I thought if I sold more sushi, I’d earn my dad’s respect.

On paper, offering to help with marketing for one of the family restaurants made sense: I knew the food. I knew marketing. And I was a millennial, so obviously I knew Instagram, #natch.

The upside potential was high. It was also a good way to give back to the family.

However, if I peel back all the layers of resume speak, the naked truth was much simpler:

I wanted to impress my dad. I wanted his approval. So I spent a lot of 2019 working on this, on the side.

If you have a family business, you can learn from my approach to marketing our family restaurant, what I experimented with, and why I failed.

Before 2012, the term “growth hacking” wasn’t a thing. According to the mythology surrounding Facebook,[note]https://www.recode.net/2016/3/21/11587128/silicon-valleys-homogeneous-rich-douchebags-wont-win-forever-says[/note] Chamath Palihapitiya coined the idea of the first growth…

I used to work at a horror production company called After Dark Films. We churned out memorable films like Asylum (“A mess, from the…