Can Spouses Work Together? – 284

In episode 284 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim, Ari, and Chelsea discuss:

• 03:45 – Their Backstory And How Did They Start Working With Each Other?
• 04:30 – Starting Their Amazon Journey
• 08:45 – Starting A Company And Working Together
• 12:15 – How Their Different Skills Work Well With Each Other
• 15:00 – Balancing Work, Business, And Family Life
• 18:00 – Delegating Responsibilities And Having Business Partners
• 22:00 – It’s About Genuinely Liking What You Both Do
• 24:30 – The Hardest Lessons That They Learned
• 28:00 – Communication Plays A Big Part
• 31:30 – Boss And Employee Relationship As Spouses
• 34:00 – Business And Marriage: Who Is In Authority?
• 36:00 – How Appreciation Works Well For The Relationship
• 39:00 – A Piece Of Advice From Our Guests

Transcript

Tim Jordan:

When you jump into entrepreneurism, you are dragging your family in with you, whether you like it or not. And a lot of people have attempted to actually work with family members, work with their spouse, and it can be tough. There are definitely some challenges. And I think it’s safe to say that the majority of the time, it doesn’t work. In today’s episode, we’re actually interviewing a couple that it did work for. And they’re gonna tell us what did, how they did it and kind of give us some secret sauce to success. It’s gonna be a great episode. Listen to the end. Here we go. Hi, I’m Tim Jordan, and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous, and the entrepreneurial veterans. We all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan:

Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of the AM/PM podcast. I’m your host, Tim Jordan, and my wife has never listened to a single episode of this podcast. That is absolutely true. I’ve been doing podcasts for years now. I’ve been doing this entrepreneurial e-commerce thing for about five or six years now. And when people ask my wife, oh, what does your husband do? She dreads that question. Because she literally cannot explain what my job is. She has no clue. She’s never listened to episode. She’s never watched a YouTube video that I’ve done. She’s never been to a conference. We are 100% separated and it’s probably for the best. If she and I had to actually work together, I might be dead and that’s not an exaggeration. She may literally have killed me by now. We have a good balance at home, but it would completely upend everything.

Tim Jordan:

If we were stuck together all the time, we were trying to make business decisions together and it’s tough. And I’m actually a little bit jealous of people that can make that happen because it would be more convenient. There’s like definitely some advantages. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have worked with children. We had Norm and Kelsey Farrar on the podcast probably a year ago, a father-son duo, but we’ve had a lot of people talk to me in the past couple years about the idea of working with a spouse and it has always been a giant mystery to me. And like I was saying, I’m, I’m always jealous when I see it done, cuz it would be cool, but I know that’s not in my cards. Today’s guests are Chelsea and Ari Cohen. It is always intrigued me that they are a married couple working together. So gonna dive into the entire story and the kind of dos and don’ts and all the information we can dig out of them in this episode. So welcome Chelsea and Ari.

Ari:

Thanks, Tim.

Tim Jordan:

So give us the backstory, right? Like, tell us what you guys were doing. Have you always worked together?

Ari:

Cool. Why don’t you start with this so?

Tim Jordan:

You’re trying to figure out who’s gonna talk first. This is amazing.

Chelsea:

Yeah. Well, I mean, we’ve been working together for many, many years. Actually, we met in an MLM and we went out on some kind of appointments together. That was kind of the first concept I wanted to work with him from the beginning. He didn’t really know that I did. So I don’t even know how that happened. Anyway,

Tim Jordan:

Was this like I wanna work with him? Or like I wanna work with him?

Ari:

Probably a little bit of both.

Chelsea:

We had just started dating and I was like, I really want to work with the person that I am dating or I connected with. I really wanted someone that I could kind of play that same game with.

Ari:

I guess we were lucky too because we became friends. Well, we became co-workers/friends first and then we kind of fell in love and we’d started dating. So it just kind of naturally progressed into working together, building our businesses together.

Tim Jordan:

But your entire relationship was basically built around the work relationship too.

Ari:

You know, this is the first time I’ve actually looked at it that way. But yeah, we started as entre working together, and then it kind of turned into a relationship. And then when we started and then we got jobs and things after that, and a few years later we started our Amazon business in 2014. And I can’t believe like this year is gonna be our 13th anniversary married, but we’ve actually been together for almost 15 years. So like you said, it just naturally progressed. And we’ve found on that when we had day jobs, cuz we quit the MLM, we went back to like, you know, the corporate world for a while.

Tim Jordan:

Separate day jobs, working apart from each other.

Ari:

Exactly. And to be honest, it was a lot worse. We had less to talk about. We both hated our jobs. I liked my job probably more than you did. I’m not gonna say.

Chelsea:

My job, I like, I got a lot out of it, but I was very, very stressed. I handled other people’s money. So you know that can get stressful.

