“I Could Never Work With My Family.” We Hear That a Lot.

Tell someone you own a business with your mother or daughter and there’s a good chance you know what comes next.

“I could never work with my family.”

We hear it all the time. Sometimes it’s said with admiration. Sometimes with disbelief. Occasionally, the person looks genuinely horrified by the idea.

We get it. Mixing family and business isn’t for everyone. Family relationships come with history, expectations, deeply established roles and the uncanny ability to push one another’s buttons with very little effort. Add clients, deadlines, money and business decisions to the mix, and there’s plenty of potential for things to get complicated.

But for us, it works. And we know how fortunate we are that it does.

PSM Marketing is a family-owned, woman-owned Minnesota marketing firm led by mother-daughter team Terrie S. Wheeler, MBC, and Michelle R. Wheeler. We genuinely enjoy working together, but more importantly, we respect each other as professionals. That mutual respect has become the foundation of our partnership.

Long Before We Were Business Partners

PSM’s story started in 1997, when Terrie founded Professional Services Marketing Group after spending 12 years as an in-house marketing director at three Twin Cities law firms. She had seen firsthand that successful professional services marketing wasn’t about flashy advertising or making things look pretty. It was about relationships, credibility, strategy and helping talented professionals communicate why someone should choose them.

The company grew, evolved and eventually became Professional Services Marketing, Inc. Terrie incorporated the business in 2004 and continued building the company around the relationship-focused approach that still guides PSM today.

Meanwhile, Michelle was growing up alongside the business.

Our first photo together was taken the day Michelle was born. At the time, of course, neither of us had any idea that we would eventually become business partners. Terrie was simply a brand-new mom holding her daughter. Years later, she would start PSM, Michelle would grow up watching her mom build a business, and eventually she would build a business of her own.

Michelle also didn’t grow up assuming she would someday take a seat at PSM.

After graduating from St. Olaf College in 2014, she started Spectrum Design and Marketing, working with contractors, nonprofits and small businesses while also serving as a Client Marketing Lead at PSM. Building Spectrum gave Michelle the opportunity to develop her own clients, expertise and point of view as a marketer. Eventually, Spectrum merged into PSM, and in 2019 Terrie and Michelle officially became equity partners.

That path matters to us. Michelle didn’t simply join Mom’s company. She built something of her own first and brought that experience with her.

Mother and Daughter, But Also Business Partners

One of the reasons our partnership works is that we don’t expect each other to be the same.

Terrie brings decades of experience in strategic marketing, business development and relationship building. She understands the professional services world because she has spent her career in it, first on the inside and then as a consultant.

Michelle brings a complementary perspective grounded in branding, websites, digital marketing and technology. She tends to look at how a strategy will translate into an actual client experience. What does the website communicate? How does the brand feel? Can people find the firm online? Does the technology make things easier or harder?

We don’t always arrive at the same answer immediately. That’s a good thing.

There’s a particular freedom that comes from working with someone you trust enough to disagree with. We can challenge an idea without challenging the person behind it. We can say, “I don’t think that’s going to work,” and know the conversation isn’t over. It’s just getting useful.

Neither of us automatically wins because one of us is the mother or because one of us represents the next generation. We listen to each other, give each other room to lead and recognize when the other person knows more about something.

Love certainly helps. But respect is what makes the business partnership work.

About That “I Could Never Work With My Family” Thing

We understand why people say it.

Working with family can blur lines. A business conversation can sneak into dinner. A quick call about a client can turn into a discussion about weekend plans, and sometimes the reverse happens before either of us realizes it.

But knowing each other so well also gives us an advantage.

We know how the other person thinks. We know when to push and when to give an idea some room. There’s very little energy wasted wondering what the other person really meant. And there is an enormous amount of trust underneath the day-to-day work.

Terrie has watched Michelle build her own career, develop expertise and become a business owner in her own right. Michelle has watched Terrie build PSM from scratch and grow it into a company that has endured through nearly three decades of enormous changes in marketing.

We respect what the other has built.

That doesn’t mean we agree about everything. We’re a mother and daughter (let’s not get carried away…)

But disagreement doesn’t threaten the relationship. Often, it makes the work better because we’re approaching the same problem with different experiences and perspectives.

Two Generations of Women Building a Business

PSM became certified by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council in 2022. WBENC certification verifies that a company is at least 51 percent owned, operated and controlled by women.

We’re proud of that certification, but PSM has been a woman-owned business since the beginning.

When Terrie launched the company in 1997, she was leaving an established in-house marketing career to bet on herself. There was no LinkedIn network waiting to amplify the announcement. There were no inexpensive website builders, social media channels or digital marketing tools that made starting a consulting business relatively accessible.

There was experience. There were relationships. There was a reputation to build. And there was a lot of entrepreneurial determination.

Years later, Michelle started a business of her own.

