How Entrepreneur Couples Stay Married – Episode 8 with James & Angela Mitchell

Introduction to Go Beyond Busy

[00:00:00] Bernard: Welcome to Go Beyond Busy, the podcast for business owners who want to build something brilliant without burning out.

Meet James and Angela Mitchell

In this episode, Christine Abela chats with James and Angela Mitchell from Colorado, USA. They run Love Intentionally, a counselling and coaching business for entrepreneurial couples.

If you’re in business with your partner, or thinking about it, this one’s for you.

[00:00:25] Christine Abela: Hi, I’m Christine from Go Beyond Busy. I’m here today with James and Angela Mitchell, who run a business called Love Intentionally, and they’re in Colorado in the USA.

How are you today?

[00:00:37] James & Angela Mitchell: Amazing. Great.

Lessons Learned in Business

[00:00:38] Christine Abela: Wonderful. Great. So the question I always ask at the beginning is, what have you learned about running a business that you wish you had known earlier?

[00:00:48] James & Angela Mitchell: It’s a great kickoff point, Christine. Thank you for that one. I’ve always been the entrepreneur in our relationship, been an entrepreneur my entire life, and Angela, when we met, had the solid job where she had a salary and an income. And what was happening in entrepreneurship, I was every role. I was the janitor, I was the marketing department, the bookkeeper, the sales, right? And what I wish I would’ve learned earlier is that not to also make my spouse, my partner, everything to me as well in our relationship. And especially as we switched into being what we call a couplepreneur, where we worked together, we definitely need to have our own spaces. For me a group of men, for her a group of women, and for us together, a group of couples. So we’re not always everything to everybody.

[00:01:39] Christine Abela: How about you, Angela? What have you learned?

[00:01:41] James & Angela Mitchell: I am newer to being an entrepreneur, right? I had a salaried position before as a counselor.

I’ve been a therapist, same role for years, but I worked for other people doing it, school systems and nonprofits. So when we went into business together, and it was just the two of us doing our counseling and coaching business. I think, and this seems dumb in hindsight, I should have known, but I wish we would have clarified our roles earlier on, really explicitly. Who’s doing what and I think, this can happen sometimes for as employers, entrepreneurs are hiring employees, it’s just being really specific about what is your job, what is mine? Who gets ultimate decision making in these different arenas and being really explicit. As a married couple, it would’ve created a lot less tension, of us wrestling over who’s doing what. And I think just in general would’ve made us more productive and efficient.

About Love Intentionally

[00:02:35] Christine Abela: So is that your main business model at the moment? The counseling and that sort of thing? Is that what Love Intentionally is?

[00:02:42] James & Angela Mitchell: It’s a blend of coaching and counseling for entrepreneurs to stay happily married, and we do that. Our secret sauce is that the two of us are always working together when we work with our clients, which are also couples. So as a married entrepreneurial couple to help other married entrepreneurial couples, that’s what we really get to excel in. And we do that through our two on two coaching. We’ll also do that in group coaching settings. And we have digital courses, just however people wanna be met in the work that they’re doing. Yeah. And what we found was that, entrepreneurs often have, there’s some unique challenges that can bring to a relationship, whether one’s an entrepreneur and the other is what we call an anchor.

Whether they’re holding things down at home or they’re holding things down with a salaried position and steady income. Or they’re doing business together, or they’re both separate entrepreneurs. Whatever the, configuration may be, it can provide unique challenges, right? There’s not always consistent income.

Maybe if only one’s an entrepreneur, the other one has trouble understanding, and why are you investing more money in this business that’s not making money yet? All of those kind of things that can come up. The not being able to clock out, as entrepreneurs. We’re often not off call if the business needs something.

Unique Challenges for Entrepreneurial Couples

So we just found there were some unique challenges to it and it’s a world we understand ’cause we’ve lived. And so really bringing our coaching and counseling skills to that unique population.

Working with Clients

[00:04:02] Christine Abela: Very cool. So do you work with people in person, online? How do you do it?

[00:04:08] James & Angela Mitchell: Yes. Here in town, our local market here in Fort Collins, Colorado, Northern Colorado, we’ll work with people in person if they choose. And online, after COVID happened, working online became very prevalent, and so a lot of our clients are all around the world. So we can’t meet with people from New Zealand in person. Maybe soon we’d love to come and visit. But yeah, mostly online for our out of towners.

[00:04:32] Christine Abela: Can I assume English speaking only.

