Working with your husband is not necessary a bad idea. There are many benefits of working with your husband such as enhancing team work, improving your marriage, efficiency and accountability.
On the other hand Yes you will face challenges such as in making decisions, poor work life balance and ownership. Despite these challenges there is it is doable and a lot of couples have thrived at it.
If you feel this is something for you and your husband, then go for it. It is recommendable to start and run a business with your partner id both of you are committed.
However, it is important that you lay down key rules and precautions for how your business will run. You can do this by drafting an agreement, learn effective communication, tolerance, patience and allocate set duties for you and your husband.
Benefits of Running a Business with Your Husband/Boyfriend
1. It is good for Teamwork
Running a business with your spouse creates great teamwork as a couple because you and your husband or boy friend are working on the same thing together.
2. Streamlines your Goals
When you own a business with your partner, you have common goals that you both want to achieve. You get to share these similar goals when you are working together.
3. Enhances Business Efficiency
Working together with your boyfriend enhances business efficiency. Because you and your partner has the same goals and interests in the business you all focus on making the business work by reducing costs and eliminating wastage.
4. Enhances Business Accountability
Working together with your husband enhances business accountability because it is easy to hold your husband or partner accountable because of working together.
5. Improves your Marriage
Working together with your husband enriches your marriage. Spending time together as you work enriches the love and the bond that you share.
Read: How to Start and Run New Business when Pregnant
Risks of Working with your Husband
1. Poor Decision Making
It is hard being in control and making a unified decision when you are working with your partner. It is challenging to reach a common conclusion because each of you may differ on some interests.
2. Challenges Work Life Balance
Achieving a balance between work and balance is hard when you are working with your husband. Already your boyfriend is a large part of your life and when he is the same person you are working with, it is hard striking a balance.
3. Conflict between Personal and Work issues
It is hard to separate work with personal issues when you work with your husband. You both share a personal and work life, and it can be really challenging to separate the two.
4. Poor Conflict Resolution
It is hard to tolerate work conflicts between you and your husband. Work conflicts will easily come up but it gets hard to tolerate your husband unlike you would with an outsider.
5. Causes Ownership Wrangles
Working in business with your partner creates finances and ownership conflicts. When conflicts are unsolvable settling ownership issues with your husband may be hard when you own or work together in your business.
How to Successfully Run a Business with Husband
1.Have a Written Agreement
It is very important that you and your husband have a written agreement in place. You need to view the business relationship as a business partnership to make your work relations easier. Put everything down in writing, including terms and ways of solving issues should something come up.
Important things to include in a business partnership agreement with your husband include;
- Ownership and control for each of you. What is each partner’s authority? include it in the agreement as it will minimize ownership fights later if you separate.
- Decide what happens when one partner decides to leave the company. The agreement is crucial to settle any issues or fights over succession or roles in your business.
- How is ownership stake handled? Do you get the right of first refusal to buy your husband out? You and your husband needs to decide on this to make your business as easy as possible with less fights.
- How to handle your conflicts. Have clarity of these elements as they are crucial in eliminating or solving any conflicts or fights that may come up when you are working with your boyfriend.
- What is the length of the partnership? It is important to decide for how long you are going to work with your husband or partner to eliminate any chances of fights over this.
- How will decision-making be done? Each of you needs to allocate areas when one is in charge of making decisions to avoid fights and conflicts over collusion.
2.Establish Rules for Effective Communication
Just like in your normal husband-wife relationship, effective communication is very important in business when you are working with your partner. There should be no room for assumptions and each one of you should strive to communicate openly with the other.
Always be intentional about consulting your husband or partner about business as well and updating each other on key developments. Consult each other but keep your roles defined and try not to micromanage the other person’s work.
Further, it is critical to keep these communication with your husband or partner official. After a casual discussion, be sure to write it up in an email or letter. It may be weird at first but very handy for keeping the business operational should things start going sour.