Tim Jordan:

I don’t even handle my own money. Well, I couldn’t imagine handling somebody else’s money.

Chelsea:

Handling people’s money who don’t handle it well is the most stressful part

Tim Jordan:

Oh yeah. You’d hate me then. Okay.

Ari:

And, I mean every entrepreneur that’s listening to this podcast can probably relate that the one thing you like to talk about more than anything is business. So we get to talk about business all the time. It’s the thing that we’re most passionate about. And when you’re kind of the employee mindset, you know, nine to five type personality or not personality, but the mindset, it’s like, what do you do after that? Well then, of course, you have to have the weekends and the barbecues and the parties and the trips and the family. And that’s what you talk about. So it just kind of progressed naturally for us.

Tim Jordan:

So you started your Amazon situation. How did the conversation go when one of you must have seen this like crazy selling on Amazon thing first? It was like, Hey, check this out. Like one of you had to drag the other one into it I’m sure.

Ari:

It was me. So I’ll take credit for finding it kind of, and then she really ran with the ball. So we had actually about, you know, a few years back into being the corporate nine to five. Again, we were both getting burnt out. We kind of had the itch to start a company, a business. And we were looking at, you know, whether it was by a laundry, or like do some kind of self-serve car wash where we could invest in or start up some kind of small business. And we had kind of got pulled back into MLM again. And right after we signed up for this MLM that her dad had found out about, we had friends that had started up doing Amazon. And so I ran to Chelsea one day and I was like, check out what my friends are doing. They made $50,000 in a month or whatever. And at first she was a bit resentful. Cause we had just started.

Chelsea:

We had just started something. I was like, we’re gonna, you know, we had gotten all of our family. I’m really good at getting all my family to sign up for whatever I’m doing.

Ari:

And we’re both kind of the shiny object type people, I personally get bored really easily. So I have the attention span of like a tick. So I was like, Ooh, you know, squirrel, what’s this a new thing that sounds a lot more fun than MLM. So long story short, we looked into it and I kind of convinced her let’s sign up for the course, which was whatever it was, I think $3,500 back then. And then she was like, whoa, this is amazing.

Chelsea:

The crazy thing is we didn’t even know exactly what it was. It was selling on Amazon. We had tried doing retail arbitrage, you know, buying things from stores and selling them because we had missed the boat on the window where we could buy the course. So luckily someone wanted to refund their course. We ended up paying some dude with the permission of the guys who made the course. We ended up paying some dude over $3,000 via PayPal without knowing what private label was. Right. And we just said, well, this seems like the thing that people are making money at so pay these guys. And we started the course and I watched the first video and I was like, this is brilliant. And so that was kind of how we started. And every night I had a part-time job at the time. Every night I was in all my free time I was working, we ended up launching our first product within seven months or seven weeks from, you know, the point of starting a course to actually selling a product and kind of hit the ground running from there.

Tim Jordan:

So you had some success selling a private label product. You started the software company and who actually runs the company now? Who is in charge?

Chelsea:

Basically myself and my partner. I mean, there’s three different partners. There’s me, there’s my partner, Dan, and John. And John handles the marketing. Dan handles the development. And I basically, I guess I’m the vision and the connection to the community.

Tim Jordan:

So you’re the CEO of the company.

Chelsea:

Yes, essentially.

Tim Jordan:

So when you said about launching this company, like you were bringing other business partners yeah. Was this like an idea that started like, Hey, we’re actually gonna launch this thing and then later you thought, Hey, we should bring Ari in? Or was this always the plan to have Ari involved in this company too?

Chelsea:

Well, I knew that all, we would always have Ari come into the company at some point it actually, he came into the company about a year ago. And so we started building in 2018. We started building and wiring out.

Tim Jordan:

So you basically started this company without Ari involved.

Chelsea:

For the most part, he was in some of the first calls. And then he was like, I don’t really have, this is kind of your thing. And so I worked to build it up until last year and I was doing all the onboarding, all of the meeting and up until that point, we finally needed customer service and it was actually my partner who said, how fast can we get Ari in to take this over? Cause he and Dan and I were the only ones dealing with customer service aspects.

Tim Jordan:

So right now, what are your actual roles? Chelsea? I guess you’re the CEO. Ari what’s your role?

Ari:

So I run tech support, customer support, and I train the customer’s success team. We call it customer success. So I basically answer all the help desk tickets. I used to do all the onboarding, but I’ve trained people to do that. I create the help desk tutorials, the YouTube videos, a lot of them, and pretty much just direct that part of the company. I, I do work with the development team, but I’m not running the development team. That’s Dan Fernanda is our partner. So she’s the visionary. Dan is kind of the, how do we actually make this happen using our background with Amazon? And then we kind of all just work together.

