Do You Take This Man to Be Your Business Partner?

Introduction:

This week, Liz Picarazzi, Jaci Russo, and Laura Zander talk about what it’s been like building a business in partnership with a spouse, and they all agree on some important things. For one, they all say that, had their husband been just another employee, he probably would have been fired. All three say that in their relationships, they are the gas that drives the business, and their husband is the brake that sometimes keeps them out of trouble and sometimes frustrates their entrepreneurial instincts. And all three agree that some things are best left undiscussed. For example, says Jaci: “Michael doesn’t even know what we make. He also doesn’t know what any of the employees make.” But the three CEOs also agree on this: In the final cost-benefit analysis, they wouldn’t want to build a business any other way.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Laura Zander is CEO of Jimmy Beans Wool.

Jaci Russo is CEO of BrandRusso.

Liz Picarazzi is CEO of Citibin.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome Liz, Jaci, and Laura. It’s great to have you here. Today, I want to talk about partnerships. Some people think trying to build a business with a partner is just a bad idea. Obviously, it can work, but it can be hard. But you guys have kind of doubled down on having a partner because not only do you have a partner in your business, but that partner also happens to be your spouse, which kind of ups the ante. So, to start, I guess I’m wondering, did any of you have doubts about whether this would be a good idea before you chose to embark down this path? And if so, how did you get past those concerns? Maybe start with you, Jaci?

Jaci Russo:
Sure. Well, I didn’t originally plan on going into business with my husband at all. I met a cute guy who happened to also work in advertising. He’s a graphic designer. I do media buying and business development, kind of a fractional marketing director. And we hit it off, dated, got married, 10 months later had a baby, and then about to have another baby 10 months after that.

So in the process of my second pregnancy, I realized this was not going to work for my current employer, who had already decided that he gave me time off for the honeymoon. And then he gave me time off for the first baby. And the second baby was not going to fit with his schedule, and he actually said, “Can you schedule the delivery on a Friday, so you can be back at the office on Monday?” And I thought: Well, the first kid almost died because he flatlined, the cord was wrapped around his neck three times. It’s a whole medical saga. The second one was going to be a breezy delivery, I found out later, but at the time, I had no idea and only had the first experience. And I assumed it was going to be as horrific as the first one. So I’m thinking, “Well, taking four hours off to have a baby is not really gonna work for me.”

Laura Zander:
So at least he was honest?

Jaci Russo:
You knew where you stood with him at all times. My father-in-law said, “Why don’t you go on your own?” And I thought, “Well, what do you mean? I work for people.” I didn’t even know what a 1099 was. And in the effort of going out on my own as a freelance media buyer, those media clients had needs that my graphic designer husband could fulfill. So he just did it as a side hustle for me—until six months in, I had more clients than the agency where he works. And he’s like, “I can’t keep doing two jobs with a wife and two kids. Can I quit my job and work for you?” And now, all of a sudden, we have this partnership. And then it turns out, I’m pregnant with a third.

Laura Zander:
And he literally said, “Can I come work for you?” Like, from the very beginning?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I recall those words. [Laughter] He said, she said. He has a different version of events, but that’s pretty darn close to accurate. Maybe he said “with you.” He might have said “with,” but I heard “for.” You know, I really love that commercial where they throw the flag on the play, and they do the replays of people’s conversations. I need that in my daily life.

Loren Feldman:
What was your initial thought? Did you think this was a great idea? Did you have concerns about the amount of time you would be spending together?

Jaci Russo:
Well, I was knee deep in work, and somebody had to pay the bills. And so I think he’s the best graphic designer I know, then and now. So that was a no-brainer. It was more about, we sometimes don’t communicate very well. And so how are we going to continue to be married and raise kids, and now run a business together? That’s a lot of time, a lot of time, and then I’m hormonally pregnant. And so the very first thing I did was hire an employee. So now I would tell the employee, and the employee would tell Michael what needs to happen. I think the buffer saved us.

