Let’s Make Money, Honey: the Couple’s Guide to Starting a Service Business
Let’s Make Money, Honey: the Couple’s Guide to Starting a Service Business
Author: Barry Silverstein and Sharon Wood
Reviewed for the NABBW by: Anne Holmes
If you and your Baby Boomer aged spouse or significant other have ever given any thought to owning a business together, this is the book you need to read first.
I speak from some experience, as like the authors, my husband and I have worked together – both in a traditional office setting and in our current home-based business setting – for over 20 years. Authors Barry Silverstein and Sharon Wood have us beat however; they have worked together in one capacity or another for over three decades – and they’ve been married to each other for nearly that long.
No doubt incredulous people – especially couples – on learning that Barry and Sharon purposefully started and successfully ran a service business together, pepper them with questions and comments such as:
- OMG! 24/7/365 togetherness: How can you possibly spend so much time together without ending up wanting to kill each other?
- How do you decide who is the boss?
- Don’t you end up talking business in the bedroom?
- What if one of you wants to hire an employee or make a significant business investment and the other one thinks it’s a majorly bad move? Who has final say on spending our jointly earned money?
- What about dealing with differing work styles? For example: I’m a “pack rat” and my spouse is a “neatnick.” No matter what, one of us is going to be personally uncomfortable…
- We wouldn’t want to own a business together, because we’d be worried that if one of us made a huge mistake that hurt the business, the other one would never totally forgive or forget.
- What if one of the partners doesn’t pull his or her own weight at work? Won’t the personal relationship suffer?
- How do you plan to handle the “dismount?” Say, one partner gets sick and can’t work anymore? Or one receives the “offer of a lifetime” to take a different job, possibly in another part of the country? What happens then?
As you read the book, you realize these are but a few of the questions a couple needs to think about before deciding to go to work together. In fact, Barry and Sharon advise that couples need to soul search – thinking long and hard before deciding to go into business together.
They write that in order to successfully work together, couples need to have a foundation of mutual trust. They also advocate learning how to make objective decisions together without emotional entanglements. Mutual trust, honesty and openness are also critically important.
If you are a Baby Boomer couple thinking about owning a service business, Barry and Sharon – and their excellent book — are here to share with, and encourage you. In the book, they discuss everything from writing a business plan, considering funding options or franchising, business structure and operations, to managing growth, narrowing your client base and creating an exit strategy.
It offers how-to advice and – perhaps more importantly – compatibility tools, checklists and a lengthy resource guide.
Told as they do, with their own mobile dog grooming business as a model, this book is a fascinating personal story of what it took to start-up, grow, and eventually sell their own business. A frank, compelling and useful read. The book is available in Kindle and paperback formats. Download a free chapter here.