Tim Jordan:

So are you a full-time employee now at the company, right? Yes. So your wife is your boss.

Ari:

Yeah, pretty much. I actually work more closely with Dan, so it works out well now, like when we were just doing Amazon full time and of course, we still have our Amazon business and we both do that. We were working a lot more closely together back then because it was literally like we would have a desk and we would be facing each other all day. We would be doing hashing out designs and new product launches. And what marketing are we gonna do? And I was running customer support then as well because I have kind of a business consulting customer service background. I like talking to people.

Chelsea:

He has a lot more patience than I do too. Anytime Amazon needed to be contacted, he would handle Amazon. I had too stressed out with any of that stuff.

Ari:

So it just, it just kind of was a natural flow for me to get back into that. And I don’t have a giant ego where I need to feel like I’m the man in charge. I know that’s an issue for some people, so I don’t have that issue. I’m happy to just be like, as far as I’m concerned and I’m not trying, I know this is like, how do couples work together? But here’s a piece of advice for all your listeners. This is my personality. As soon as she said yes when I proposed to her, I had already won the jackpot. So as far as concerned, this is all gravy. I’m like if I get to work with her and we get along really well, I don’t have some big ego where I gotta be the guy calling all the shots and bossing people around. I have my little team and she does her thing. And that actually that tiny separation makes it a lot easier.

Chelsea:

Yeah. And actually a funny story, cuz we have worked together in the past before this obviously you and when it came time and Dan said, you know, how can we get Ari? How fast can we get him? And I went to Ari and I said I want you to come work for this company? And cause we’ve had fairly separated roles within our other duties for a while I said, I want you to come work for us. And he had kind of a resistant. I said why are you resistant to this? And he said, you know, he goes, well, I don’t necessarily wanna work with you. You know, you’re mean to me. So you said that I was mean to you.

Ari:

She can definitely be bossy. And it’s–,

Tim Jordan:

It’s not bossy Ari. It’s assertive.

Ari:

Yes. Okay.well, yeah, maybe with like a little, maybe just a little sprinkle of micromanaging or

Tim Jordan:

Sprinkle of malice, micromanagement, meanness

Ari:

Micromanaging is not the right way. It’s gotta be highway.

Tim Jordan:

It’s not micromanaging. It’s micromanaging.

Ari:

Okay. There you go

Chelsea:

Yeah, I just get frustrated when people’s minds don’t work the way that mine does. So I have to like back up and go, okay, take a second and realize that they don’t, you know, maybe this type of stuff.

Tim Jordan:

It’s not wrong. It’s just different.

Ari:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s different. I mean, look, she’s smarter than I am. Let’s just be honest. So she’s a fast learner and I’m like, wait, wait, what, can you show that to me? She’s like–,

Chelsea:

Which is like, it’s great for customer service because he’s like, tell me like you would tell a two year old.

Ari:

Well also and that’s why another reason why I am good at that part is because I like to create tutorials, the training videos and I can really like to understand where someone’s coming from. That’s new to the software.

Tim Jordan:

So the company’s growing, right? Like it’s growing very, very fast. I don’t know if we can talk numbers, but like massively multiplying every year will say that. Yeah. And I know I don’t have to ask you this specifically, but I know that any business growing at that rate startup business can be very stressful. Like there are days when you just wanna curl up under your desk and cry. There’s days where you’re so excited, you can’t stay in your chair. The massive amount of emotions now for me going home and disconnecting from work, provide stability for me. If I have a terrible day, I go home and play with my kids and like disconnect. If I’m having a great day, I actually have to tone it down a little bit when I get home, because maybe my wife had a bad day and it’s unfair of me to be jumping around acting a fool. When, you know, she did not have a good day. How do you do that? Because if you’re working together, even if you’re not like directly working the same projects every day, you’re in the company together, right. You’re going through the highs, you’re going through the lows. Do you try to turn off work mode when you go home or when the end of the day works or do you just say screw it’s all one together thing. And like it’s all in one pot.

Chelsea:

Yeah. I feel like we do that more now with this company than we did with the other company.

Tim Jordan:

And is that the nature of your positions or is that intentional? Were you like, Hey, we need to have separation.

Chelsea:

I think it’s the nature of our positions. And also routine is very important. Like we have breakfast together every morning. And so at the time for us to just kind of be together, he makes breakfast, I make dinner. And also having some sort of hobby or some sort of activity that can kind of pull you out of that for him. It’s running.

Tim Jordan:

Both of you. Do you have the same hobbies or different hobbies?

Chelsea:

Different. Well, for me, honestly, I like cooking. I would say my number one, joy is chopping things, chopping food. Like that’s very stress relieving

Tim Jordan:

Hobby is being productive.

