Building A Successful Business With A Spouse

It is a dream come true, to be able to run a successful business with my husband. It has been less than a year but together we have accomplished many things. During that time, I have learned many things about my husband and about running a business together. It wasn’t always pretty! Definitely didn’t feel like a dream journey at first!

In dōTERRA, more often is the case that the wife starts a business and the husband joins her in that business. Support could mean a lot of things, including helping out at home while the wife is away teaching classes. For you wives, is that your idea of a supportive spouse? For you husbands, are you worried that THIS is your wife’s idea of support and team work?

The truth is that there are so many ways that a husband and wife can work together in a family business in dōTERRA.

We learned the following things through many experiences! We are not perfect and we feel we always need to be working on these ideas.

These are the 5 tips I am going to cover.

Marriage Comes First
Simplify & Be Organized
Give Your Spouse Wings
Leverage Each Other’s Strengths
Celebrate Successes & Grieve Losses Together

1. Marriage Comes First

I am blessed to consider my husband my best friend, too. I’ve heard friends say, they can’t stand to be with their spouse 24/7. There may have been a handful of times when we were struggling that I’ve thought that, too. But 90% of the time, we’ve played nicely! If you can work well with your spouse, then you can probably work well with anyone.

Ben enjoys the essential oils and the dōTERRA products. When he joined me, he tried to do everything I did, but he didn’t fee the same way I did about the products. At first, I couldn’t believe why on earth he didn’t see the same way I did. I came to realize he didn’t enjoy the girly things as much as I did, which is understandable. We had different ideas about the business and about how to approach problems, too. Even when you have differences, seek to always be united.

One key to being united is clear communication. I found that I first needed to figure myself out before I could communicate effectively with my husband. I did a lot of journalling to figure out my thoughts, feelings, and frustrations. Then when my head is in the right place, I would communicate the thoughts with Ben. We both need to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Communicate regularly. Set a time in you weekly schedule to talk about your plans and …. feelings. Also communicate your dreams, ideas, goals, and intentions. When you share ideas you are still forming, make sure you communicate that you are still working of those ideas. The more you discuss things, the more often you will be on the same page. That’s what it means to be united.

Consider how what you do will affect your marriage. When I am clear-headed, I often ask how each of my decisions blesses and strengthens our marriage. The two secrets to maintaining any relationship, whether it is business or not, are as follows:

Love, and
Service and Sacrifice

Love is a verb. The love and unity between you and your spouse will be a source of confidence and comfort to your work life.

Maintaining marital love requires time. Stephen Covey says that you can’t be efficient when dealing with people, meaning that you need to give the relationship the time it requires. The more you give, the less the relationship will require of you. In a nutshell, spend time together (outside of business). You may be passionate about what you do, but your spouse wants to hear more from you than about essential oils or the business. Talk about other things, too. Each week we try to find time for a date, a time alone together. We go out and eat a meal or go for a walk together. Not giving your time fairly (not necessarily equally) can cause resentment in the other spouse, for example a husband who begins to despise your doTERRA business. Take time to express your love both in and out of the bedroom.

Recognition and appreciation are expressions of love. Whether it is big or small, recognize all of the things your spouse has done. I sometimes don’t realize that I haven’t shown enough appreciation for his support. Small accomplishments maybe a big deal to them. For example, I know that posting my first post was a small accomplishment, but a huge deal for me! Ask for acknowledgment if you feel like you haven’t been recognized too. Be considerate. Praise often. We had to work hard to consider the needs of each other. Simply looking at your spouse, being grateful for them, and considering their wants and needs goes a long way to produce a harmonious relationship.

Balance work and family and time. Sometimes when I get so caught up in what I am doing, my husband reminds me that I need to balance. We try to spend time with the kids even if we take turns. We take turns doing dinner and we do chores together. Husbands don’t want to be a glorified babysitter, house-sitter and a secretary for you. That is very degrading, and takes away from their masculine role. Somehow be sensitive to that, ladies!

2. Simplify & Be Organize

My husband has taught me, ‘go slow to go fast‘. In the past, when I get an idea, I jump into it quickly when I haven’t considered it long enough. Initially, I was a little frustrated when Ben would ask too many questions about what I was doing and why I was doing it and what benefit those things were to our business. I forget that even though he has been around me from the beginning, I haven’t really shared or fully showed him how the business works. I assumed he knew just by watching me all these years. Initially, I thought, “I don’t have time to explain it, just do it.” Then I got wiser and allowed us to put our heads together to think, communicate, and even strategize together.

When Ben studied and analyzed the business enough, he found areas of great potential that were supported by the numbers. Using his business management skills, legal knowledge, and computer technology skills, he helped us simplify our business activities and organize our life. We didn’t get it right the first time. It took tuning, but we got it down pretty smoothly now. I am still amazed that it has been only a year and we even moved countries in the middle of it all.

Working at home may be difficult for some people because they haven’t developed the kind of discipline that is required. Having a plan, weekly business schedule, and work space helps. If you find it hard to concentrate, use InTune oil and noise cancelling headphones.

Here are some of the ideas to help you be organized:

Get a separate business bank accounts for your dōTERRA business
Use a good income and expense tracking system
Set up joint calendars on our devices, color coded these (e.g. Jade, Ben, Business Events, Family)
Share task list and documents
Organize a shared file system (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.)
Create joint and separate email addresses
Hold weekly business meetings and short daily meetings (We always start with a prayer)
Create visions, vision boards, and mission statements (review these often)
Have separate work spaces
Schedule time blocks and weekly tasks
Organize oil products for business and family (new, open, for home and for classes)
Capture ideas, but stay focused on the agreed goal

3. Give Your Spouse Wings

Give your spouse wings. Giving someone wings means that you allow them freedom to choose and work in their own way. Freedom is the reward you were seeking when you entered self employment in the first place. Enjoy your well-earned reward, your freedom to choose how you work and what you decide. Remember to respect each other’s freedom to make choices within the business. Choices entail risks and consequences that may be felt by your spouse, your business partner. You need to welcome risk taking and mistakes along with the welcoming freedom of choices. Make it safe for your spouse to test new ideas and mess up. This safety will also allow them to soar with wings far beyond their current abilities.

