Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Keeping it in the Family

John R. Ingrisano

It can be tough having to deal with a partner in business. It can be even tougher when that partner is your spouse. The result can be pure craziness or total bliss. It all depends on whether you take the time to carefully structure your business relationship.

There are distinct drawbacks to husbands and wives working together. The biggest is that trouble at home can easily spill over into the business, eventually, resulting in failure and the loss of jobs and money. Worse, if the couple splits, the business generally becomes a pawn in the “great divide” known as divorce. That’s because it’s often the single greatest asset in the marriage. In this respect, working together can be a detriment to both the business and to the marriage.

Still, the benefits can far outweigh the potential disadvantages. Couples who know how to work closely together share a unique dedication and loyalty to their business’s success. And let’s face it, it’s also fun to be able to work shoulder to shoulder every day with your life partner in a common purpose. That’s why, best of all, husbands and wives who are successful in business together tend to enjoy peace and harmony in their personal lives as well.

If you’re part of a husband and wife business partnership, here are a few suggestions to help ensure that both the business and the marriage continue to prosper:

• Divvy up responsibilities. Maintain clear and separate areas of responsibility. Write down job descriptions. Then leave each other alone. Perhaps she heads up marketing and sales, while he focuses on product development. This division of labor is crucial for maintaining the working relationship. Otherwise, you will literally be stepping all over each other. It will only be a matter of time before problems develop and resentments build.

• Keep your personal lives out of the conference room. Conduct yourselves professionally at all times while on company time. Public displays of affection, personal conversations or other signs of intimacy can embarrass and alienate other workers. Worse, they can disrupt the smooth flow of business.

• Keep business out of the bedroom, or anywhere else in the house, for that matter. If you are so busy all day that you don’t have much time to talk about business, take half an hour or so after hours to catch up, unwind together and make the transition from business partners to marriage partners. Then put business away for the day. The idea is to strike a healthy balance between your business life and your personal life.

• Get away with each other. Plan work-free vacations and get-away weekends so you don’t ever forget that you’re much more than business partners.

• Get away from each other. It’s unrealistic to believe that you can be side by side 24 hours a day and still maintain a healthy outlook and attitude. Develop outside interests in things that belong strictly to you.

• Capitalize on the benefits of being in business together. Maybe one of you works just 20 hours a week or splits hours between home and the business. As business owners, you have the luxury of setting your own hours and planning your own schedules.

The bottom line: If you and your spouse are in business together, you know that it is both challenging and invigorating. By carrying out the above suggestions, you can make it even more rewarding. You may even have fun together.

Related Topics: Business, Employee Relations, Entrepreneurship, Leadership    No Comments    

Start-up Lessons Learned: JustinTV

Justin Kan, JustinTV

This is part one of a two part series.

Last year in May I got my BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale; three days later Emmett and I officially started work on Kiko and became entrepreneurs. We’ve been working on Kiko full time for the past ten months, and during that time I’ve learned a few lessons as a young (newb) founder that I thought were useful enough to share. I’m not claiming to know it all about starting your own company, or even most of what there is to know (I still haven’t made a dollar of revenue, sold a company, brought a company to IPO, the list goes on…), but I wish someone had told me these things ten months ago.

Don’t hire/co-found-with your friends just because they are your friends.

I said this at Startup School last October. Here’s my reasoning behind it: You want your co-founders/employees to reside at the intersection of really smart and really hard-working. Most of your friends probably do not live there. I went to a pretty decent school that claims to have lots of smart people, and most of my friends are not both really smart and really hard-working.

We’re naturally inclined to do things with our friends: play racquetball, drink beer, etc. This is no different for starting a company. However, when picking co-founders, its human nature to either overlook or make excuses for your friends’ shortcomings. This is really bad, because it can lead to situations where you think things like this: I know my friend, Gideon isn’t the hardest worker, but he’s really really smart. It’ll probably be ok if we bring him on, I might just have to pick up the slack a little bit…

This might not seem that bad, but in a startup, everyone needs to be doing 150% of a normal job. And if Gideon is only doing 50% of his job, then you will end up doing 250% of a job. This will probably cause you to become very resentful, and you really don’t want to be resentful about something that you’re spending 15 hours a day on.

Furthermore, when you’ve had enough and you finally want to get rid of your friend, it becomes a non-trivial task, because you have to carefully balance his feelings against your need to divorce yourself from his incompetence. With an employee who isn’t your friend, you don’t have to worry about whether you’ll mess up the weekly poker game.

Justin Kan is the founder and president of justin.tv. Founded October 10, 2006, Justin.tv is the destination site for broadcasting and watching live video online while chatting with friends

Related Topics: Branding, Employee Relations, Entrepreneurship    2 Comments