Ari:

Very specific.

Chelsea:

No like chopping food to make food and looking at cookbooks and anything like that. I feel like I’m still being, cuz I have to be productive all the time.

Tim Jordan:

This is such a bizarre hobby. It’s not cooking. It’s literally chopping food.

Chelsea:

It, the funny thing is that I didn’t realize that that was my favorite thing to do until Ari filled out one of those Facebook surveys about your spouse.

Tim Jordan:

Oh. Which is always 100% accurate by the way.

Chelsea:

And he said favorite thing to do when he said chopping.

Ari:

I didn’t realize it was chopping.

Chelsea:

You’re right.

Ari:

Yeah. I mean baking going out to eat obviously. We’re not

Chelsea:

Organizing, I organized the fridge this weekend as a thing I wanted to do.

Tim Jordan:

I’m still waiting for you to tell me what your hobby is. Not your OCD is right. It feels different. So anyway, you do have some separation in life, right? But you have different interests. 

Ari:

She is definitely the workaholic. So it’s a lot easier for me to turn it off. Although since I’m running customer support, I’m in there all like seven days a week. Of course. There’s no days off, but we do take time. Like we took Valentine’s day, we took a weekend and you know, we do have some staff now, so that’s easier to start delegating. I think delegating is gonna be huge for anyone who really wants to have a business with their spouse. Because as a startup, it’s just, it’s impossible not to turn it off a hundred percent. So when we have our date nights or we have our let’s go out and just have some time alone, we’re still talking about business.

Tim Jordan:

Well, that was gonna be another one of my questions was what is turning it off? Like there’s two things that we can turn off. There’s one time. Yeah. Like our tasks, like okay. At 6:00 PM, we are no longer going to work on this. I’m gonna go run. You’re gonna go destroy a poor carrot. Right. So like there’s the time. But even though you are not actively working on business things, are you still able to separate emotionally? So if you have a bad day at work, if someone has just you off, if the deal didn’t go through, if you know all your software broke at whatever, like, are you able to turn off the emotion of the business, even though you’re turning off the tasks of the business at the end of the day? Or is that impossible?

Ari:

Again? I think if we compare this one to the Amazon one like we have partners and I think correct me if I’m wrong. In my opinion, I think having partners is really what took us to the next level because we know that we can turn it off and it’s not a hundred percent on just our two shoulders when it’s a hundred percent on our shoulders. We’re like, man, if, if something happens, if this one thing doesn’t happen with the development team, then I can’t sleep at night. And that means our whole business is screwed where I know actually that’s Dan’s problem. He’s gonna figure it out. And all I have to do is I can, you know, I can he’s even giving me permission. He goes, you know, you can throw me under the bus. Sometimes I go, yeah. My development team they’re working on it is taking longer than we thought, you know, COVID or whatever. So there’s always ways to kind of turn it off a little bit and go, we’re just gonna have time together. And we’ll take this up with Dan on Monday when we have our next meeting

Tim Jordan:

But you had to get to that point by either having so with the bigger team, whether it’s partners, investors, staff, delegated, you know, outsource stuff, would you say that’s important to be able to turn it off? Like, would you say, Hey everybody, that’s listening? If you’re thinking about going into business with your spouse, your significant other, like you have to be able to turn it off, would you say that’s a fair statement?

Chelsea:

I think. Yeah,

Ari:

absolutely yes.

Chelsea:

I think that you’ve gotta create on your relationship and you know, and talking about business all day is not creating on your relationship. And I think that the problem some people have is that they stop creating on their relationships. This is just marriage in general. Sure. And when you’re so tied up in business, that is a quick way for that to happen as well.

Ari:

Yeah. So like, yeah. Hobby-wise, just going back to that and then I’ll tie that into your current question. I like to go for runs. I’m the one that walks up to three, four times we have a little terrier and she needs to get out a lot. She’s a little psycho. So she’s like me, she’s got the short attention span. I can’t sit at a computer 24/7. I need to get space. I need to get out. I need to drive my truck or go to the shooting range or go for a run. Things like that to get my attention outward. And she can be happy sitting at a maybe not fully happy she needs to get out too, but she can handle being in front of the computer all day. And like, literally we’ll have times where I’m like, when was the last time you went outside? She’s like, no, I haven’t been outside

Tim Jordan:

Little pale, honey. Yeah.