Enable your improvement by valuing feedback. At first, I found it hard to get feedback from my husband, especially since I had been doing the business for a while and he just joined. When I received feedback, I was defensive and took things personally. I took the feedback personally because I doubted my self worth, a limiting belief. Irritation with feedback is always a reflection of limiting beliefs. When I let go of limiting self-doubt, I was able to change and improve from the added insight of the feedback. Now I value feedback in any form because I know I can choose to see it for what it truly is, reflections of me in someone else’s eyes. That reflection often (but not always) contains helpful information that enables me to improve.

Utilizing feedback from each other, we are able to accomplish much more interdependently. Without some form of feedback, we may be doomed to repeating the same mistakes. Repeating the same actions and getting the same results indicates that you need to improve what you are doing. The key is knowing what to improve on. New ideas for improvement often come from leveraging the perspective of another person. When it comes to generating solutions for a problem, two heads are better than one. Feedback from others activates the power of interdependence when you can draw on the knowledge, experience, and skills of another to improve what yourself.

Trust and support one another. At the core of trusting another person is believing they have your best interests at heart, or at the very least they ALSO have your best interest at heart along with their own and can be counted on to seek for a win-win solution that serves your needs, too. Seeking to further your interests along with those of your spouse involves communication and commitment. Communication because you need to know their needs and interests. And commitment because you need to be able to rely on them and their promises. Once you have discussed your needs, intentions, and have committed to supporting each other’s best interests, you must default to assuming the best in the other. This means taking responsibility for your thoughts, feelings and actions, and not blaming others.

Give each other the benefit of the doubt. Doubt will always be an issue with humans because humans make mistakes. But we must realize that even though humans make mistakes, they can be reliable and trustworthy. Trust and reliability arises in a relationship when people consistently show that they have the best interests of the other at heart. When trust and reliability is in place, you can know that the other person is there to help — their feedback is there for your good. Without this trust, you will fall victim to a common fear: the other person is motivated by increasing his/her self-importance rather than helping you improve. Fear and distrust block progress; faith, trust and support accelerate progress. Trust and support each other and achieve more than you can both do independently.

4. Leverage Each Other’s Strengths

Leveraging each other’s strengths is the key to working interdependently and creating a synergy. We all have gifts and talents. These gifts and talents can be magnified in their effect if they are shared. Together you are more! Don’t be modest. You came to earth with some God-given gifts and talents. We divide business tasks according to our skills, talents, and interests:

I feel like my gift is to make friends, to help people, to learn, to educate and share knowledge. Identify your talents and start there. As you honor your gifts and use them more, they will simply be magnified. So I teach classes and make friends.
Ben helps teammates with tech, website, videos, content, editing, social media, accounting, and keeping us organized and functioning. So he takes care of the tech and administrative things.

When you have figured out how to divide tasks up and each person has their own special jobs, learn each other’s jobs too so if you need to, you can do it too. This also shows appreciation for the strengths of the other.

Do not pan off menial jobs to your spouse–s/he isn’t your secretary. Get a helper to do that. I pay my kids to fill sample vials and laminate things.

Keep the communication channels going. Share knowledge and train each other up in the strengths of the other, so you are better interdependent and not dependent on each other. You must keep learning about the strengths of the other person. Show an interest (you can build interests simply by learning more about something). As you know more about each other, you will improve your ability to leverage each other’s strengths and address each other’s weaknesses.

5. Celebrate Successes And Grieve Losses Together

Celebrate successes and grieve losses together. As a natural part of life and business we will have high’s and low’s. Grow together. You have the most important things already. You are successful already.

Celebrate.

Laugh at yourselves. Have fun. I am learning to be less serious and sensible about things. Schedule parties for yourself and others. We have traditions in our family, like eating sushi to celebrate a successful completion of some goal.

Take a moment to rest. All work and no play makes for a very dull life. Schedule some down time– do this on a weekly basis, too. If you are religious, and have a special day of rest, use that day to step back from things. Try to take a few hours every day to play, relax and spend time with family. If you fail to do this, you will seriously decrease your level of productivity and even run the risk of burning out.

Grieve, Forgive, and Let Go

Life happens. Although life is full of many great and wonderful moments, it also has some dull repetitive moments and moments of loss. Be happy and see the joy in every moment you can, but some moments are just plain sad. Sometimes you lose. Be a good sport. Feel the pain without magnifying it or focusing on it. Take a breath. Have a cry. Get it out. Then, … get on with the good things.

Sometimes these bad experiences come because of a mistake one or both of you made. When you do experience lows, be quick to forgive. Forgive yourself, your spouse, the universe and anything or anyone involved. Be grateful for the bad when you realize that you cannot know joy without knowing sorrow, too.

Realize that not everything is in your circle of influence. Pray for the courage to change the things you can change, and to accept the things you cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Release the need to control. You will do your very best, but sometimes things happen.

Essential oils for business support

Lavender: Communication

Forgive: Forgive

Elevation, Cheer, Citrus Bliss: Joy attracts joy

Balance & InTune: Be organized and focused

It can be painful and challenging working with your spouse but it is worth it in the end. Good thing is we don’t miss out on each other’s life. We go together to as many events as possible. Life is definitely better.