In this article, you’ll be learning how can start-up couples can manage their business and love together. Management of love and business side by side together seems to be a dream venture for couples, however, it takes a lot of challenges to reap the real fruits. When fun, love, and business are mixed well, it becomes real happiness. Achieving business success together feels priceless.
What a common business takes to take is to identify and measure many factors between startup couples i.e. common goals, priorities, limitations, personality types, etc. Once these factors are well analyzed and synchronized, startup couples can expect many successes in relatively less period.
“Forget Netflix, let’s build an umpire and chill.”
Benefits of managing the business together for start-up couples
Common objectives:
Startup couples once find mutual interests and objectives, they can turn working for business into a passion. Common objectives bring chances of greater bonding and caring for each other.
As a piece of advice, letting in-hand jobs go for a common startup business by both partners simultaneously may cost a collapse. Instead, one of the partners has to keep continuing his/her current job and only leave it for a new startup once things are good to go for the other partner to jump in completely.
Tips
- Always work-out break-even analysis to know how much money is needed to run business expenses instead of assuming and estimating inflows and outflows of money/funds.
- Make good research work for sourcing from the right place.
- Meet potential vendors/service providers and get formal quotations.
- Be very careful with terms and conditions from vendors/service providers.
- Make research work about inbound and outbound logistics expenses involved.
- Make the costs involved in processing/converting to your finished goods.
- List out all fixed and variable expenses.
- It’s always a good idea to make 4 portions of net income i.e. 2 for each of you, 1 for contingencies, and 1 for marketing and business development.
- Find out your target market and ask about their expectations. You may use the google service for surveys.
- Never plan to render 100 percent of all your resources i.e. time, money, and energy. Always leave a cushion for a fallback plan.
- Along with research for business success factors, also find out the reasons why the businesses collapse in your chosen startup domain.
- Make a list of the possible functions in your startup, and classify them into critical and non-critical ones. Well plan for critical ones and you may consider outsourcing non-critical chores of the startup.
- Make a list of your competitors who may impact you. Also, plan and decide whether will you create more customers or eat up from existing market share.
- Last but not least, never make a startup for the sake of just a new startup. Always think about what will you do something best than competitors which your customers value. This competitive advantage should not be easy to copy. Remember, being best is far better than being best first.
No more traditional dedicated job hours:
They would no more feel like working for someone else, instead, they can enjoy working together beyond the traditional job or business timing requirements and psychological issues. There won’t be a separate time and vacations required for family bonding. It could be fun and working at the same time.
“What you are doing will be actually what you love and this keeps you get going”.
More time, more ideas, more solutions, more flexibility:
Discussing business ideas and creative solutions to problems and opportunities round the clock can be really fun. They can also switch roles and benefit from each other strengths. Going together for meetings is more fun and celebrating successes keeps them more motivated. A study shared that doing business together led to significant income gains for both spouses.
“Business, Fun, and Love all together keep getting going at the same time”.
More energies and enthusiasm:
All personal energies and professional skills with the least time and office restrictions will be used to harvest and nurture benefits for the very own success of the mutual business.
However, this won’t mean everything is just done perfectly alright once decided to work with each other for a self-owned business. There are some challenges are is always good to anticipate these challenges, be ready, and know how to sort out such issues.
Challenges
Your Spouse is not just a spouse:
You will have to understand and remember every time that your spouse is not just a business partner available round the clock. Your spouse needs more personal attention, praise, affection, and care even more.
Your spouse will always appreciate things done for the mutual business.
The spouse will make mistakes, even stupid mistakes but you have to remain soft, gentle, and caring in correcting him/her. In case you are having a bit of a problem in your relationship grab some solutions on how to solve the relationship problems efficiently
There will be disagreements and fights too:
There will be a lot of times issues that will become points of disagreement and emotions will take over the senses.
Don’t be late in accepting the mistakes and forgiving and forgetting to fix what has gone wrong.
Be very cautious next time, keep cool, calm, and kind and become a good listener.
You will have to feel when it’s high emotion time and take time to react, comment or decide.
You will have to try to be the first to forget, forgive, and bond more strongly.
Decide the Primary Roles for each other:
You will have to find various areas and decide which roles to play for a mutual business.
You will have to allocate the individual roles on the best strengths available between you.
- For example, you will need to find potential customers, convince them for a meeting time, presentation, follow-up, negotiation, payment terms, order processing, delivery, invoicing, etc. there would be several roles.
- You have to primarily decide which one of you will be primarily taking up which roles and the other one has to remain in a supporting role.
Don’t forget my time:
That’s a tricky, however, highly important part while managing business and love by startup couples.
Never compromise your me time be it going for a walk, going to the gym, or occasionally visiting friends. Remember it is going to be your private time so be spent positively and healthily. This will give you some moments to have a good break and enable you to come back with more energy and passion.