Ari:

You need some vitamin D, let’s get out. And then, you know, if you stack on top of that, the last couple crazy years with COVID and all that, and people were just going out less and less time to go meet up with friends, go to church, different things like that. Community events, it’s not all easy. So in terms of, is it important to turn it off? Absolutely what you said, but also it depends on the person because there are some people who resentfully work with their partner. And I used to do business consulting before we ever started our business. And it was actually in the automotive repair industry. So I would consult shop owners who have like an automotive or a collision shop. And 99% of the time their wives were doing the books and the wives didn’t like doing the books, but they did it out of necessity. Yeah. And they hated it, but they did it because this is what they’re all in. This is our business. Now, if they actually liked that industry, they got together. They worked together so much better. And that’s how it is with us. We generally like genuinely, not generally, we genuinely the industry, we love talking to entrepreneurs. We like talking about business again, her probably more so than me, but it makes it a lot easier. And so sometimes it is good to turn that off, but I think it does depend on the person.

Tim Jordan:

So this gives like answers 10 of my questions. Right. And let me paraphrase. You agree that you have to have some separation, right? Like we all agree. Like you have to be able to turn it off emotionally, mentally, physically. And it sounds like one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that you’re not stuck. You’re not stuck where every single second of the day, you’re having to make decisions together or work together. So it sounds like a big team, right. Being able to delegate, having other people that take responsibility, other people to make decisions, but also going back to the bookkeeper and the mechanic shop, making sure that you’re delegating and doing what you want to do, because if it was a situation, it sounds like where Chelsea said, Hey, we need some extra staff. All right. We need you to come and do this really horrific job. Like you’re gonna hate it.

Ari:

Yeah. If she had

Tim Jordan:

A much different dynamic than there is right now,

Ari:

If she had me doing the books, I would be miserable.

Chelsea:

I don’t think he’s paid a bill on his own in the last 15 years.

Ari:

Electricity bill.

Tim Jordan:

So I love that like that gives some really good context. And maybe some advice, some of you that are listening, like if you’re worried about, Hey, can we go into business with your spouse or your significant other will say like, always be achieving. You might not be able to do it right away. But like, you need to strive towards the delegation separation of responsibilities and that’s gonna make things a lot easier. Yes. So,

Ari:

And let them do their job. So yeah. It, you know, if we were to do the cuz a lot of your listeners are, Amazon sellers. Right. So let’s say we had just started a brand new Amazon business and she’s got the creative mindset and I’m more of the person to person. So yeah, it’s natural for me to do customer service. Now, if the roles were reversed and she was like, I really need you to do all the creative stuff. Like, can you design the packaging for this new widget we’re gonna sell? And I’m like, I don’t even know where to start. That would be hard for me. And I wouldn’t enjoy it. So, or rather if the revolt, if the roles were reversed, I would enjoy it. Or when she’s trying to pass something off that I don’t like, you get what I’m trying to say. So, yeah, that’s really important.

Tim Jordan:

So what was one of the biggest mistakes that you made or one of the hardest lessons that you had to learn and trying to figure out this appropriate balance of being married and also working together?

Ari:

Hmm.

Tim Jordan:

I’m curious to see, like who speaks up first and offers this up

Ari:

Biggest mistake

Tim Jordan:

Or hardest lesson that you had to learn hardest lesson

Chelsea:

As far as being a couple working together.

Tim Jordan:

Yeah. Figuring out how to stay married and stay working together.

Ari:

My answer’s gonna be kind of a repeat of what I already said, but more specific really defining the roles or the hats, so to speak like, you know, everybody has their hat, the hat designates, the job that you do. So we didn’t really have, have those clearly defined for the first few years. And we did get into a couple of periods where we were resenting each other a little bit. So it felt like she was stepping on my toes or being too bossy because we didn’t define that her hat really was the creative person. If I had known that that was her hat, I wouldn’t be resentful when she’s like, when I go, Hey, I think, you know the design should look like this instead of like that. And she’s like, okay, but we’re gonna do it this way. That I can feel resentful if I don’t realize it, she’s literally doing her job. And if that’s me handle the customers the way I do best, because I’m better at it. And I genuinely like it. So now that we have the business and we have our hats clearly defined our job descriptions clearly defined. It’s a lot easier to do that. That’s my answer.

Chelsea:

Yeah. I would say for me, it’s getting rid of stressors. If you can get rid of stressors like that. I think when we ever had problems, a lot of the time, at least from my end, it was stressors that were continually coming up. Like we had a staff member. We were, you know, constantly, and this is in the other business. We were constantly talking about this staff member as the problem, trying to solve this problem. We were on vacation. I remember like getting really stressed out about this and we’re supposed to be on vacation, turned off. If we had just gotten rid of that person and found another person, or it, maybe it’s a task that you don’t like that task. Well, maybe you can outsource that task to somebody else. If there’s specific stressors that become a in your life. And you’re able to get rid of that, that should ease a lot of the tension in the relationship.

