The Realities of Being Married to Your Business Partner

When people find out that my spouse and I are partners in business, they often make the comment, "Well...I could never work with my spouse like that!"

I often reply with, "Well...I would never marry someone I couldn't work with!"

My opinion - the bar for potential spouses is set way too low if you marry someone you cannot work with. However, I’m in the vast minority of camps with these views in modern society.

Thankfully, my spouse shares my views on family-owned businesses, and we’ve been in business together for almost as long as we’ve been married. It’s been a very effective, efficient, and rewarding partnership for us - on both the personal and professional front. 

In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s a few insights for being married to your business partner (and making it work!):

Business partnership exposes the relationships for what it really is. 

You can’t take a fractured union and “fix” it by going into business together. If your personal relationships is strained and stressed, so will your working relationship. Business has a way of bringing out different aspects of yourself than what is typically revealed after hours. For some folks, this multi-faceted view is positive, and for others not so much. If you’re interested in going into business with your spouse, know that it will just magnify your relationship’s many dimensions - the good and the bad. It won’t fix anything - it’s a continuum. 

The same goes for any type of business partnership - with a parent, sibling, friend, or military service buddy… entrepreneurship is like truth serum. Working together in the high-stress setting of starting a business exposes everyone for who they are in the worst moments. It has a way of revealing everyone’s weaknesses, bad habits, and less-than-desirable qualities. If you’re not partnered up with someone who shares your work ethic, sense of purpose, or moral code, it can be a really frustrating experience. 

Clearly stated roles and responsibilities help. 

Any partnership - personal or professional - can benefit from clarity of expectations and measures of accountability. Both my spouse and I are extremely hard-working, farm-raised, first-borns, and as a result, neither of us requires micromanaging, coddling, prodding, etc. to get things accomplished. 

However, it’s very helpful to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities - who does what - in the business operation to prevent confusion, duplicity, and feelings of encroachment. Our workflows are all developed in alignment with our business development goals. If I’m better at capture management, I’ll handle that critical component of the company, while my spouse who excels in operations will run point of that essential element. Our skill sets are complimentary, so we divided up the requirements based on our strengths and interests, which, has proven to be a much better working arrangement than the ones I encountered in other partnerships or employment settings. In previous employment settings, I found myself always picking up the slack for the slackers - I was ambitious and hard-working, and the only effort they put forth was riding my completely overworked coattails. The great thing about working with my spouse is we have a mutual interest in both accomplishing our business objectives and supporting each other’s well-being. 

Set schedules for both professional and personal pursuits.

Shared calendars are your friend when working with your spouse; however, don’t only schedule work things and forget about the personal relationship. Spending all day at work together is not the same as spending a Saturday relaxing together. Work is work - even if you are working with your favorite person! You both must make an effort to invest in the personal relationship outside of work hours. Plan fun things, put it on the calendar, and don’t talk about the day-to-day stresses of business ownership on your date nights. 

My spouse and I pick a new “couple’s hobby” each season to prioritize - dance classes, fly fishing, mountain climbing, antiquing, sailing, etc. Anything that is NOT related to our business or our industry is fair game. Learning new skills together helps provide us with a new perspective on the dynamic person we’re partnered with both in life and in business. 

Another way to invest in the personal relationship is to volunteer with each other. My spouse and I also served on multiple community and organizational nonprofit boards with matters that are big deals to us - healthcare, military, religion, rural economic development. We spend our off days building houses with Habitat for Humanity, volunteering at a local food bank, and with youth in foster care. We prioritize these commitments and get to see yet another side of our spouse through these off-the-clock experiences.

Recognize the uniqueness of this partnership.

The reality is that most people couldn’t or wouldn’t choose to go into business with their spouse. Their assessment of the status of their relationship and the needed constraints and restraints around that union are probably accurate. Entrepreneurship isn’t easy and it certainly isn’t for everyone. 

If you’re interested in exploring this “in business and life” union, recognize that it’s not nearly as popular or represented as it was in previous generations and that you’ll be going against the grain on multiple fronts. That’s okay, you’ll just not have the external structures our entrepreneurially-inclined predecessors had in terms of societal expectations and support of family-owned small businesses. You’ll always be the odd couple who does things differently, but isn’t that what entrepreneurship is anyway?

If you’re interested in learning more about being married to your business partner, check out this Episode #3 of “Tipping Spears with Hannah Becker”, where we dish on the ins and outs of a family + veteran-owned small business. 

Click here to listen to “Episode 3: Married to Your Business Partner”