Laura Zander:
Yeah, I was just thinking, Jaci, I mean, how much of your life together have you spent not working together? I mean, it doesn’t sound like there’s much, so it’s almost like, “Well, this is just the way it is. This is what our life looks like together,” right? We have these kids. We have this business. I mean, it’s not like you had 10 years working at different businesses together.

Jaci Russo:
No, I mean, from the moment where we met and had our first date in January to getting engaged in April to getting married in October to finding out in November that we were pregnant with a honeymoon surprise to having that baby the next August, and so now this is the next year. I mean, so yeah, it’s two and a half years.

Laura Zander:
Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s really, really interesting. And I think that, like with Doug and I as well, we met at work, and then we always worked together. So we don’t know any different. We don’t really know what it’s like. I mean, even when we did work at different businesses, which was a couple of years, either we would do projects on the side together, or we even programmed in the same languages. And it’s part of our relationship, and always has been.

Loren Feldman:
Did you start the business together, Laura? When you started Jimmy Beans Wool, it was a brick-and-mortar yarn store, and you sold coffee, too, right?

Laura Zander:
Yeah, yeah.

Loren Feldman:
And Doug involved in that?

Laura Zander:
Yeah, because we were building the website together. Because we started the business, because he had a full-time job. But I had started my own business building websites for people and doing the back-end stuff. And more often than not, I would need his help. He’s a better programmer than I am. And so I would sell projects, and we would work on them together.

And so we built this platform, which is 25 years ago, which is the platform that we still use. I built this platform for another company. And then when we decided to open Jimmy Beans, I mean, it was me full-time in the store, in the retail business, filling the orders, doing the operational stuff. But he and I built the website and the platform and all that stuff together. So from day one, it was always the two of us. He just had another job to pay the bills for the first couple of years. But it’s a joint investment, from our standpoint.

Loren Feldman:
So you didn’t really take the time to stop and think, “Is this a good idea to work together?” You had worked together before.

Laura Zander:
Exactly. Yeah, but I don’t really take the time to think of anything is a good idea. I mean, you just jump off the cliff. Right?

Jaci Russo:
Right. All gas, no brakes.

Laura Zander:
Yeah. All gas, no brakes.

Jaci Russo:
He’s my brake.

Laura Zander:
Yeah, Doug is the brake for sure.

Liz Picarazzi:
Right. Frank is too.

Laura Zander:
I mean, Jaci, yeah, we’re so similar, it’s crazy—except I would say that he’s never thought of himself, and I’ve never thought of him, as working for me. For us, it was always our business. And then, Loren, when I met you, and I applied for that Ernst and Young Winning Women, you had to be a woman-owned business. So I think we were 10 years in, or eight or nine years in, and so we changed the structure of the business to be 51 percent me and 49 percent him. But, I mean, that was really just paperwork. You know, we’re two equal partners.

Jaci Russo:
And, Laura, I would agree that we are equal partners, but we had a conversation very early on that somebody has to be the boss. Somebody has to be the final word, and we collectively agreed it was me.

Laura Zander:
Well, and you know what, I think that here’s the difference. Doug and I have a very passive-aggressive relationship. So, he’s from the Midwest. My family originates from the Midwest, so we don’t have those quite frank conversations. And so we’ve never talked about it that specifically.

You know, I’m the figurehead, if you will. I did put CEO on my business cards, but that was more from a PR standpoint. Yes, I’m the one who, technically, everybody comes to—or I shouldn’t even say technically—operationally, everybody comes to. But it still is, we’re both the boss. And so we just passively-aggressively let each other kind of make decisions in areas that we feel more passionate about. And that’s been our whole relationship. I mean, we don’t argue. We don’t fight. We never have. If something’s more important to him, then he gets the say in it. If something’s more important to me, then I get the say in it. And so in a really weird, unhealthy way, we have a very healthy relationship. [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
It works.

Laura Zander:
It works. You know, it just works.