[00:04:36] James & Angela Mitchell: I would say yes. For now. My Spanish is decent, his less decent. No. We spent last year living in Peru where she put a lot of energy into learning Spanish, and I’ve put a lot of energy into practicing my Spenglish.

Married and Magnetic: The Book

[00:04:49] Christine Abela: Very cool. Okay, so you told me before that you’ve just written a book. Tell me about that.

[00:04:56] James & Angela Mitchell: Yeah, so our book is called Married and Magnetic, and it’s specifically, it’s an entrepreneur’s guide to a thriving marriage and booming business is the subtitle. And it basically, it was a place we put all of our best tools, our systems that we use with couples, our framework, the tools we use. Really, how do we stay connected as a couple and as keep our marriage thriving?

Because we believe that actually allows us to do better in business, right? It can be the jet fuel. So if home is solid and that’s not taking our energy, it’s actually rejuvenating us with energy, we have more energy to put in the business. We have more bandwidth and head space and emotional, load to be able to really invest in our business.

Which has been our journey. Yeah. Working together, especially helping other couples. When our marriage wasn’t super connected or maybe even not connected at all, it made it really hard for us to want to go out there and put a lot of energy into growing our business when this wasn’t solid. And so this is from learned experience.

And we’ve also unfortunately seen, couples where they put the marriage on the back burner while they built a business, or one of them built a business. And so then they build this wonderful business they want and then end up with a rotten marriage, or even worse getting divorced and often then losing half of the business they spent all that energy creating.

And so we really see it as a strategic advantage to have a healthy and happy relationship in home life.

[00:06:20] Christine Abela: So where can people get the book?

[00:06:24] James & Angela Mitchell: We’re on Amazon. Married and Magnetic.

[00:06:26] Christine Abela: Oh, cool. I’ll put a link to the Amazon sales page under wherever you’re watching this video or this podcast. And tell me how can people actually work with you? So they buy the book, they read the book? Is that it?

Masterminds and Coaching Services

[00:06:41] James & Angela Mitchell: So our, we have a few different things. Our big thing we’re doing right now is we are doing masterminds for married entrepreneurial couples. So they meet online, so it can be anywhere in the world. We have a few different options, so time zones can be accommodated. And we’ve found that there’s this magic that comes together when couples are together sharing.

So people aren’t only learning from James and I, but they’re learning also from each other, and we’re getting to share that wisdom and knowledge and lived experience with each other. We’ve run a few of these in the past and at the end, the couples always want to keep going. So this one, we have ones that are just open-ended. Couples can come in for as many months as they want, and it’s just a space for us to support each other. We offer tools and learnings from our own life and the couples we’ve worked with that can help people navigate this path. So our masterminds are our big thing we’re doing right now. We also do offer two on two coaching for people that want some more individualized and customized support.

[00:07:41] Christine Abela: Can you work with same sex couples as well?

[00:07:44] James & Angela Mitchell: Absolutely. We can and do in fact, work with same-sex couples.

Couples have a very similar set of challenges regardless of their sexual orientation, and so we believe that all humans deserve love and to be happy and fulfilled, and we do not discriminate against any couple that wants to come in and better themselves in their relationship.

[00:08:07] Christine Abela: Do you find that the gender stereotypes, whether it’s a same sex couple or a mixed sex couple, do you find that gender stereotypes tend to translate over into business? So that you might have one person as the more nurturing person in the business and one person is the more logical person in the business?

That kind of thing.

[00:08:27] James & Angela Mitchell: I would say often. And I think a lot of that is even just how we are raised, right? So I as a woman was raised to communicate in a certain way that is a little more indirect and might drive him crazy sometimes. As a male who has learned to communicate very directly, and we might bring that to our business. And just like anything, I don’t think it’s a hundred percent, right? So we have had couples where the wife has been really the entrepreneur, the go-getter, the risk taker, the very direct, and the husband has been a little softer in his approach. So we have worked with those couples as well. So yes, they do come into play and not always.

[00:09:07] Christine Abela: What about a situation where one person in the couple is running a business and they really want the other person in the couple to be involved in the business. Can you help to guide turning a entrepreneur into a couplepreneur?

[00:09:23] James & Angela Mitchell: That is one of our specialties, in fact, right? A lot of it happens in one of my first jobs as a, I did real estate here in the United States and the business was booming and it was going really great, and I was getting overwhelmed. I needed to hire and I was like very common for a lot of these solopreneurs, right, an entrepreneur. They’re gonna hop into that game and the first thing they do is go, oh, we do so well at home. We build our life together. We communicate well. We manage our household. So great. Why don’t you come and work for me? It’s usually how it sounds. Come and be my assistant, come and be my marketing, right? And right there, instantly, it puts the relationship and the dynamic of power in a really interesting and probably not super great space. So we invite and have a process to bring people through a very intentional. Is this really the right thing? Back to roles, what roles do you really want and need me to fill?

