020 - Thriving Together: Working with Your Spouse for Success

Welcome to Women Powering Ecommerce, where we dive into the journey of a female e-commerce entrepreneur every Tuesday and Thursday. Today, we'll explore a topic that sparks both admiration and caution: working with your spouse. Some say it's a golden opportunity, while others warn of potential disaster. Let's uncover five reasons why working with your spouse can be a recipe for success and one crucial aspect to be careful about.

Complementary Personalities: A Perfect Fit

One of the biggest advantages of working with your spouse is the potential for complementary personalities. When your strengths align with your partner's weaknesses and vice versa, it creates a dynamic synergy. This perfect fit allows you to divide and conquer tasks efficiently. For instance, while one partner may handle marketing and big-picture ideas, the other can focus on details, team management, and operations. Such a partnership lays a strong foundation for a successful business.

Shared Passion and Goals

Working together on projects you both feel passionate about can be immensely fulfilling. When spouses share the same enthusiasm for their work, it creates an exciting environment for growth and connection. Aligning your goals ensures that you both head in the same direction, even if your roles within the business differ. This shared vision fosters mutual support and drives your venture towards success.

Trust: A Fundamental Pillar

The trust between spouses, as business partners, is a critical aspect of making the partnership work. Trusting each other completely removes doubts and helps maintain transparency in all aspects of the business. When you trust your spouse's judgment and decisions, it leads to better communication, smoother operations, and a sense of security in your shared venture.

Designing Your Schedule Together

Having the freedom to design your work schedule collaboratively is a considerable advantage of working with your spouse. Unlike previous jobs where you had to conform to external schedules, you can now tailor your work hours to suit both of your needs. This flexibility allows you to allocate time for work, personal commitments, and leisure activities, leading to a more balanced lifestyle.

The Challenge of Disconnecting

Working with your spouse, especially when you both love what you do, can blur the lines between work and personal life. While passion drives success, it's essential to establish boundaries and disconnect during non-business hours. This is a common challenge for couples working together. To strike a balance, set rules for discussing business matters outside of work hours, focusing on positive and exciting aspects during personal time, while reserving problem-solving discussions for work hours.

Conclusion

The decision to work with your spouse can be a fruitful one if approached with the right mindset and a willingness to adapt. Complementary personalities, shared passion, and aligned goals create a recipe for success. Trust serves as the foundation, enabling effective collaboration and decision-making. Additionally, the flexibility to design your schedule together enhances work-life balance. However, it's essential to be mindful of disconnecting from work during personal time to maintain a healthy relationship and overall well-being.

Ultimately, every couple's experience will be unique, and challenges will arise. But with open communication, respect for each other's strengths, and a united vision, working with your spouse can lead to a successful and fulfilling journey as entrepreneurs and life partners.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Women Powering Ecommerce. We hope you've gained valuable insights and inspiration to achieve your own business goals. Remember to follow us on social media and your favorite podcast platform for more exciting content. See you next time!

Episode Transcription

020 - Thriving Together: Working with Your Spouse for Success

(00:00):

Welcome, e-commerce empresses to this episode of Woman Powering Ecommerce. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday as I take you behind the scenes of my journey as a female e-commerce entrepreneur. Together, we'll explore the highs, the lows, inspiring you to take action and achieve your own business goals, so let's get started.

(00:32):

So, what are we going to talk about today? This topic I am super happy to talk about. I want to talk about working with your spouse. So, I find that you usually hear two different stories. So either I love it, I love working with my husband and my wife, or my girlfriend, my boyfriend, it's such a golden opportunity, or you have the completely other opposite. Oh, it's such a bad idea, and when we tried that, we were heading right into a wall. So, well, what do I think? I would say it depends and I feel like sharing today my reasons. I'll share with you five reasons as to why I personally love working with my husband, but also one thing we really needed to be careful about and had to adjust, let's not lie, we had to adjust to a few things when we started to work together, but especially one that I'll share.

(01:32):

So, number one reason why I love working with my husband is our personalities are total opposites. Therefore, that makes a great fit for us working together. So, that means that my strengths are his weaknesses and vice versa, his strengths are my weaknesses. So honestly, that works out great, and when we first started to work together, we opened our e-commerce. He was doing all the marketing, just doing the big work, I would call it. Nothing into details, I would take care of all the details. I would take care of making sure the team was doing good, feeling comfortable and happy at work.

(02:27):

So, we worked like that for a while and it was going super well until we decided to create another business at the same time, and we just commonly decided to, "I'll just continue and maintain our e-commerce while my husband just works on creating and getting started our SaaS business or software Buster Fetcher." So, we did that for a few years to finally realize that something was missing. I was missing that passion, that fire to try new things, have new ideas. I was not as visionary as my husband was, I was more into anything around structure, the team, the operations, basically, and my husband, he started this business on the other side. He was all over the place having so much fun, but there was no structure, so eventually you just kind of stopped growing because you need some structure at a minimum to continue and make sure you grow.

