Thinking About Working With Your Spouse? Here’s How It Works for Us

Working with your spouse can be extremely rewarding, but it’s not without its challenges for sure. When I was first starting my business, and even for the first several years, I never imagined that my husband Landon would work with me one day. But now that he does, I wouldn’t trade what our life looks like for anything! 

Having him by my side, building this business together has been amazing. However, even though on Instagram everything may look great, that’s not always the whole story. Today I’m sharing how we make it work.  

Working With Your Spouse: How We Make It Work

The biggest thing to consider when you’re thinking about working with your spouse is your communication. It’s so key in any working relationship, but especially with your spouse or partner! It may even take some therapy to work through, but more on that shortly. 

Besides getting our routine and communication down, here are some other factors that contribute to our successful working relationship: 

• We aren’t planning on having kids. This is a huge financial factor in our budgets and lifestyle. 
• We don’t have student loans, all the debt that we are in could be paid off if we wanted.
• Landon is a HUGE finance guy. He does trading and investing when we aren’t painting so we have a good savings account. 
• I don’t entirely rely on murals for income, I have passive income streams supporting us. 

We also went through intense couples therapy before and during the time that Landon was getting ready to leave his job at Amazon to work with me full-time. I’m talking like two hours every other week for months! We wouldn’t be able to work so well together, be around each other all the time, and handle the dynamic of me being the “boss” without this vital layer of our relationship. 

There doesn’t have to be something “wrong” in order for couples therapy (or any therapy!) to be helpful – it’s beneficial to learn tools for working together both in business and in your personal life no matter what.

Even though we’ve had to work at making our working partnership successful, it’s SO rewarding. It was definitely years in the making but so worth it. Owning our time as a result of being fully self-employed has been the best thing in our lives. We’ve been able to have so many experiences together because of this freedom and flexibility, and I love Landon and our relationship so much more for it! 

Creative Business Mentorship

If you are thinking about working with your spouse in your creative small business and ever want to talk it through, please reach out to me! I love helping fellow creatives navigate the world of small business ownership.