And then also just checking in with the spouse, do you really want to do this? Or does this feel like something you’re doing out of duty or obligation because it’s needed for the family? And that’s a distinction between we’re gonna do anything that’s needed for the family as a married couple. But when it comes to business, is it really the best thing for the family to get into business together? And really slowing down in that moment to make sure that everybody’s on board and has the same vision.

Yeah, and it really depends on the couple. We’ve seen couples who have, one of them has been the primary entrepreneur and the other one has come into the company, but more in a support role and have, it’s worked and they’ve loved it. And then other times where there gets this role confusion and they’re butting heads and one’s not really happy and can create all sorts of friction.

So it depends on the couple, the personality. And for us, it’s all about having really explicit communication about those things, rather than just making those assumptions. Or, for us, we really assumed because we did, or I assumed I should speak for myself. I assumed that because we did life so well together as a married couple when he was the entrepreneur and I wasn’t, that when we started working together it would just go seamlessly as well.

We parented seamlessly. We made financial decisions seamlessly. Wouldn’t this go seamless as well? And I was wrong. It did not go seamlessly. And we had to figure out and have really explicit and sometimes hard conversations to get to a point where now we enjoy working together, because we’ve sifted and sorted through all of that.

Tools for Couples in Business

[00:11:45] Christine Abela: We’ve also mentioned the idea of tools to help people to work together. Tell me more about that.

[00:11:51] James & Angela Mitchell: We have lots of them. One of our favorites, which we offer for free we can also send you a link to that. A way to get that is we do a weekly marriage meeting. So a lot of people are used to a weekly business meeting, if you’re in business. And we believe that the rest of our life deserves that same amount of intention.

And so we working together, we do our family, our marriage meeting on Sundays and our business meeting on Mondays, but there are two separate meetings. And the one on Sunday is really designed to keep us on the same page, to keep us connected. It’s part emotional check-in.

And then it’s also part logistics, because being married is similar to running a business. There are logistics involved, there are schedules, especially if you have children, there are children’s schedules. How are we going to feed the family this week? Where are we going? Who’s doing what? All of those things. And so we, that has been one of the things that has really kept things running more seamlessly at home the midst of having this busy entrepreneurial life as well.

And I’ve always, I get feedback often about, it’s just one more thing to do, right? Oh, my plate is already full. Another meeting. Another meeting, right? That kind of an energy. But as, as business owners, entrepreneurs, we understand the concept of ROI. What’s my return on investment? And this thing has an ROIT for the time that you invest. And so this one hour a week on Sundays, for us, saves us hours of inefficient time or oh shoot, who’s cooking dinner tonight? Or who, whatever, right? So we forgot to get this at the store. We’re able to really make our life run more smoothly so it can create more time and space instead of always trying to juggle the balls and react to everything. This resource is available. We’re on a platform called Skool, S-K-O-O-L, and you can log into that for free and get a hold of that weekly marriage meeting at no cost.

How to Connect with Love Intentionally

[00:13:41] Christine Abela: Would you like to let us know what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

[00:13:46] James & Angela Mitchell: Yeah, online especially if you’re in New Zealand listening or watching, this online’s gonna be the best way, unless you’re coming skiing in Colorado. Then we’ll come hit the slopes with you.

On instagram is @loveintentionally.co or online, you can find us at loveintentionally.com. a weekly newsletter we call a love letter with great tips, tricks, and more tools and just resources for people that are on this journey and path.

If you wanna join a community of other married entrepreneurs, he mentioned our school community. So it’s skool.com/loveintentionally, we have free resources on there.

You can also get on the discussion and chatting and learning from other married entrepreneurs. It’s all for free.

Conclusion and Thanks

[00:14:27] Christine Abela: Very good. Thank you very much. So thank you very much for joining me. And if any of you listening would like to have a chat with me about the free business strategy session, then you’ll find a link to that under this podcast as well. Thank you very much for joining me.

[00:14:41] James & Angela Mitchell: Thanks. Thank you for having us. It’s great to be here.

[00:14:43] Bernard: Thanks for listening to Go Beyond Busy.

To find more episodes, or book your free Business Strategy Session with Christine Abela, head to GoBeyondBusy.com.

Christine is a seasoned business consultant and tech strategist who helps business owners build stronger, more sustainable businesses.