Maybe entrepreneurship runs in the family. Or maybe watching your mother build something from scratch makes starting your own company seem a little less intimidating.

Either way, there’s something meaningful about seeing PSM today and knowing that the company Terrie started is now being shaped by two generations of women.

Minnesota is Still Home

Although PSM works with clients across the country, Minnesota has always been home base.

Terrie built the company after years working within Twin Cities professional services firms. Michelle graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield and now lives in St. Paul’s Mac-Groveland neighborhood. Terrie is about an hour north in Rush City. On paper, there’s some distance between us. In practice, it rarely feels that way.

Most workdays, we connect by video conference and simply leave it running while we work. We call it virtual coworking. We’re each doing our own thing, answering emails, working on client projects, jumping into meetings and tackling our respective to-do lists, but we can chitchat throughout the day just as we would if our desks were in the same office. A quick question turns into a conversation. Someone shares an idea. One of us makes the other laugh. Then we go right back to work.

It means we see each other nearly every day, even though we live an hour apart. There’s something wonderfully ordinary about it. We don’t have to schedule a formal meeting every time we want to talk, and our relationship isn’t confined to client calls or business decisions. We get all those little in-between moments that happen when people work side by side. Most days, it honestly feels like there’s no distance between Mac-Groveland and Rush City at all.

Minnesota has also shaped how we think about business. Relationships matter here. Reputation matters. People remember how you treated them. For a firm built around helping clients develop relationships and grow through smart marketing, those values feel pretty natural.

We Know How Lucky We Are

There are plenty of family businesses where the next generation feels obligated to join. There are others where a founder has trouble making room for someone else to lead. We’re fortunate that neither describes our story.

Michelle has never needed to become Terrie 2.0. Terrie doesn’t want her to.

Terrie has experience Michelle doesn’t have. Michelle has skills and perspectives Terrie doesn’t have. We’ve learned to trust those differences rather than erase them.

That mutual respect also means we can celebrate each other’s strengths without feeling competitive about them. When one of us has the better idea, PSM wins. When one of us learns something from the other, PSM wins. When we combine two different perspectives and come up with an answer neither of us would have reached alone, our clients win too.

There’s also the simple fact that we get to share this.

Business ownership comes with wonderful moments and plenty of hard ones. We get to celebrate the wins with someone who understands exactly what they mean. We can talk through difficult decisions with someone whose judgment we trust completely. We get to watch something that began with one generation evolve through another.

Not every mother and daughter gets that opportunity.

So when someone tells us, “I could never work with my family,” we usually smile. For us, working together has turned out to be one of the best parts of the job.

Family-Owned. Woman-Owned. Very Much PSM.

The marketing world looks almost nothing like it did when Terrie started PSM in 1997. Websites changed everything. Then came social media, smartphones, remote work, increasingly sophisticated search and now AI. PSM has changed right along with it.

What hasn’t changed is our belief that good marketing begins with people.

We want to understand our clients, their businesses and what they’re trying to accomplish. We believe relationships matter. We believe smart strategy should lead to practical action. And we believe people do their best work when they respect and trust the people sitting across the table from them.

As it turns out, that philosophy works pretty well for a mother-daughter business partnership, too.

We’re proud to be a Minnesota family-owned and woman-owned business. We’re proud of what Terrie started nearly 30 years ago. And we’re especially grateful that today, we get to build what comes next together.

If you’re looking for a marketing partner who values relationships as much as results, get to know PSM Marketing and tell us what you’re working on. We’d love to meet you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is PSM Marketing a family-owned business?

Yes. PSM Marketing is co-owned by mother-daughter team Terrie S. Wheeler, MBC, and Michelle R. Wheeler. They became equity partners in 2019 after Michelle’s company, Spectrum Design and Marketing, merged into PSM.

Is PSM Marketing a woman-owned business?

Yes. PSM has been woman-owned since Terrie founded the company in 1997. In 2022, PSM also earned certification from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council.

When was PSM Marketing founded?

Terrie S. Wheeler founded PSM in 1997 after spending 12 years as an in-house marketing director at three Twin Cities law firms. The company was originally called Professional Services Marketing Group.

What makes Terrie and Michelle’s mother-daughter partnership work?

Mutual respect is a big part of it. Terrie and Michelle bring different experiences and strengths to PSM, give each other room to lead and are comfortable challenging one another’s ideas. They don’t need to approach every problem the same way to trust each other’s judgment.

Where is PSM Marketing located?

PSM is a Minnesota-based virtual marketing firm. Michelle lives in St. Paul’s Mac-Groveland neighborhood, while Terrie lives about an hour north in Rush City. PSM works with clients throughout Minnesota and across the United States.

What kinds of clients does PSM Marketing serve?

PSM specializes in marketing for professional services firms and other relationship-driven organizations. Services include marketing strategy, branding, website development, digital marketing, content and ongoing outsourced marketing support.