(03:34):

So, we for a while decided that maybe it would be nice to go back to what we were doing previously and we thought about it for a long time, but didn't really do it because a lot of things were implicated. We had to change roles a little bit. Our job description on a weekly basis would change, but eventually we decided to go back to that and we have done that since January and oh, am I so happy, and he would say the same thing. It just changed everything dramatically. We are just made to work together. So, now what we do is we just have both our roles. So, he'll have a role of a visionary and I'll be more the integrator, if you're a little bit aware about the whole EOS system, that's kind of what we based everything we do on as of now.

(04:28):

So, we both have a very separate roles that really complete each other and we manage our businesses like that. So in the e-commerce and the other business, I will take care more of the operations sides, the financials, the structure, the team, and he'll be more into anything to just the ideas, the partnerships, the visionary stuff, so it just works so well. Number two, I would say yes. So we work on completely different things, but at the same time we get excited about the same stuff. We share a passion and that's so much fun because it allows us to grow together on the work level. So we grow together, we get to talk about all the same stuff that really makes us passionate about we do on a daily basis, and maybe I would put that in number three, we share the same goals, so we have shared goals.

(05:30):

Yes, we do different things, but again, we are aligning our goals. We both are heading still in the same direction, just doing different things, so it's great. I love it. So, the next point is we trust each other, and I think that's probably the point I don't appreciate as much as I should, or at least I could say that I take for granted just because we've always worked together and we've always trusted each other, but I put myself in the position of two business partners not knowing each other pretty well, not knowing if you can trust the other half, and that must be really hard. So, I'm just really grateful to... Your spouse, you're supposed to trust your spouse. So, having that and that being my business partner just makes it so much better, and I sleep really well at night, having that confidence and... I don't have any trust issues. We make sure that whatever... We are very transparent and honest with each other and we trust the other half with whatever we do.

(06:44):

And another thing, and the last point I'll say for today is working with your spouse is great because you get to design your schedule together, and I used to previously years, years before when I had a job and my husband was just his own boss, he had to adapt to my schedule because I wasn't 100% in control of my schedule, so now we are, so it's great. We can just make sure that our week is synced together, so if we need to take some time off, we'll do it together. If we need to work on something specific, we can move around things and blocks in our schedule. So, the fact that we get to design our schedule is something we appreciate and that I am very grateful for. Now, things that we have to be careful about, a few things, but the number one point I really want to mention is disconnecting.

(07:49):

Since we're so passionate and we love what we do... This is not a job what we're doing right now, it's something that we love doing, so it's almost... Every single day we feel like we're playing. We don't come at work, we don't come and do a job, we just come and have fun and play with a lot of great people on the team. So what happens is that... And we really try to stop working at 5:00 and we do now, before we did not, but now we do at 5:00 PM or 5:30, depending on whatever we have in our schedule, but the point is we respect our schedule, but then do our conversations, respect or get a schedule, and that's a whole other discussion. So it happens, and I'm not going to say... We try not to be too drastic, but are we still talking about work at 7:00 PM or we get up super early?

(08:42):

Are we already talking about work at 5:00 AM? We try to be careful, same thing on the weekends. We really make a conscious effort to disconnect out of business hours, I should say it like that, and that took us a long time and a lot of work. I personally was more severe with that. I really felt the need to disconnect even more, but we really found a good balance now. So as a rule of thumb, we have decided that anything that's positive within our work in the business, we can talk about a little bit, then we have to determine what's a little bit, but like I said, rule of thumb, whatever is positive and exciting about anything that's happening in the business, we can talk about outside of business hours, but for any problems, we try to keep that within our work schedule. I find that when we do it like this, it's been going really well.

(09:44):

It creates a good balance and it's a great compromise we found and everyone is happy, so that's it. So, what did I learn throughout all those years working with my spouse? I would say that complementary personalities really make you much more successful. When we did not work together or we're just our own personality working alone, we were missing out on something, but when we put those two personalities that completed each other, then that really is a working recipe. And another point is that when you share a passion with your spouse, especially in the workplace, while it's just such a nice environment to grow and to connect together on another level, so I love it. It's something we really cherish, and lastly, align goals. When you have the same goals and you're heading in the right direction both together, you thrive, you really thrive.

(10:42):

So, that's definitely something now we make sure that our goals... We have our own separate little goals, but our big common goals, when they're the same, it's so much more fun, and we definitely thrive when we do that. So working with a spouse, is it a recipe for success? Is it a recipe for a disaster? Well, I can speak for myself, in our case it's definitely a recipe for success. Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I hope you gained valuable insights and inspiration today to keep growing and taking action towards your goals. Please follow me on social media. Also, follow us on your favorite podcast platform to get notifications every time a new episode is uploaded. See you next time.