CHALLENGES OF RUNNING A BUSINESS WITH YOUR SPOUSE

Husbands and Wives in Business Together

Being an entrepreneur, self-starting business woman, and a wife is difficult. However, when you add in the dynamics of your husband being your business partner, things can get even more challenging. My husband and I have owned several businesses together and separately. The most successful businesses were the ones we worked on building together. They were also the most challenging business to manage because there were so many dynamics to doing it successful that clashed with our personalities, areas of passions, and work methods.

WHO IS THE BOSS?

That is the major hurdle that many couples have to establish. In our case, I had the business idea, but my husband was the business front man since he had the sales experience and passion for in person and phone sales. In his mind, he was the boss. In my mind, I was the boss. This bought challenges when it came to the goals of the business, who did what, who made the decisions, and of course the power struggle.

To fix this we had to:

·       Agree on mission of business

·       Create a business plan

·       Decide on how decisions were made

·       Divide areas of management determined by the person’s strength

·       Agree on expectations – write them down, make them visible

TIME MANAGEMENT

The other area that was hard to manage was our time. Since both of us needed to work the business, work our actual full time jobs, and parent our children, we had many times when we thought the other person was cooking dinner, putting the kids to bed or picking them up from school.

To fix this we had to:

·       Create weekly schedules

·       Assign each other or delegate task out

·       Cut time at full-time job (one of us) to part-time or hire a nanny

MAKE TIME FOR LIFE AND DATES

Sometimes the business takes over. It can cause stress to manifest in the personal relationship of the couple in business. Building a business is fun, exciting and like raising a child that you have more control over. If you aren’t careful though, it will consume everything you care about.

To fix this we had to:

·       Have standing date night – no talking business, kids, or work (we played board games, went to movies, or a day trip)

·       Take mandatory vacation (even if only for two days)

·       Do something special for each other, write notes to remind each other we love them, sneak off for breakfast.

·       Continue to work on our balancing act

By LM Preston, author of Building Your Empowered Steps and Homeschooling and Working While Raising Amazing Learners, www.EmpoweredSteps.com

EMBARRASSMENT – A LESSON, A STRENGTH BUILDING EXPERIENCE

By LM Preston, author of Building Your Empowered Steps and Homeschooling While Working To Shape Amazing Learners, www.empoweredsteps.com

Many of us fear embarrassment to the point of going to great lengths to avoid it. With the exception of comedians, making fun of our past mistakes, goof-ups or unpleasant experiences isn’t common. Instead, we typically try to forget those situations ever happened.

ONE OF MY EMBARRASING MOMENTS

The kids in my neighborhood would spend tons of time making up games. One we played was truth or dare. Usually, I wasn’t invited to play because I was the youngest kid in the neighborhood. However, this particular time, they allowed me to play seemed like the best day of my life. I was going to play with the big kids, and no longer follow behind them. That day, Miniworm had arrived, and she was on top of her little world.

The SET UP

The game went on as usual. Dares were made, secrets were told and the bottle spun. Finally, it was my turn. My moment, my acceptance, and then it came. The kid that had made the last spin, looked at me with a sneaky grin, and I knew immediately that I was doomed.

THE DARE

“I dare you to eat this beetle!” the kid said. I gulped. Then I compared the penalty for not going through with a challenge. The penalty was to let every kid spit in your face. The decision was difficult, the choices were both gross. However, I refused to be made to eat something that I didn’t want.

STANDING UP TO MY SO-CALLED FRIENDS

At that moment of recognition, I felt strong and fierce. Ok, no really I was scared to death. However, I stood and said, “I renege on the dare!” There were gasp, snickers, and whispers. I held my ground, stuck out my chest and licked my lips. “You know what that means don’t ya?” the kid with the dead fat beetle snickered.

“Yeah, and I don’t care!” I said, and swallowed as a tear ran from my eye. Man, I was so angry. The other kids bustled to stand in line in front of me. Never before in our game of Truth or Dare had someone challenged their fate. I was the first, and they relished in the chance to demean me further.

There I stood, as each kid gathered as much saliva in their mouths as possible and spit in my face. My eyes closed as I felt the thick, cool, wet globs slide from my forehead, down my nose to my lips. I held back a gag.

Finally, it was over. My best-friend, who was last in line did a fake spitting sound that held little or no power. Then she took out a tissue and wiped my face.

“Why didn’t you just do the dare?" she whispered.

“I opened my eyes and smiled at her then said, “Cause I didn’t want to eat a stupid beetle.”

GROWING FROM YOUR EXPERIENCES and USING THEM TO HELP OTHERS

When I sit down to write my novels from a teenaged perspective, I have a lot of material to pull from. I was called all sorts of names, teased, and jeered at. I wasn’t the lowest on the totem pole, but I was somewhere near the bottom middle of the middle school pecking order. Yet, through these experiences I learned something about myself. I was a survivor and I was never a follower. That is what I portray in my fiction books and that is a skill I sharpen every day. We all have a purpose and the capacity to stand up for ourselves. Never forget that.

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Website: Fiction Books: www.lmpreston.com Empowered Steps: www.empoweredsteps.com