When my husband Patrick and I began working together, people responded to our decision with both skepticism and deep curiosity. They wanted to know how on earth we’d do it. Patrick deflected this with a joke, “My day boss is the same as my night boss.”
Our workplace partnership formally began in 2010, when he joined InkHouse to head operations for the PR firm I had co-founded three years earlier. But in reality, Patrick was InkHouse’s first employee. From its inception, he helped me on nights and weekends with the operational challenges of doing great work while growing and managing our business.
In retrospect, the clues that our future workplace partnership would succeed were easy to see. He was selfless in his support of my fledgling entrepreneurship (even though it added a second, part-time and unpaid job to his schedule). And he was egoless when it came to working for his wife. While this sounds like rainbows, unicorns and workplace bliss, there were inevitable bumps along the way that taught us some important lessons about how to make it work.
- Establish an equal partnership. The decision for Patrick to join InkHouse meant a shift from being my personal cheerleader and supporter to, well, my employee. Don’t let the boss-employee dynamic color your relationship. We never did, and it’s created a true partnership where we are in it for each other, at work and at home.
- Stay in your lanes. Agree on which facets of the business you will each own, and then defer accordingly. In simple terms, Patrick owns the infrastructure and budget planning while my partner and I own PR strategy. Even in InkHouse’s incubator days, these were our roles. While I fretted over quitting my “real job” and how social media would impact PR, Patrick ran the numbers: we could manage a year without my salary. I believed in his certainty then and I trust him now.
- Be willing to toggle your role. Often. When you work together and have children together you are balancing a shared life, not just a shared workplace. Amid the snow mounds of winter, when one child’s school is canceled and the other one is sick, you will need to determine whose meetings are more important. Don’t let that turn into a discussion about who is more important. Once in a while, you will need a reminder that tending to a thermometer is just as important as tending to a PowerPoint presentation.
- Leave work at work. The arrival of our children helped us learn how to put our phones down during the evenings. There will be times when big decisions are happening and those, of course, will spill over to home. But if you don’t keep it in check, your work will become your life, which leaves no room for perspective on either.
- Remember why you got married. Patrick and I try to book a date at least every other week. In any family, it’s easy to get sucked into the strict roles of parents, but when you add work into the mix, pretty soon you’re either a parent or a boss and the spouse part fades into the stories about “before we had kids.” Book a babysitter out a few months in advance so you can connect around the things that made you want to get married in the first place.
- Know your priorities. You cannot foresee all of the difficult choices you will face in running a company: devastating client losses, difficult personnel decisions and interesting business alliances. Making any kind of good decision is contingent on an awareness of your goals. I carry mine with me, and at the top is my family. Even before I committed them to paper, from the moment Patrick began working with me I knew I would choose him and our family over the business.
Does it work? An open, honest partnership around a shared passion and clear goals almost always does. Today InkHouse is a bi-coastal firm with 80 people, something I never dreamed was possible back when Patrick was doing the math on how long we could survive without my salary.
