Family Business; When husband and wife partner up in small business

family business

The highs, lows of husband and wife business teams

Husband and wife couples family business

What happens when business partners wake up in the same bed every day?

I specialise in working with husband and wife family business partners to help them discover and build their own Beautiful Business and Life and then build it. Typically, businesses such as these are built on the profession of one of the couple. Husband and wife family businesses like these make up the majority of small business partnerships in Australia. 

“Roland helped us get clear on our roles and responsibilities in the business and find a realistic balance between work and home life again… Business is Fun again”
Mark and Linda

Operations, marketing and admin

Often (but not always of course) it is the husband’s trade or profession that lies at the foundation of the business, and he runs the operations of the business (the work of the business), while the wife runs the marketing, finances, the HR issues, and the admin.

A husband and wife family business partnership such as this can be highly satisfactory and profitable and what’s more, it can allow the couple to grow and develop together. But there are also a bunch of unique challenges to developing a small family business and having it become a Beautiful Business that Stands the Test of Time. More about the unique challenges of husband and wife family businesses on this site, and also on entrepreneur.com, a great article about how to build a successful family business.  If you’re ready to start to discover and build your own Beautiful Business and Life, click here now to book a Discovery Session with me as part of my Five Steps to Discovery Process.

Complete the Bey and Jay Family Business Survey

husband and wife family business partnership

Take the Beyoncé and Jay-Z Family Business Survey, to find out how you rate against the world’s most famous married business partners. Complete the questionnaire here. It will take you no more than a few minutes to complete and you will receive a 2-page report with your score, showing where you sit on the Bey and Jay Family Business Scale. Ideally, you and your spouse should both complete the survey independently and then compare results.

We love being life- as well as business partners, we’ve learned to communicate at a completely different level with each other and we both love standing in the centre of our lives having this great sense of control.

Anh and James

Here is a cool infographic about how to make a success of being in business with your spouse on the Business Families Foundation website

What you can expect when working with me:

This is how I’ll help you build a Beautiful Family Business that supports your family rather than fights with it:

  • Develop absolute clarity about your roles and responsibilities in the business, allowing both of you to relax knowing that the important stuff is handled every day and every week.
  • Implement better bookkeeping, workflow management and project management systems. Your fingers on the pulse of all the key indicators of the health of your business, as opposed to keeping your fingers crossed.
  • Develop absolute clarity about the Purpose of your business; the reason your business exists and why anybody else would care about that. Know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.
  • Build relationships with the right people. Referral marketing is the most powerful way to build your business.
  • Develop marketing strategies that mean you get to build your business with the right type of clients. Clients walk in the door, wanting to do business with you.
  • Develop and implement Quality Improvement systems that allow you to let your staff get on with things confident the work will be consistent. Make your business run like a Swiss clock.
  • Develop and implement better hiring systems so you can be sure you get the right people on the bus
  • Create a balance between work and home that is practical and flexible; Learn how to ‘leave work at work’ when it needs to be left there.

Download my Free Guide to finding the perfect coach or mentor for you.

“One of the reasons we decided to go out on our own was to increase not just flexibility but we wanted freedom of choice … to be the masters of our destiny and that is definitely one of the benefits of running a husband and wife business.”

Kylie and Jake

Complete the Bey and Jay Family Business Survey

Don’t forget, take the Beyoncé and Jay-Z Family Business Survey, to find out how you rate against the world’s most famous married business partners. Complete the questionnaire here and you’ll receive a 2-page report usually in hours.. It will take you no more than a few minutes to complete. Ideally, you and your spouse should both complete the survey independently and then compare results.

It’s a fun thing to do and it will lead to some great conversations between the two of you… I promise you

Next step: The Five Steps:

If you do recognise some of those statements above, then I’d love to have a chat with you to explore if it might be a good idea for us to work together. To explore that question I generally ask people to work through my 5-Step Discovery Process with me, which is purely designed to answer that question for both of us.

The first steps in the process are free and there will be no pressure in any form. At the end of the process, it will be clear to both of us if we should engage and go on a journey and adventure together or not. follow the link to the 5-Step Discovery Process page. The page also outlines all of my regular programs. You can also go straight to my online booking calendar to book a free initial chat.

Business support, coaching and mentoring

There are many forms of support available to business owners: Short term, long-term, government-funded, private, highly personal and customised, or more templated. There is an entire page on this site that details the 7 main types of business support available. How to find the right support for your business is also one of the 7 Big Questions about building a beautiful business and life

There is also a collection of articles about finding the right business and life coach on this site, as well as a page about the principles of business and life coaching.

Business owners I work with and industry-specific coaching programs

I have written in detail about the business owners I work with, and furthermore, as you’ve read about on this page, I have developed a number of coaching programs designed to support specific industry groups:

  • Coaching for architects, designers, creative agencies and Professional services
  • Coaching for Builders, and trades people
  • Coaching for Husband and wife businesses (this page)
  • Coaching for Studios, salons and workshops
  • Coaching for Retail businesses

Further reading and resources

Download my Free Guide to finding the perfect coach or mentor for you.