Jaci Russo:
It works. And he has a team he’s in charge of, and I have a team I’m in charge of, so we each manage our own teams. But then, I’m the final say, by his admission and mine. And so that has worked well for us. We do not have the Minnesota nice, Midwest, passive-aggressive nice y’all have. Because he’s Italian, and he’s loud. And I’m Methodist and quiet. And so that’s a whole thing that, you know, our marriage counselor was like, “I don’t know if this is going to work out, y’all.”

Laura Zander:
You’re quiet? [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
Oh, when I’m disagreeing? Yes.

Laura Zander:
Oh, yeah.

Jaci Russo:
I’m not a loud yeller.

Laura Zander:
And I think that, again, there’s that yin and yang. In meetings, I’m the one who’s always talking who should stop talking. He’s really quiet, you know? So he’s a little more passive.I mean, yeah, it just works. It’s yin and yang, and it just works.

Loren Feldman:
Liz, how about you? You started Citibin by yourself—actually, after having started a previous business by yourself—and then Frank joined you later. Did you have any concerns about what it would mean for both of you to be working in the same business?

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, we definitely did. You know, at the point that he joined the business, I had already had it for eight years—and then the previous business a couple before that. I think for us, it was less of a concern interpersonally, or how it would affect our family or personal life. It was more about the risk of having all of our income tied to the business. You know, previously, I had had a corporate job and made good money. And he had a corporate job and was making good money. He lost his job in May of 2020, and you would think that the last thing we would do is have him join the business, because we’re losing all that income. But we actually decided that’s what the time was, because he got a nice severance. He was on unemployment. And we had a lot of things that needed to be worked on to pull us out of—you know, we had a rut for a couple of months there in 2020.

I think that I did worry a bit that I’m definitely the more emotional one. I’m definitely more of the sort of flighty entrepreneur. I so much thought that I didn’t want him to be around my grandiose ideas, because I knew he’s the brake. And he was going to shoot that down. And so prior to him joining, I could go on a lot of tangents, and did. And I have to admit that when he came in, he did temper that, and that was probably a good thing.

I mean, we still run into it a lot. And when he ended up not going back to corporate, we knew that if this experiment failed, that he could go back. And he did have options to go back. He used to work in fashion, kind of on the back-end, the operational side. We knew that he could go back and get the corporate job with the benefits, the health insurance, all of that. But we decided to go for it. And it ended up working. And he’s still with the business four years later.

Loren Feldman:
I’m really intrigued by the idea that, in each case, it’s your husband who you refer to as the “brake” on your more entrepreneurial impulsiveness—if that’s the right word. Do you guys have any thoughts on why you all have that in common?

Jaci Russo:
I think that in every partnership, somebody is probably the gas and somebody is probably the brake. I think it speaks more to you, Loren, that you’ve chosen these three women to spend time with today. That might be the bigger question. Years ago, a group of founders from a very large regional ambulance company, the two founders were talking—actually, oddly enough, both named Richard. And one was saying that if he had been solely in charge, he would have run them right off a cliff, because he had no brake. And the other Richard said, “Well, and if I’d have been completely in charge, we would have never left the starting blocks, because I wouldn’t take any chances at all.” And so I think in every partnership—a good successful partnership—you’re going to have that blend, because that’s how you end up at just the right speed.

Laura Zander:
Are you guys familiar with EOS, and the visionary and the integrator? So you’ve got the one person, obviously, who hits the gas, and then the integrator is the brake. And it just so happens with us that we’re married to the integrator.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yep.

Laura Zander:
Yeah, it was really interesting for us. Unlike Jaci, it took us 10 years to decide to have a child. So we spent the first 10 years just on this great path. I mean, we worked seven days a week, but we would go ski for a few hours here and there. And so we worked together, we played together, we did everything together, and we just had it dialed. And then we had a kid, and all of a sudden—and we have no family, so we didn’t really realize somebody has to watch the kid sometimes. We didn’t know about the daycare stuff. And you know, we were completely unprepared.