3. Separate Work-Life from Home Life
One of the major challenges you may have while working with your husband is spending all the time together and talking about work. You and your husband may experience an incredible amount of stress about the business and how to make it work, which often carries over to your personal lives at home. You therefore must be intentional at keeping your home and work issues separate to achieve a form of work-life balance.
You do this by separating work from home. When at work, keep everything all business. When at home keep your business out of it and enjoy life just like a normal couple. Go out on dates and attend social events as other normal couples do.
Further, learn to compartmentalize work issues from personal issues. When you or your husband are having personal issues whether related to your relationship or not, it is important to keep these issues out of work.
4. Develop Tolerance and Patience for Each Other
You and your husband both need to develop tolerance and patience for each other, especially for mistakes and limitations. These may be the hardest virtues to practice but they are important. Understand that everyone, even you can and does make mistakes and errors in business.
Handle the situation as you would with another employee with the end goal being finding a solution to the problem and not outshining or blaming your husband/boyfriend. Learn to solve problems and let them go, without them affecting your relationship and respect for each other.
5. Designing Separate Duties to Avoid Collisions
Ensure that you have designated individual responsibilities for you and your husband. Even if you have the same education and career background, you have different skills and abilities. You are good at something that your husband is not and vice versa.
Therefore it is important for you and your husband to have different domains of the business where each will be solely responsible for. Divide areas of the business according to your time and expertise. In such a way each of you “owns” that portion of the business.
For instance, your husband can handle overall strategy and accounts while you handle sales and customers. You or your husband should take full responsibility for each part and gets the final decision on what direction to take. This is critical as it is hard to have a consensus on every decision that you will come across while running your business.
It is very possible to crash over each other when there are no clear guidelines on who handles what and is responsible for what. Setting different duties ensures a high level of accountability and also eliminates many instances of disagreements that you may have with your husband over your business operations.
After setting this, you should not interfere with your husband’s duties and he should not interfere with yours. You both should trust the other’s capability and let them run the operations independently. However, it is important that you and your husband consult each other on key business matters.
Secrets to Avoid Fights when Working with Husband
1. Always Calmly Manage your Conflicts
Every form of relationship has disagreements. You will argue and disagree with your husband over your business numerous times. Conflicts are necessary as they help you reach a consensus on the best way ahead for your business.
However how you handle these conflicts is very important and therefore never argue in front of employees. You can disagree, but don’t argue in public. Your employees are bound to pick up on the slightest rift and exploit the issues to pit you and your husband against each other.
2. Work As Separately As Possible
Running a business with your partner means you spend 24/7 hours together. This can create a lot of tension and even irritation towards each other. As such avoid unnecessary areas of possible collision and fights by working separately as possible.
You can achieve this by setting separate duties and roles for you and your husband. You should also stay out of the way of your husband who should do the same. Consult when you need to but handle your roles separately without too much interference from the other.
If you can have multiple offices, the better this will be. The separation enhances your relationship as you will cherish the times and moments that you do get to work together or be together. In addition it means less areas and chances of conflict.
3. View Your Business Relationship As A Business Partnership
Decide on issues such as finances and ownership. Agree on what percentage each of you owns in the business. While other factors may affect this ownership ratio, a 50/50 ownership is the most ideal.
This means you are responsible for your decision-making, even when doing it independently. The approach means fewer fights and conflicts because you are both accountable for your actions.
4: Show a United Front
In cases where one of you has to make an executive decision, such as on-the-spot decision making, ensure that you maintain a united front. If it turns out to be a wrong decision, avoid the blame game and instead discuss and make corrections privately to how to solve the problem and avoid similar problems in the future.
5. Write up an Agreement Together
Ensure that you have a very specific partnership agreement in place. It should detail all key issues including control, ownership, conflicts, and designated responsibilities within the business.
The agreement is crucial in keeping you and your husband responsible and accountable to each other. You will find that you avoid petty conflicts this way.
Related Articles
Why and Why Not to Run a Business with Your Husband
A Guide on Becoming Self Employed
