Your Healthy Business: Top 5 Lessons from Deoing Business with Family

5 Lessons Learned from Business with Family

Your Health(y) Business, Episode I

Let’s talk about doing business with family and how it impacts interpersonal health. To set the stage, we are a healthcare business, our Partner program is full of healthcare and fitness businesses, and we work closely with companies where poor employee health is creating a drag on company culture and performance.

As business owners, there’s a pendulum of personal health and relationship health, and managing the size of those swings has proved challenging over the years.

To top it off, we’re married. So where in a normal relationship one might come home and share their day with their spouse, and the lines are clear, those lines can be completely blurred with family or a spouse.

Doing business with family is the first episode of this series. Your Health(y) Business is what we’re calling this series. Overly clever? Perhaps. But it’s the intersection of our health business, our healthy business, and our health as business owners.

A Systematic Approach

We’ve fundamentally altered our business in response to what were strains on our personal health and relationship health. For us, and I assume most of you are similar, we needed to change our environment to better manage our reactions and responses. We all have triggers that bring out deep-seated behavioral patterns, and changing the environment is the best way we found to manage those triggers.

Restructuring the business was how we did that. Evolving what we do on a daily basis has helped improve our environment and our personal and relationship health. It’s also made the business far better while at the same time creating some freedom.

The tools we use we are making available to other healthcare and fitness businesses. It’s called the Partner Plus program. The key pillars of that system are Build Expertise, Build Credibility, and Build your Business. That’s not the thrust of today. Today we’re focusing on Business with Family.

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The Top 5 Things I Learned from Working with My Spouse

Family businesses are notorious for dysfunction, but they can also be incredible opportunities when relationships are put at the forefront. To do this, BOUNDARIES are incredibly important. Here are the Top 5 Lessons from Working with Family.

#5: Fluffy Bunny Rules are mandatory. Fluffy Bunny is our keyword for wanting to talk business after hours. The person who wants to talk business needs to ask permission by using the phrase ‘Fluffy Bunny’. The other person DOES NOT have to agree, and can simply say ‘no’.

#4: Fluffy Bunny Rules are EASY to break. It’s difficult to enforce boundaries between work and home without some specific physical tool. Maybe like the conch shell from Lord of the Flies? Or a kettlebell?

#3: Roles must be clear. And reinforced. And reinforced. And reinforced. Family loves to either a) be in one another’s swimlane, or b) assume the spouse or other family member will pick up the slack. We constantly monitor our roles and where we overlap.

#2: The plan, deadlines, and accountability have to be CRYSTAL CLEAR. It’s too easy for family to quickly escalate into WTF mode with one another. Therefore a crystal clear plan, continuously referred to and reviewed, is paramount. Meetings to review the plan need to have structure – a very precise and specific agenda with clear rules on interpersonal communication. No cell phones. No side conversations. No complaining. No jumping on someone else. This is something we struggle with from time to time, but we’re working on it.

#1: Alone time is ABSOLUTE. We carve time out as a couple, but more importantly we benefit from carving time out for ourselves. We each take a weekday evening each week to disappear from home and the office.

If you have any additional thoughts on structure or rules to follow when doing business with family, let us know about them!

To hear Dr. Theresa Larson’s Top 5 lessons learned from working with family, watch this video.