And what we didn’t anticipate and didn’t realize—I mean, one of the 8,000 things we didn’t realize—was that we were going to lose our integrator. So I’m still driving the business, because I’m the gas. And Doug is doing what he does best, which is details like feeding the child and doing the things to make sure the kid’s alive. And so he wasn’t able to spend as much time being the brake in the business. And it took us a couple years to really realize that this is what was happening. And so it took us forever to find a new integrator, because now we had this third component at home that we had to take care of, that we had never had to take care of before. It was super disruptive.

So I highly recommend avoiding this situation—or planning for it and recognizing it. And if we could go back, that’s what we would have done. Either I would have gotten somebody like an au pair or somebody to come in and take care of the kid, so we don’t lose our integrator, or I needed to replace the integrator at work, which is what we ended up doing. And that helped.

Liz Picarazzi:
I think the timing on that means a lot. With Frank and I, we had our daughter for 13 years before he joined the business. And so all of our roles in the household and everything were really well-established. I have a feeling that if we had more than one child, we might not have taken the risk, either me or him, to have a business. Luckily, I was able to go at it for like eight years or so before he joined. But if we’d had two or three…

Like, nothing against the Jaci people who have more children, but I don’t think I would be an active entrepreneur if I had a lot of kids. I just wouldn’t have been able to do it. I wouldn’t have been able to juggle it. My brain, as it is, is just going in too many different directions. So I think that, for us, that was actually one of the best decisions we made, was to just have one child. I know my mother-in-law, if she’s listening to this, would be furious hearing this. But the truth of the matter is, it really made it a lot easier for me to make the decision to start a business in the first place, because I was a mother of one. And she was five years old. I kind of knew how to be a mom. Our roles in the household were pretty well-set. So a lot of it does depend on timing.

Loren Feldman:
All three of you have talked very positively about how your relationship has worked with your husbands being the brake. But there must have been some times, I suspect, for each of you when his being the brake produced some tension. You’re all entrepreneurs. There have to have been times when you wanted to run a little bit faster, I’m guessing. How have you guys dealt with that?

Liz Picarazzi:
I can talk to that, because I feel like I’m in that a lot—with inventory in particular. So we’re a product business. We buy things before we sell them. We have inventory. We have a cash flow, very up and down on our cash flow. With purchasing inventory, I would say I’m expecting and planning for success, which means I’m inclined to buy a lot more inventory than Frank is. He’s definitely much more conservative with it, because he’s been in business for many less years than I have. He’s going to be very cautious about making purchases. And unfortunately, with our business—well, fortunately or unfortunately—we’ve had a lot of growth and success for the last couple of years. And we often are out of inventory because of his conservative purchasing.

So right now, we’re in that situation where our warehouse is virtually empty, and we’re not getting inventory for another four to five weeks. And so I would say that that’s been a really major point of contention, because that means customers need to wait. We potentially are losing business, because people don’t want to wait 12 to 14 weeks, understandably. And it’s a discomfort he has with spending the money that needs to be spent to get the inventory that we need to meet demand.

So I will look at: What is the demand? How are we growing? I’ll apply a growth metric to any of his projections, and he’s going to be more on the conservative end. And, you know, we fight about it. Of our worst fights while he’s been in the business, they’ve all been related to inventory. And I can remember once, it was in a summer—it was during all the supply-chain difficulties, kind of near the end of Covid. And because we were always out of stock, I wanted us to place really, really big orders, and he didn’t. And I hated to hear that. We were about to place an order, and we were in the backyard. It was the summer. We were trying to relax by the pool. And I ended up basically getting hysterical and screaming at him. And all of our neighbors heard it. And I may have even been crying. And I realized, in that moment: We need to really get on the same page with the cadence of ordering, because I don’t want to get crazy about this.

And so I’ve really laid down more criteria for making the inventory purchase the way it needs to be, and right now we’re placing an order. I think we kind of met in the middle of what I wanted to buy with inventory and what he wanted. But I will say things to him like, “Well, let’s just see if this inventory runs out again. How are you going to feel then if we have clients waiting,” which basically is threatening him. Not that I would do anything about it. But that’s the tension, because when he’s planning inventory, he’s got it all in an Excel spreadsheet. He’s primarily looking at one cell, and that cell is what is the total dollar amount. And that dollar amount, as we grow, gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And his comfort level is not growing with that number.

