walking away from a steady paycheck and walking toward…whatever this was. And it would have been way easier for my wife to say, “Eh, maybe don’t do that.” But she didn’t. She backed me then, and she’s continued to be the person I lean on when I’m about to make a big decision – the “should we go full-time?” kind of decision, or the “do we hire someone?” type. Even the “does this client seem like they’re going to drive me crazy?” kind.
She’s the kind of person who sees through the noise and reminds me why I started this thing in the first place. There’s no Sharp Guys without her – and not in some metaphorical, “aww how sweet” kind of way. I literally would not have started it without her support.
And when it came time to actually manage people — like, real employees — I had little experience and I had never been responsible for someone’s paycheck. Luckily, my dad had spent decades doing exactly that – hiring, managing, making tough calls. So when I’m unsure about something administrative or need to figure out a “how do real companies do this?” kind of problem, I go to him. He doesn’t show up in team photos or client meetings, but his fingerprints are all over how we operate.
As for my kids, well – the jury’s still out. My 15-year-old daughter has made it very clear that she’d prefer a career path that doesn’t involve sitting at a desk all day (or possibly ever). My 13-year-old son asks a lot of smart questions about the business. He seems interested – not necessarily in doing web design, but in what it’s like to run a business. And my 8-year-old daughter – I just try to keep her off websites entirely and that seems to be working out great.
So what does it mean to be family-owned? It means no investors. No equity partners. No debt and no one making decisions from a spreadsheet 600 miles away.
It means I own it, and my family has helped shape it – every big choice I’ve made, every risk I’ve taken, I’ve run by them. Their influence isn’t visible in a client deliverable, but it’s baked into everything we do.
At the end of the day, we’re a four-person web design team focused on doing high-quality work: website design, WordPress maintenance, and SEO. We don’t outsource. We don’t try to scale for the sake of scaling. We grow when it makes sense and when we can keep our quality intact – because that’s what we’d want if the roles were reversed and we were the client.
So yeah, we’re a family-owned web design company. And we mean that – not just because my name is on the business license, or it is good for SEO but because I wouldn’t have made it a week in without the people I love pushing me forward and keeping me grounded.
If that sounds like the kind of team you want to work with, you know where to find us.
