When Your Business Partner Is Your Spouse

My husband and I each have our own business as sole proprietors. We both work from home and help each other out in our businesses. Some people wonder how we can work together because they say they could never work with their spouse.

Of course it can be challenging at times. I may be concentrating on a project and my husband needs my assistance with his project. Sometimes there’s some juggling to be done to schedule everything. We also have a four-year old and the continual interruptions can be challenging.

However, I could have no better person to work with each and every day. I’m sure it helps that we’ve known each other since we were children, for 35 years now. And long before we were married, we did work together for nearly two years at the same company. So we know each other well, how the other works, when to step back and let the other have some quiet time.

Quiet time? That’s the real challenge. My husband puts on his headphones and listens to music while working. When the headphones are on, we all know to let him work. I’ll do childcare. It’s a bit more challenging for me to find uninterrupted time because I don’t use headphones. Guess I’ll have to put up a sign to indicate when I need my quiet time.

I have found that taking a few minutes each morning before our daughter gets up is helpful in planning my day. Yesterday I discovered that going to a local coffee shop was a good way to get away from it all and have some relative quiet to make important phone calls. So now we’re discussing the possibility of each of us having a time each week when we can get out of the home office and go to the local coffee shop to have some quiet time to make calls, read, write, or work on projects.