And we need to work on that, you know, to have to explain, we have a line of credit at the bank that’s also growing for that very reason. It means: Tap that line of credit, instead of buying conservatively and having customers wait. So, Loren, you’re asking kind of: What have been the downsides? That’s been one area where we really have difficulty. And in my worst moments, I will say, he’s preparing for failure, and I’m preparing for success. And I’ll get into this sort of black-and-white thinking, take it personally. You know, “If he thought we were gonna go as high as I think we’re gonna go, he would be wanting to buy more.” But it’s more of the conservatism. And when that cell keeps growing and growing, I think for most people who aren’t entrepreneurs, that would be terrifying.

Laura Zander:
So, can I ask, Liz: That’s very, very similar [to us], because we’re an inventory based business as well. So where it ended up, we reframed it. Because at the end of the day, all of this money trickles down to us, right? So if the business is profitable, that profit is ours. And this business is our single largest personal investment.

Like, we just went through this. I’m like: Look, there’s an opportunity to buy some close-out merchandise. It’s going to cost us $75,000. Do we want to invest $75,000 in inventory that I am confident we can turn over in 60 days? And so then we make it, it’s a personal investment strategy. Or do we want to put that $75,000 in the market? You know, do we want to put it in our 401(k)? Do we want to go buy a house? What are the options for this $100,000? This $50,000? And, you know, through these acquisitions that we’ve done, as well, it’s a similar conversation. Like, we can spend 100 grand to buy X, Y, and Z. What else could we do with that $100,000, personally, to get us toward our retirement goals? And then we just kind of look at it together, and we’ve gotten to a point—

So it sounds to me like he doesn’t trust that you can turn this money into something. I mean, I don’t know how much you’re talking about it. I mean, we’ve gone up to $500,000. Like, it’s a risk, but are we in it together? Do we believe that we have the skills? Do we believe that we can turn it? And then, what’s the timeline for the investment?

Doug was a finance major and worked in finance. So we throw it into a spreadsheet, and we’re like: Okay, if we put $500,000 into this, here’s best-case scenario. Here’s worst-case scenario. And here’s how long it will take for us to recover our investment. Are we better off putting that $500,000 in a mutual fund that’s going to produce 8 percent? So if we think that investing it in the business will return greater than 8 percent, let’s say, annually, then we put it in the business. At least for us, that kind of reframing and thinking about it differently has really changed things.

Liz Picarazzi:
I get that. The thing that’s a little bit different is that I’m not buying inventory in a speculative way. This is inventory that, for years, has always turned. So I’m not buying something we’re like, “Oh, let’s see if this works.” Yes, I did this a couple of years ago. He probably has reason to believe. But what we’re talking about is basic replenishment. It’s not even like, “Oh, let’s see if this works.” It’s more like, “What is the cadence of buying this thing that we’ve proven for years is going to sell out?,” as it has.

Laura Zander:
It sounds like you have the wrong supply-chain manager. You have the wrong guy in procurement, independent of whether or not he’s married to you. I mean, if that was an employee, what would you say?

Liz Picarazzi:
I don’t know what exactly. I mean, I don’t want to say I’d fire him, but I think that there would be more receptivity of a real employee to my feedback.

Laura Zander:
Well, do you have metrics that you’re like, “Hey, we need to have this many days of inventory in stock?” I mean, it’s just math.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, I think that I need to develop that more. With this most recent inventory purchase, I said that I have three criteria to say whether the buy is the right amount. The first one is: Would clients still need to wait to get their goods? Even one week, there’s no reason why that’s needed with something that’s going to turn. The second one was: Is our warehouse empty or full throughout the cycle? And the third one is: Do we ever need to furlough our installers because they have no bins to install? Those are three things that are metrics that are really easy to see and measure. And right now, we’re in a spot where all three of those are bad or empty. Clients are waiting. Warehouses empty. And guys don’t have enough work. In this next purchase that we have made, I do think that we’re probably going to recover on those, but still maybe not as much as I’d like.

