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My husband worked for me for about a year before he opened his bike shop. It wasn’t necessarily something that either one of us planned. He lost his job. He became somewhat entrenched in the recliner by the TV. I told him he was either working for me or he was working for McDonald’s. He chose me.
After he opened his shop, I kept the books for him. I did this in my spare time, which wasn’t exactly plentiful because I was already pulling 10-hour days at my home office. After our baby was born, she spent a lot of time in a sling as I stood behind my husband’s cash register.
These days, though, I don’t help out all that much at the shop, and my husband doesn’t help out all that much with my business, either. Sure, I will sometimes watch his register for him while he’s in the John. And, sure, he was at my service a few months ago when I did a frozen dinner review for a magazine that required the dinners to be “man tested and approved.”
But, for the most part, we’re generally working apart these days, and I quite enjoy it.
At any rate, all of the tips that follow are based on those experiences along with the fact that my home office doubles as my husband’s auxiliary office, as his shop doesn’t have enough space for an office. (A quick aside: the employees refer to the bathroom there as “the office.” So, whenever I call and one of the employees tells me that my husband is “working in the office,” I know exactly what’s going on).
In addition to the advice here, you also might find useful information in the following articles that I came across recently at Simple Marriage and the Marry Blogger.
- If your home is large enough and you have the financial means to make it happen, set up two home offices in two different rooms. You each will want your own phone, your own computer, your own iPad and the like. This will prevent you from arguing over whose turn it is to use what. More important, if you are like me, one of the reasons you left corporate America was this: you were sick of working in a cubicle or sharing an office with someone else. We all crave a certain amount of privacy while we work. Just because you are working with your spouse doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly enjoy sharing an office.
- Decide who is in charge. Every corporate business has a boss, and a boss’s boss and so on. Yet, most mom and pop small businesses do not, and this creates loads of simmering tension. When my husband works for me, I’m in charge. When I work for him, he’s in charge. If I don’t agree with how he’s running his business, I tell him, and then I let him decide what to do with that information. I don’t hammer away at him until he does what I want.
- Write job descriptions. Know who is going to do what before what needs to get done in a hurry. When you run a small business, there are many tasks that fall well beyond your comfort zone. It’s important to know whose job involves fixing the paper jam in the printer, reading and signing the business tax return, and researching the iPad and figuring out if the business really needs one.
- Set deadlines. When I want my husband to do something for me, I give him a specific deadline. Otherwise he’ll assume it’s not very important and he won’t get around to doing it. A slight aside: I’ve found that most people operate more efficiently when you give them a deadline.
- Hire the best employee for the job. I did his accounting for him not because he didn’t want to do it (he didn’t) but because I was good at it. He used to fix my computer for me not because I was scared to do it (I was), but because he was quite good at doing that sort of thing. Then I switched from a PC to a Mac. Now, my computer never breaks. The point is this: Figure out who is better at what and have the better person do what.
- Be co-workers by day, spouses by night. Part of the problem of working with a spouse is the inherent lack of boundaries and office etiquette. Most of us would never think to micromanage a colleague, but we think nothing of doing it to a spouse. We also would probably never call a colleague at 9 p.m. at night about a trivial work matter, but we would wake our spouse out of a deep sleep to do so. I find it healthier to emotionally separate my role as wife from my role as business partner. You might as well.
What advice do you have for couples that work together? Have you ever worked with your spouse? How did it go? Share your stories and insights in the comments area.
Copyright 2010 Project Happily Ever After
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent advice as always. My parents ran a business throughout my childhood & youth. It was an old fashioned small town Drug Store. It even had an old fashioned Soda Fountain that we sons worked until we graduated high school. Anyway I remember several times when my mom would come storming home saying “I’ll never work with THAT MAN again”. Of course she would be back in 2 days but it caused a few arguments as to how to run it. One tip that helped them was to have different days off. Mom’s was on Mon & Dad’s was on Wed. It gave them some down time alone so they weren’t together 24/7. On a couple of years they even took seperate vacations & took trips to Europe with church friends, brothers & sisters etc. It really helped them a lot & they felt so much refreshed when they returned.
I worked as my 2nd husband’s Administrative Assistant – kept track of his sales, when he should get paid on said sales, etc. Since he was on the road, I made sure we discussed business before we discussed life and livingness (any repairs I’d taken care of at the house, what my daughter was doing, etc.). It worked only because I made sure we followed the “rules”. When he got home from being on the road for three weeks, he’d want to “manage” the household. Sorry, Dude, you aren’t here enough to manage the household. My domain and shut up.
When I lived with a boyfriend, I started working at his family business. We kept our personal life personal. However, his family was much worse to deal with. For example, we were moving the business to a new location. I had arranged for phone service at the new location. The day the phone company was to arrive, I was sick with the flu and would not be going to the new location (nearly an hour drive in Los Angeles traffic). His mother had to take over. Well, the phone company didn’t show. And they told his mother that I hadn’t set it up for that day. Of course, I got blamed for sabotaging the move to the new location. Never did it occur to his mother that the phone company messed up and lied.
Thankfully, current hubby and I don’t work together. He goes to his office and I stay home. When we have jobs around the house that we have to do together, I’d just as soon shoot him. He gets very crabby if I don’t do something exactly how he wants it done.
Many of times I’ve said to him: “do you treat your employees they way you treat me? Because if you do, I’m surprised you have any employees, you’re a jerk to work for”.
Now, I say to him: “explain exactly what you want me to do, because I’m not going to be treated like an idiot”. That has helped, a lot. Not only that, most thing he does because it’s “manly” work, I’ve done. Before my current hubby I didn’t know a man that could do what I can do around a house – paint, hang pictures, fix the toilet, etc. (And I did have to teach my hubby how to paint a room, properly.)
Alisa, your comments are all exactly what I’ve done when I’ve had to work with the man in my life.
My husband and I both teach at the same small school–his classroom is right down the hall from mine. I’ve been there four years, he came on board from another school this past year, so we had to adjust our routine, everything from who drives there and back, whether we eat lunch together and where, and what time we leave for the day. We hash over our day in the car on the way home, and then have more time to spend as spouses at home, cooking dinner, sharing kid duties, and snuggling on the couch. Sometimes it is very hard to separate being spouses at work–we want to pick over an ongoing argument instead of leaving it for home, or forget that public displays of affection are against the rules! We have to remember that each of us is in charge of our own classroom, and that we fulfill our teaching duties in completely different ways, so the occasional suggestion is ok but we can’t try to run each other’s classes. We even help each other out professionally–I proofread students’ science fair papers, he helps on band trips! It hasn’t always been easy, especially at the beginning, but good communication usually solves most misunderstandings.
Kate–that’s an interesting situation. Thanks for sharing your insights, and I’m glad you’ve been able to make it work. Thanks for shaping our next generation of great thinkers!
.-= Alisa Bowman´s last blog ..Happy Memorial Day! =-.
Spot on! I have never worked with my husband (and know that is a good idea that we don’t) but even sharing a home office is sometimes a recipe for disaster!
.-= Andi´s last blog ..Eat Pray Love and Drink winners! =-.
I have never worked with/for my husband and don’t plan to do so, but this is good and useful information for if it ever comes up for us. Thanks, Alisa.
You got fantastic nice ideas there. I made a research on the topic and got most peoples will agree with your blog. Unfortunately, he was moving up to Boston the next day and had rented a hotel room for that night because he had already had his electricity shut off.