Tim Jordan:

That makes a lot of sense. I think that it is easier to enjoy life in general when you’re not always ticked off or stressed out. So, I think that this applies not just to, you know, couples and spouses, but also to like business partners. Right. Like working with the business partners a lot more fun when you’re not just constantly having to put out fires. So it sounds like what you’re saying is like one of the secrets to success, one of the lessons you had to learn was like to proactively eliminate those problems, eliminate those stressors so that life was easier and that you didn’t have as much to complain about together and be stressed out about together. Right.

Ari:

Yeah. And let’s face it. A lot of that has to do or applies to financially as well because when you’re starting a new business, you’re investing everything into the business. And if you put a lot of money into that business, it can get stressful financially. And if you’re not both on the same page, Hey, we’re gonna change our lifestyle a little bit. You know, if I like spending all of my money on going shooting and going out to eat or whatever, expensive hobbies, and she’s like, no, like we can’t do that for a little while. Then we could resent each other. But if we’re like, Hey, we’re both all in. And we have to set aside these little bits to go do things that are special because we know that we’re taking on a little bit of extra or a lot more stress for a little while. Obviously, you know, money doesn’t buy happiness, but it’s a lot nicer

Tim Jordan:

Money helps to eliminate stress.

Ari:

It certainly does. When you don’t have the debts or the big pressure of how am I gonna make this happen? Of course, everything just becomes easier.

Tim Jordan:

I heard someone once say money, doesn’t buy happiness, but money can buy a boat and a boat can make you happy.

Ari:

Yeah. But without money, you’re not happy. It’s like there’s a lot of variations to that, but for sure.

Tim Jordan:

Yeah. So it sounds like communication is a huge part of communication of managing expectations of setting roles of being able to articulate what the stressors are so that you can start to eliminate them. Having that conversation of like, no, I am the creative person. Like, let me make this decision, keep your, you know, operational hands off of it. Right. You say that like communication is probably one of the most important things to survive being this task of starting a business and staying married.

Ari:

Huge. I think communication is the universal solvent and it is the thing that the relationship really flows on is the communication between the two of you. And even if we have the jobs or the hats, whatever you want to call it defined, we still communicate about them. If I didn’t talk to her and tell her how my day was going, and she didn’t, you know, talk to me like, she and John are, are marketing partners. They’re designing things. And she asked me for my opinion, and she’s like, nah, I don’t agree with that. But we still talk through

Tim Jordan:

Your opinion. You’re wrong. We’ll not consult you next time. Right.

Ari:

Right. But it’s still, we still appreciate that. We’re genuinely interested in each other’s opinions. And it’s just fun to talk about. So yes.

Chelsea:

Agreed. I also think that in terms of communication, communicating about where you’re going, communicating about your goals, reminding each other, you know, especially during the stressful times kind of painting that picture of why you’re doing all of this, cuz it can be stressful and you can get to the point where you can’t see the forests for the trees. But if you can constantly remind yourself, you know, we’re getting this and we’re accomplishing this and where are we on that track? You know, if, if you constantly feel like you’re never going to get there, it’s going to be a problem. But if you can really stretch your views out into the future and go, okay, this is where we’re going. This is kind of that point where we can celebrate. And this is where we are on that timeline. That to me has been really important.

Ari:

Yeah. I mean, you’ve heard the analogy you of entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and figuring out how to build a parachute on the way down. If you didn’t have an idea of what that parachute was gonna be like or how awesome it was gonna be once that thing finally opened up and the feeling of freedom and gliding through the air and all you did was like, come on, I gotta build this thing. We’re about to crash and die. That would not be a very, a fun relationship, whether it’s work or, you know, marriage or both,

Tim Jordan:

How do you manage accountability? And I’m just thinking this as we’re talking, but like Chelsea, you are the CEO of the company. And there is some point where if Ari starts to suck it up, you’re gonna have to have a hard conversation with him. Say like, Hey, you need to get your crap together. Right. And in a normal boss and employee relationship, that’s very understood how that happens. Yeah. But you guys have like a double relationship role as far as accountability because Ari, when you guys went all in on this business like you’re an equal member of this marriage and you actually trust Chelsea to make the right decisions and have this company going well. So there’s almost like this extra layer of accountability where if she’s sucking it up, you not as the employee of the company, but as the husband can sit her down and say, Hey, you’re overworking or, Hey, you’re not working enough. Or, Hey, this is not stable for us. Like, if you had struggles, balancing who’s accountable for what? Because it is kind of like two way, but in different levels, right.

Ari:

Both have happened and it’s a bit tricky. So there have been times when she’s had to say, you know, yo, you need to like step it up and contribute more to the business. Or she has worked too hard and it actually started affecting her health or something. And I’m like, you need to take a step back and chill cuz this is not going well. So I would take up more.

Tim Jordan:

I love that.

