Finding our new normal: building a business with my husband

In an earlier piece, Everything I did not know when I started BearTech, I said that running a business with the person you are married to was a whole other article in itself. This is that article.

We both came out of long corporate careers, made redundant within a stretch of each other, and spent a summer recharging and making the most of time with our granddaughter, with a grandson since. By the end of it we were both back on the hamster wheel, applying for corporate roles, and it did not take long to realise that everything we disliked about big organisations would simply be waiting for us somewhere else. Same problems, different logo. So we looked at each other and asked the only question that mattered: what is the worst that can happen? If we did not try, we would spend the rest of our lives wondering what if. Rob had the technology. I had the people, strategy and transformation side. We took the leap. What we did not do was sit up at night worrying about what running a business together might do to our marriage. That is just not who we are.

Starting over, together

Here is the first honest thing. We already had a strong relationship. Best friends, soulmates, the lot, soppy as that sounds. None of it quite prepared us for working together. When we started BearTech it was almost like meeting again. We had to find a whole new normal, a working version of us that did not exist before. If you are thinking of going into business with your partner, that is the part I would most want you to hear. The relationship you have is not the relationship you will need at work, and you have to be willing to build the second one.

We divided the work along the lines of who was strongest. Rob took the technology, I took people, strategy and the project side. On paper that is clean. In practice we are both opinionated, and both very happy to share those opinions with each other, if you know what I mean. Early on we bumped heads more than once. Much more. Two people used to being listened to, now having to actually agree. Anyone with an HR background will know Tuckman's forming, storming, norming, performing. Well, by God did we storm. The difference is that most teams do their storming in a meeting room, then go home to separate houses. We did ours and then had to sit down to dinner together, sometimes in a decidedly frosty atmosphere, sometimes in separate rooms altogether.

The certain one, suddenly unsure

There is something else I did not say out loud at the time. For more than twenty years I had been the certain one, the person who knew her field and was trusted to know it. Then, in the early days of BearTech, imposter syndrome took over. That is the part people underestimate: how completely the doubt can swallow someone who has always been sure of herself. What did I really know about co-founding a technology business, and who was I to stand in front of anyone as its credible other half?

The truth is I did understand the business. I knew what we were building, what we stood for and where we were heading. The one thing I could not do was write the code, and for a while I let that single gap drown out everything I could do. Credibility, I eventually realised, was never going to arrive by learning to program overnight. It was already there, in understanding the business and its direction, in people, strategy and judgement, in building a company around the technology rather than letting the technology run the show. The impostor feeling does not disappear entirely. You just get better at carrying on anyway.

Where we bumped heads

Our first real test was a hire. Someone who reported to Rob, who simply was not delivering, and who kept being given another chance, and another. My background is in HR, I am a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, and I could not let it go. I argued that the person was not being managed objectively, that we were talking about how we felt rather than what had or had not been delivered. Rob, closer to the work and to the person, wanted to keep giving room. That one did not stay at the office. It came home with us more than once, and was picked over in more than a few debrief conversations in our local. In the end Rob came round to managing it on deliverables, on what was actually being produced rather than effort or good intentions. We are a better business for it, and probably a better marriage too.

The second one was harder to name, because it grew out of one of Rob's best qualities. He is driven. Sometimes that drive ran ahead of the partnership. At one point he reached out to a potential senior leadership hire and got as far as discussing a financial proposition with them, without me in the room. As co-founder, and frankly as his wife, I should have been part of that from the start. So we made a rule. Nothing that commits the business, a senior hire, money, a big change of direction, moves forward until we are both genuinely comfortable with the person and the proposal. The first time we applied it, it earned its keep straight away. Once everyone was actually in the conversation, it became clear the individual had a very different view of their own value to the one the business could support. The deal did not go ahead. The rule had done its job on day one.

The bigger half

I have been honest about the friction, so let me be just as honest about the rest, because it is the bigger half. I trust Rob completely. He has my back, always, and I have his. If anything we are closer now than before we started, which I did not expect. Decisions are joint, but we can move at a pace our old corporate lives would never have allowed. No committees, no process for the sake of process. We can recruit and onboard someone in weeks. We can decide on a Friday morning to give the team the afternoon off because they have earned it, and simply do it. We can flex overnight when a client needs to change direction. That freedom, the autonomy, the flexibility, the challenge, and the blessed lack of politics, is the whole reason we left corporate in the first place. Building it with the person I trust most in the world is what makes it work.

So if a couple came to me on the edge of doing this, here is the one true thing I would tell them. Your relationship, however strong, is your starting point, not your finished article. You will have to build a new normal for work, and it is hard to navigate. Some of it will follow you home. What carries you through is keeping sight of why you are doing it. For us that is the autonomy, the flexibility, the challenge and the freedom from politics. Nothing worth having comes easily. It takes determination, drive and real grit, and doing it with the person you love takes every bit of it twice over.