Conversations with Precious Lee

Today we’d like to introduce you to Precious Lee.

Precious, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I spent ten years working at investment banks in New York City. Honestly, I’d made it. Real influence, real money, a career I worked hard to earn. My parents immigrated to this country from the Philippines. Both of them are highly educated, and they raised me to strive to be the best at everything I did.

I left in 2023.

Not because it was the wrong version of success. It was mine, I wanted it, and I’m proud that I accomplished it. But I was constantly stressed, had no time for anything, and my health was paying the price. I kept telling myself that if I poured that same energy into something of my own, there would be no ceiling on it. So I walked away and took about a year off to reset and dial into my purpose.

Then we had Avery, and everything changed again.

Today I’m a full time mom running a digital marketing business alongside it. Andrew and I run our family brand together, and Avery is right there with us for all of it. That’s the short version of how a finance executive ended up here.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been smooth. Two different kinds of hard, really.

The first came before any of this even started. Avery arrived at 31 weeks and 5 days, by emergency C-section, and ended up spending 40 days in the NICU in LA, right after we’d just moved to Orange County, about an hour away. Andrew was still working full time on top of it, and I was recovering from surgery. Our families are all on the East Coast, so it was really just the two of us figuring it out. Andrew put it simply: staying on top of everything while running on no sleep was the hardest part, and he’ll tell you flat out he never wants to do that again.

The second kind of hard hasn’t really stopped, though. We don’t have childcare, so my whole week belongs to Avery, and the business just happens around him. That’s actually pushed me to start looking at everything going on in my day and figure out where I can automate it with AI, so I can get more done without running myself into the ground. Same goes for Andrew. He’s at work all week, and weekends aren’t really downtime for either of us, since we’re UGC creators too, so a lot of that time goes to shooting content for brands. It’s a lot right now, but we’re building something we actually want, so it’s worth it.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I approach my work the way I approached every problem in my corporate job: analyze what can be improved, put a system behind it, and execute without waiting for anyone’s permission to start. I don’t have a team anymore, so I’m building one out of AI employees. It’s still a work in progress, but it’s already shaving hours off my week and keeping me way more organized. When it’s fully up and running, I think it’s going to almost double what I can get done in a week and give me back time and energy to keep on growing. We also don’t hire help to create content with a toddler in the house. Avery is at every shoot, and there’s no version of this career, at least right now, where he isn’t.

Andrew would tell you he just does what I tell him (lol). Ideas sometimes, cameraman always, driver and cleanup crew the rest of the time. I’d put it differently. He frames almost everything we shoot, and nothing goes up until we’ve both looked at it. This is genuinely a two person business, and that’s a big part of why it works.

So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
What matters most is that everything we build adds up to something bigger than a follower count, and genuinely helps someone in their day. That’s why we package and deliver care kits to the children’s hospital with the support of our social media community, and why we started making content that puts more of ourselves out there: estate planning, Avery’s therapy, and the conversations that are hard to have but matter. Our perspective is that if something’s uncomfortable to talk about, it’s usually a sign it’s worth leaning into.

Andrew sees it the same way. He’d tell you we started this to have something of our own, with no ceiling on it. As challenging as it’s been, it’s been worth it: we’re constantly learning and making memories together along the way too.

If somebody reads this and never once looks us up, we’d want them to know we don’t have it all figured out. We’re just two ordinary people trying to build something that’s actually ours while raising a toddler with no extra hands, running on coffee and leftovers (except Avery, who somehow has two private chefs), and still showing up for each other every day. Because at the end of the day, that’s the real story. Not the highlight reel.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://itstheleefam.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itstheleefam/