Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Entrepreneurial couple or supportive wife?

So I asked some female friends, "Would YOU work with your husband?"

Unequivocally they answered, "No! I could never do it."

"Why not?"

The answers varied from 'we have different communication styles' to 'I don't want to have to answer to my husband' to the simplest, 'I don't want a divorce.'

What's the motive behind my pseudo-interviews? Confirmation that I'm not crazy. Confirmation that working with MY husband is HARD work. Confirmation that we're not the only husband-wife business co-owners with conflict, at work and at home. But the confirmations weren't enough.

Being the post-academic I am, I sought literature too, to help "explain" what I've already learned but haven't been able to articulate. Amazon.com offered up Kathy Marshack's Entrepreneurial Couples, a book about "making it work at work and at home". Intrigued, I hit the Prime, Two-day 1-click button and awaited some insight.

While not a huge fan of self-help books--self-assessments and checklists are littered throughout the text, I must shows that intimate partners, particularly with children, struggle to balance (meaningful) work, family life, and marriage. While this may seem a no-brainer, the specific challenges for copreneurs are different from, say, dual-career partners. Starting, maintaining, & growing a start-up is no easy task and the stresses often exceed that of traditional employer-employee relationships. For example, the risk of immersing the family's entire financial livelihood into a start-up can create insomnia in the best of us. In fact, the whole endeavor can be a recipe for disaster, or delight. The jury is leaning toward the former in our case.

Two years ago, Pat had been working as a sales rep for a software company when a long-time mentor introduced him to the property preservation industry. I believe he saw this as an opportunity to earn more money and overall fulfill the American dream of the self-made man. He started taking “orders” from the mentor’s son’s company and within months, built and claimed the Colorado market for himself. In fact, business took off so quickly that he quit his job in software sales, and requested my help to manage the volume. After all “Nikki, you’re not making any money, you’re dissatisfied with academe, and you’re not going to make tenure.” Given I couldn't argue with any of his claims, I quit my tenure track job and began to “help” Pat. Quickly, Pat and the mentor’s son argued over money and went their separate ways. Pat asked if I wanted to become his business partner (with me taking 51% ownership so as to take advantage of a woman-owned business status--which to date we never have). I agreed and we incorporated Helix.

In those early days, Pat and I shared high hopes that I’d draw upon my academic skills and contribute to Helix by researching and writing about the industry, and working with higher-level stakeholders to define and address the problems within the industry (there are many). But we quickly learned that running a small business demands all your waking hours and energies and resources, and within record time, the small business was running us. Recruitment, training, payroll, tax planning, paper processing, sub-contractor (subs) management, and other host of other daily tasks supplanted any lofty aspirations of industry reform. And those tasks quickly became divided along stereotypical gender lines. Pat worked “in the field” and managed subs, while I became the primary paper processor and bid writer.

Fast-forward to today, Pat and I continue to argue over when, how, and or if I'll contribute to Helix. And from Marshack’s categorization of entrepreneurial types, I can begin to see where some of the conflict is arising. Given her criteria, I’d surmise that we’re the “solo entrepreneur with a supportive spouse” type. We aren’t “dual entrepreneurs” who each have their own venture, and given our history and division of labor, we aren’t truly “copreneurs”. Instead, the whole endeavor fell in Pat’s lap, and I came on board to help. And, at the end of the day, I’m probably too competitive to be anyone’s helper, even (or especially?) my adoring husband’s.

Where to go from here? I don’t want a divorce either, so I guess I better start reading Chapter 2 now…