What Should You Do If You Are Running a Business with Your Spouse?

Being an entrepreneur can be very exciting, but at the same time very challenging, especially if you are trying to build a successful business with your spouse.

This can be a great opportunity to connect and grow personally and professional at the same time, but you must do it right.

Here are 5 things you must do to have a striving business and relationship

1. Work hard, play hard

It’s very easy to get caught up in your business and forget about growing the relationship and sometimes simple things like, “How was your day?” can be forgotten and replaced with, “Did you ship out the order to the customer on time?”

We become so obsessed with the business that we forget about taking care of each other.

As much as I do understand that it can be a challenge to be running your business while at the same time make time to hang out and have fun with your partner, and knowing about the little details in each other’s lives, especially in the early days when the business is in the infancy stage.

But you don’t want to have a situation where your business is growing, but your marriage is sinking. One of the best way to ensure that this doesn’t happen and to ensure you have a loving relationship is to work hard, but at the same time play hard.

Just like you would schedule the time to complete a certain task, in the same way, you should schedule time for play and togetherness. For example, you could schedule date nights each week or fortnightly, regular vacation time together where it’s about you and your spouse, time when you just take a walk in the park together, go an watch a movie or something fun.

2. Tap into each other’s strength

Both of you approach business and life differently. That’s great.

Diversity in business or relationship is always good. What this means is that both of you can focus on your individual unique strength or gifts.

Maybe your wife’s strength is dealing with people, she knows how to market and to sell anything. While you are better at managing people.

That’s good.

It is not about who should be the boss and who shouldn’t or who should have a such and such role, it should be about building something incredible together.

When you decide and delegate responsibilities based on your individual abilities and interest, each one of you will be able to grow while at the same time complementing each other’s talents and bridging any potential gaps.

Without establishing individual roles, what might happen is that both of you keep stepping on each other toes.

I have read of couples in the early days of their business arguing constantly about every detail in the business as each one of them had their own opinion.

For example, what should their customer policy be? What products should we sell and so forth.

3. Respect each other’s role

Now that you know what role each other will play, both of you must respect each other enough to do their job.

If your spouse’s responsibility is finance and marketing, while yours is to manage the day to day operations of the business, don’t step in your spouse’s territory, allow your spouse to do his or her job.

Trying to micromanage every area of the business is not a wise decision and will end in disaster as it tells your spouse you are not confident of his or her abilities.

Stay in your lane while you allow your partner to stay in his or her lane.

That is not to say each person should not be able to give suggestions, but each person should have full control over their given domain.

4. Establish work-life balance

Balance is very important in everything you do.

Without balancing your work and life one area of your life will suffer. That is why you should establish boundaries early on in your business.

Regardless of the fact that you are very driven and passionate about your work, you need to spend time together where business topics are off limits.

Together, both of you have to establish boundaries in your relationship. For example, no business topic around the table or after certain hours.

5. Create your own space

In the early days, it might be a little bit difficult to have a separate work area, but it’s very important that both of you have separate workspace to do what you do best.

6. Listen to each other

Both of you will have your own individual opinion about almost everything, your own way of doing things and so will not always agree with each other, and that can cause a lot of contention if you don’t learn to just listen each other without interrupting each other.

Both of you must make an effort to listen to each other without interruption and pay more attention.

When this is done, you will be surprised at what you both are able to create together.

Final thought

Owning a business with a spouse presents some challenges, but the benefits of working alongside your spouse can be huge. If handled properly, it can be a blessing, but if handled the wrong way, can be a curse.

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