In our interview with Aisha Pandor, She discussed how the spousal business partnership can work citing the business partnership with her husband Alen on their business Sweep South SA.
She states:
“Someone said business partnership is deeper than marriage. Why? Because the business partners spend a lot more time with themselves at work than couples spend with themselves at home! How much better is it to be in a business with your spouse? That means you have the best of both worlds. That was meant to be a joke. But seriously, I am in business with my husband and together we have built an enterprise that is helping people solve their cleaning needs. So, what is the key to what has made my partnership with my husband work? First of all, we went into business together, not thinking we are married. We went into business together, thinking we have come across this opportunity for a business. It’s something that we thought may work and have a really good impact. Couples going into business need to realize from the onset that the business they want to jointly run is separate from their marital relationship. That way, they are able to look at the business dispassionately and define the role that each partner will play. Otherwise, it may happen that one party may fail to pull their weight or the other may assume too much control that is healthy for the survival of the partnership. The point is that there is a need to draw a clear line between your business relations and your marriage relations so that one does not distort the other.
The other good thing about partnering was that we actually had complementary skills to go into this partnership together. Our skills and personalities complemented each other. We are very different people; my husband is a software developer with a lot of experience with building scalable systems – he actually developed our business online platform from scratch. His personality is very much about getting things done, you know, a put your head down, operations kind of person who applies logic, math, and sciences. But I’m a lot more on the management kind of thing. I have a typical manager type of personality and those skills match each other very well. Operations and management are two important skills required to run a business. Perhaps, it may be tougher for couples who have similar skills in one area and lack skills in the other to do a good job without bringing in outside help into the partnership. We make a good match and complement each other very well and I think that’s really important when looking for a co-founder. If you are able to identify what the business needs, then your co-founder needs to complement that.
Another key element that is super important, is you have to really trust the person you are going into business with whether they are your spouse or not. Trust implies a commitment to something or someone, in this case, your business and your partner. It will take that to make it work. You have got to trust that person with your life. I mean your start-up ultimately will probably become your life if it goes well, so you need to be able to trust someone and put your business into their hands.”
Watch the full interview on Youtube:
