In Business With Your Spouse (And Still Married)
I hope, five years from now, I’m not rereading this divorced and feeling like a moron for having written it. But we’re 12 years into the marriage and things have been going pretty well, so I’ll take the shot anyway. A lot of thinking went into what happens when your wife also becomes your work wife, and so far, we’ve largely been okay.
Figure this out before you invest in your partner
Every marriage has dynamics you’d better sort out early. Kids or no kids. Does one or both of you work. Where you live. How you split or commingle finances. Whose family gets which holidays. Who takes the dogs out at night once summer heat sets in and the ticks are out there waiting like little blood-sucking ninjas. Hint: that one’s mine.
Understanding and respecting each other’s strengths, weaknesses, communication style, goals, and general dreams for a life is what a healthy adult relationship runs on. The good ones tend to run on complementary skill sets, partners picking up each other’s slack without keeping score. Building a business with that same person just means you need to understand those dynamics on purpose, instead of absorbing them by osmosis over a decade of marriage.
Who does what
Chrissy and I got lucky: our strengths and weaknesses mostly point in opposite directions, and we’ve both got egos small enough to actually appreciate that instead of competing over it.
Chrissy is the organized one. Process-improvement brain, allergic to anything that isn’t on the critical path, operationally sharper than I am about making both the business and our actual life run smoother. She’s also aspirational in a way that occasionally outruns the calendar; she knows exactly what she wants and isn’t always worried about whether it fits the timeline she’s picked for it. That’s where I come in, more strategically minded, usually the one arguing for the counterweight. On the flip side, she’s less interested in anything technical, not incapable, just unwilling to burn hours on it when she doesn’t have to, while I’m the one who ends up rebuilding the website, wiring up workflows, or figuring out Klaviyo.
We split work by leaning into what we’re each good at and steering around what we each can’t stand. It’s not a formal system. It just works.
Candid, sometimes blunt, conversations
Here’s the obvious thing first: running a business with your spouse is not for everyone. There’s a version of marriage where you let things slide because you’d rather be happy than right. Import that instinct into a business and it can sink the business. If you can’t say something blunt without sounding like an ass, or receive something blunt without falling apart, or pressure-test an idea before you commit real money to it, this setup is going to be rough.
In business, being right tends to get you to happy faster than avoiding the fight does. Sometimes you just have to rip the bandage off. We had exactly that moment recently, prepping for our booth at AmericasMart Atlanta this coming January. Some of our products are exactly where we want them, brand-aligned, ready. Others are genuinely good products sitting behind packaging that isn’t there yet, and the honest path to fixing that isn’t something our current cash flow supports.
I couldn’t sugarcoat that conversation. I sat down with Chrissy, laid out why we couldn’t do everything at once, made the case for what we should cut, and walked through the actual cost of not cutting it. She didn’t love hearing it. She understood I was arguing from wanting us to succeed at that show, not from wanting to win an argument. We tabled a few products for a 2027 launch and kept the rest of the year’s plan intact.
Might sound like a small conversation. It wasn’t. Fudging it, or just going along to keep the peace, would have meant showing up with inconsistent presentation across our line, which reads to a wholesale buyer as inconsistent execution, full stop. It also would have quietly eaten the budget and attention we need for other things we’re trying to pull off this year. We had the uncomfortable conversation instead, landed on a compromise, and moved on to the next problem the same way: as a team.
What we have to actively manage
A few things about this setup don’t resolve themselves. They need attention, on purpose, or they’ll cause real damage.
First: we’re both genuinely passionate about our family and the business, which sounds like a strength and mostly is, except it means nothing ever really turns off unless we make it. Waking up, all day, falling asleep, in the shower, I’m writing this at 11pm in the living room while Chrissy sits next to me working on product packaging. Without real boundaries, the business would happily colonize every hour we have. That’s not good for the marriage or the kids. We have to carve out time that isn’t about the business on purpose, partly to actually rest, partly because stepping away is usually when the nagging problem quietly solves itself in the background instead of under a spotlight.
Second: the split is never really 50/50, and we’ve stopped pretending it is. Most days it’s not even a fair comparison of tasks, so I think about it more as energy than task count. Some days I’ve got 10% in the tank and Chrissy covers the other 90. Some days, especially close to when she’s due for her Crohn’s medicine, she might be running on 1 or 2%, and I need to find the other 98 somewhere. The split shifts constantly. What matters is whether we hit 100 together, not whether either of us hit 50 individually.
Third, less a challenge than a rule we hold onto: we’re spouses and co-founders, not employer and employee. Same flat hierarchy we run our marriage on. Even mid-disagreement, we both know we’re pulling toward the same thing, for the same family and the same business. That baseline is what lets us have the hard conversations, the passionate ones, the occasional heated one, and still trust we’ll land on the same side when it’s over.
Ask me again in five years
For now: still married, still building Celeste Naturals together, still mostly agreeing on which fights are worth having. Ask me again in five years. I’ll let you know if the ticks finally got to me.