Mixing Business and Pleasure: How to Work with the Love of Your Life

Over the years, my boyfriend and I have seen the eye rolls when someone says "you're really business partners?" For us, mixing business with romance was never an issue. We've been involved in joint ventures for over five years and the one thing we've never argued about is work. Perhaps it comes with age or a joint desire to be self-employed. It might be that we both know business isn't personal.

Our first joint business venture was a karaoke/DJ business. Years before Harry and I met, I had been partners with another KJ and had built up quite a collection of karaoke CDGs. I also had a huge CD collection and when we looked at our combined resources, we made the investment in sound equipment.

Harry was the sound man and I was the host. We were doing something we enjoyed and it was an easy way to make a few bucks. We scored a regular weekly gig plus picked up a few other shows each month.

Since 2007, we've been partners in The Wright Taste, a cottage food and licensed home bakery business. I had been operating The Wright Taste for a few years before we met, then Harry found a house where we could design and remodel the kitchen to increase our volume. At our peak, we baked more than 400 loaves of bread every week to sell at area farmers markets.

How have we managed to keep love alive and work together every day?

Business is business
We don't always see eye to eye when it comes to the products we make. For three years, Harry thought we should make and sell cinnamon rolls. I believed them to be too labor intensive. In 2010, people stopped buying our artisan-style breads and we had to come up with something new.

Harry offered to handle the rolling and shaping of the cinnamon rolls. I made the dough, baked them and found a way to quickly ice them. In a good week, we were selling 30 dozen cinnamon rolls for a dollar each.

Leave it at the shop
In our case, we work at home. Our conference room is our front porch and that is where we discuss our business while watching the hummingbirds.

If we don't agree on something related to production or sales, we debate each side of it until it's resolved. We don't carry it overnight and we don't take it into the bedroom.

Keep it fun
The whole point of any business is to make money. But, when your quality of life starts to suffer, it's time to step back and re-evaluate.

Last year, we started the season with four farmers markets on Saturday morning plus one on Wednesday and one on Friday evening. We didn't sleep much on Friday night, even after dropping two of the Saturday markets. By the end of September, I was exhausted and never wanted to bake again.

After a winter of discussion, we decided to scale back. No more than one location on any given day and we picked our three most successful farmers markets. We've agreed that if a market loses its profitability, we'll find another or just drop that day.