Ari:

Well, yeah. So I would have to like, literally like, let’s go downstairs and feed your body and go for a walk. Let’s go play with the dog. Let’s get you out. Let’s go get a coffee. You know, let’s do something. Does it all work in no play? You know, make Jack du boy type of thing

Chelsea:

Yeah. I feel like you get burned out. That is very important because I do work so much so hard all the time. If I don’t know what my life would look like if I didn’t have him kind of, you know, looking after me, making sure I’m fed, you know, picking up doing all the errands, he loves to do errands. Cause he loves to get outta the house. I don’t like doing that stuff. So I have a lot of those bases covered. And I think that that is another side of marriage and of working together that it to be figured out is defining your roles within the marriage, who does the cooking. Like I said, he does, you know, breakfast. I do dinner. Who does the cooking? Who does the errands? You know, when do you do and why taking that and making those just as, just as defined as your responsibilities within your business, I think is important. Otherwise, the resentment could come maybe not from the business, but from that side of things, because you’re working so hard and you know, I’ve felt that way. Sometimes I’m working so hard, you know, I need you to do this and you know, making sure that you don’t kind of drop those tasks as well.

Tim Jordan:

I would think that authority is tough to manage because ultimately in the business, Chelsea is as the CEO and as a founder, like you have more authority in your decision making. But I suspect that’s not the case in marriage, right? Like in marriage you probably have a different set of rule, not rules, but a different expectation of who the authority is, at least in different aspects of life. For sure. Am I wrong there? Am I right?

Chelsea:

I would like to hear Ari’s answer.

Ari:

I mean, look guys, this I’m giving you some advice for the dudes listening. Okay. She happy, me happy now it’s not a hundred percent, you know, a hundred percent because I’m, I’m not trying to emasculate anybody, but happy wife, happy life. Like there’s a reason why these things exist when she’s doing well like this is the way I always looked at it. I’m like the easiest going person. I don’t need a lot to be happy. I’ve got her, I’ve got my dog. I’ve got a nice house, nice neighborhood. As long as there’s food in the refrigerator a cold beer after work, something like that. I’m happy. But usually in a relationship, one of the two people is gonna have the more lofty ambitious goal oriented personalities. And that is her. And that’s okay with me. I don’t feel emasculated by that. I don’t feel threatened by that. I just go great. So how do we work that together? Where I’ve never been resentful of her goals? I’m like, let’s build this together. She works harder than I do on the businesses sometimes. And I have to work harder on the, you know, doing other things outside of the business, on the house or, you know, chores and things like that. That’s fine. That makes me happy. And it actually works out really well.

Chelsea:

Yeah. I would say, you know, one of the most important things in our relationship from the beginning has been and appreciation like as a woman, like, just as he’s saying, you know, here’s a tip for the men as a woman, you know, women get this bad rap of, you know, being nagging or whatever. One of the things that I learned and I used to in a past relationship, I kind of did some of that nagging. I had this revelation of that. Men do not take a lot. They do not need a lot to be happy. They need appreciation. Like a lot of thank yous. A lot of, I love yous on a daily basis, a lot of tiny acts of gratitude to you know, going into his office, giving him a hug, whatever, just small things.

Chelsea:

That’s the best key to a successful relationship. Honestly, I remember him cuz he had gone was in a relationship that wasn’t, you know, that wasn’t that great before we went together and he did my lawn and I thanked him and he was like, I can’t like just me thanking him the amount of gratitude that he had just for kind of that exchange. I think that we just take for granted that, you know like he does the laundry, he does the dishes, you know, I do, you know, I cook the dinner, we thank each other for every single action. You know, he brings me a coffee. Thank you. You know, it’s constantly appreciating and not taking for granted those little actions even after, you know, 15 years of being together is I think extremely valuable for a marriage and even more so when you’re, together 24/7,

Tim Jordan:

So maybe, and I’m just speculating, but maybe the moral of the story is that I was wrong coming in thinking about like, how do we separate our relationship from our business relationship when the answer is not to separate it, it’s to make sure that both are healthy. If you have a strong marriage you’re communicating you’re appreciative, you’re respectful of the strengths or weaknesses of the other. You’re respectful of boundaries. And you have those principles in place in your marriage. You’re going to have those same principles in place for your business relationship. And they’re both going to function in an intertwined way without having to separate them. Yes. Is that right?

Chelsea:

Yeah, I think so. You know, and in thinking about it as you’re talking, it’s it is that it’s not this because we talk about turning it on and turning it off. We don’t necessarily have to do a turn on and turn off. Like we do, you know, have to be practically creating on the relationship, but he could be in the middle of a workweek and I’m in the middle of the same workweek. And I go in and I, you know, give him a hug or whatever we go, wanna walk or something and

Ari:

Share a funny memes she found on Facebook, like anything that just, you know, just make it fun. Like the same thing you would

Chelsea:

If you’re still participating in your marriage the whole time. It’s not like you, you know, and I think that’s part of it is that we’re talking about turning off work, but you know, then does that in, in the same breath meme, we’re turning off our marriage.

