Over half of marriages fail.
Over half of small businesses fail.
What hope is there for the married and self-employed?
We’re #%*@^. If we fail at home, we’ll usually loose both our marriage AND the business. If we fail in business, we go back to a ‘job’ and live with the burning ‘what-if’. And, for us ‘serial entrepreneurs’? We habitually ‘try-again’, often further disconnecting and labeling ourselves as ‘eccentrics’ - out of touch with reality. I know. My marriage surprisingly ended after 20 years of being a ‘social entrepreneur’ - as a Christian economic development practitioner.
Wait, it gets better!
Who’s even more ‘at-risk’ than marketplace entrepreneurs?
Social Entrepreneurs.
We make up less than 5% of the entrepreneur spectrum, and yet, there are over 600,000 of us in the U.S. alone, and I DO MEAN ALONE. Most of us can’t name a handful of other ‘nuts’ like ourselves. We don’t have the luxury of a ‘consistent’ or ‘stable’ income. Most of us don’t even measure our success in terms of ‘cash-flow’ or ‘financial stability’. We are prone to focus on the social outcomes, and deal with the need for finances second-place. We’re looked at by our peers, the ‘real’ entrepreneurs' as nutty as ‘Don Quixote’.
Angelina and I know what this does to a marriage. Two social entrepreneurs in the same household is near insanity. Who’s paying the bills? With either one of the partners working a regular ‘job’ the issue of financial accountability tends to submerge a bit. But that’s only a vale that cloaks the issue, often a highly emotional grudge that sounds like;
“when are you going to get a real job?”
If you know someone in business – especially those that are business partners with their spouse - be a hero for them. Share our website with them. If it’s YOU, then interact with our ‘induction’ slide-show and see if YOU TOO ARE BLIND to what will destroy both your marriage and your enterprise. Visit www.EnterprisingCouples.com/induction.aspx
What ever you do… DON’T GO IT ALONE.
“Isolation is the death of the entrepreneur”
You risk “dying with the music still in you” as Tolstoy wrote.