Tim Jordan:

Yeah.

Ari:

Good

Tim Jordan:

Way to put it. I don’t like it. And I’m just gonna speculate here, but I feel like you’re using some code here. So when you go into his office and give him a hug or a cup of coffee, quote-unquote, I know what you really mean. And Ari, I’m not jealous, I love it.

Tim Jordan:

No comment.

Chelsea:

This is one of those things, right?

Tim Jordan:

We’re not editing that out. That’s great.

Ari:

There’s a reason why we had those little camera covers.

Tim Jordan:

So as we wrap this up, cuz we’re already going overtime, but this is too good to just not, not continue on. Let me ask this like one final piece of advice. You are sitting in front of your uncovered camera right now, thankfully, and you are addressing this audience. And some of our listeners are either working with their spouse. Thinking about working with their spouse will work with our spouse in the future. What is one last piece of just quick advice? Like something that you just want to stand up on the stage and share that is super, super valuable.

Ari:

I’ll give something super easy and super valuable. Listen to your partner, like actually pay attention to them and listen to them. Not because you have to don’t but hear and listen. So there’s an old sales tactic. Not that this is selling, but it does apply to every relationship. You have two ears in one mouth. Use them accordingly. Listen more than you talk. I think that’s huge in relationship.

Tim Jordan:

Amen. Chelsea, what’s your piece of advice?

Chelsea:

I would say, you know, sitting down first and foremost and is so establishing what you want. It is a new role. And that was one of the things that we did actually at the be before we even started dating is sitting down and discussing, what do we want this relationship to look like? And I think that that is something that if you are working together, if you’re thinking of working together if things aren’t going well, when you’re working together, sitting down and saying, how do you want on our daily life to look, what do we want? You know, our life to look like in the future, making sure your goals are aligned, but also making sure that you know, what you need and want as an individual in the marriage and in working together that you list out, this is what I want and this is what I need

Chelsea:

Finding out from the other person, what they want and need, and then doing your best to make that happen. Make that a reality. If you might make sense to write it down because you know, in times of trouble you might forget and you can go back to that and say, look, this is what we wanted. Of course I can always adapt and change, you know, later on, but establishing this is what I want my life to look like. If that’s not happening, you know, that creates friction points and it’s oftentimes not spoken. So there’s this resentment. When a person doesn’t even know why their partner is resenting them because it was never said.

Tim Jordan:

Agreed, amazing. This is all good information. I will admit what I thought were going to be some of the answers and takeaways and like revelations were different than reality, right? So this is great. This is one of the best things about hosting these podcasts. Like I get to learn too. And I get to ask those questions. It’s an AMA that I get to have every week. So I appreciate that. And listen, I appreciate you guys coming on. I know that it was probably at least slightly stressful going, what the crap is Tim gonna ask? And what are we gonna say? And like, this is like, this is kind of personal stuff, but I appreciate the willingness for you two to share this. And I knew that you would come through with flying colors, cause I’ve always seen, you’d be nothing.

Tim Jordan:

Both of you be nothing but helpful in this industry. So thank you for those of you that are listening. If you appreciate the fact that they wanna share their wisdom and that t they’re at least seemingly doing this well make, believe us a review on the podcast, let us know what you think and go out and check out their business. They’re all over the social media and the grams and all of that good stuff. Follow these two and show them some love and send them a message and tell them you them. And you love ’em or tell ’em if you disagree with everything they’ve said too, I’m sure they’d love to hear some feedback. And if it’s negative feedback, Ari will get back to you in the most professional manner.

Ari:

You know, there there’s no one size fits all answer. Like I said, really depends on your personality, but it’s worked out pretty good for us for the last 10 or so years.

Chelsea:

So only 10 of them

Tim Jordan:

Only 10 of the other four sucked.

Ari:

Well, we’ve only been working together as business partners for about 10 years.

Tim Jordan:

Understand. Well, awesome. Thanks, guys for being on and Hey, congratulations. You’ve had a lot of growth and a lot of success. And I think that a lot of people are proud of that. I know I am, and it’s been fun to get to watch this happen. And I can’t wait to work more closely with you in the future.

Ari:

Likewise. And you’ve been a huge help to us. So we really appreciate you too. We’ll see you at Prosper.

Tim Jordan:

Yep. Next week, The Prosper Show for those of you that are listening to the replay and Prosper’s already happened. Well, you missed out cuz it’s gonna be a good one. All right. Thanks, guys for being on. Thank you all for listening. We’ll see you next week.

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