Laura Zander:
And when you say, “Is the warehouse empty or full,” is that literally the metric, like zero or one? Or you’ve got something that’s a little more specific?

Liz Picarazzi:
It’s definitely something more in between. So, like I say, right now it’s empty. Like, we maybe have 15 percent.

Laura Zander:
But you have a number that you’re shooting for, so that it’s very black and white. Like for us, it’s a dollar amount of inventory that we have on hand. And we actually do it based on days of inventory. So, how many days will it take us to sell through the inventory that we have? And we’ve found a number that we feel very comfortable holding on to, and then the dollar amount will shift based on demand. But by just having that number, again, it’s quantifiable. And in terms of, does my staff have work? Define that for me. Does that mean, are they at 70 percent, 90 percent, 80 percent? But then that metric becomes very clear.

Liz Picarazzi:
Those are really good.

Loren Feldman:
What has stopped you from being more assertive in this situation and winning this fight?

Liz Picarazzi:
So, I think with this next round, it really was laying out these metrics. The other thing is, I will involve other team members more in the conversation. So we have a salesperson, in particular, who doesn’t like it that all these bins he’s sold, that his clients—who he wants to get repeat business from—need to always wait. So that’s someone who, without even coaching him, which I would do, he’s kind of taking my side on it. With this next purchase, the other thing that I did was, I contacted the factory. And I said, “I think that we’ve made a good-sized purchase now. But if we get another couple of big orders, and we want to do a fast follower, like literally a month after we placed the first order, is that possible?” I found that it is.

And that’s a good thing, because it doesn’t mean a fast follower, like, they’re going to throw in the second order with the first and delay the first. It actually means the factory is going to turn its lights on twice. You know, one month and the next month, do two separate productions, and ship two separate times. That gives it a little bit of a cushion. I don’t know if that answers your question, but I would say, involving other team members and putting out these three criteria is what I’ve been doing. But then I also sometimes take a sort of perspective of, let’s see what happens here. And maybe he’s gonna learn his lesson this time. I probably shouldn’t have that attitude. But the other thing is, we haven’t had any major client complaints about waiting, because we are still somewhat of a luxury good. So if someone orders really nice outdoor patio furniture, the lead time on something like that is often longer than what ours is. So it is that sort of a purchase. It’s not like we’re selling refrigerators, and they need it immediately.

Loren Feldman:
Jaci, are there issues that your instincts and Michael’s instincts tend to differ on and that keep coming up?

Jaci Russo:
I wish he was here for this, because he would be laughing so hard at how kindly you worded that question. So Michael doesn’t really get involved in the decision-making around financial matters. He trusts me completely. He isn’t comfortable in the conversation, doesn’t have expertise in it. Neither do I, but I’m figuring it out as I go.

And I think that that actually would be a source of contention, and a cause of fighting, if we had to hash out budgetary discussions. So, he’s out. Home and office? “Just handle it. I don’t care.” And that has worked really well for us. What was a major source of contention early in our relationship, now is not a contentious subject in either place.

Laura Zander:
Same.

Jaci Russo:
He just doesn’t care. He asked me the other day—so, we’ve been married 25 years, last October. So this was maybe January. We’d gone to a show in New Orleans at the Saenger, like a touring Broadway. We’re driving home. The bridge was closed. So a two-hour drive took five hours. We had time to kill. And he said, “Hey, I was just wondering. Do we have any money saved for retirement?” [Laughter]

And I said, “I have so many questions for you right now. But I want to answer this properly. Are you kidding?” And he said, “No, I was just curious. Some people were talking about the other day, and I just wondered, do we have a plan?” And I said, “I don’t know how detailed you want this answer to be, but yes.” And he’s like, “Okay.” I said, “Do you want more information than that?” He goes, “Nah.” I was like, “Okay.”

Laura Zander:
Oh my God. So okay, here’s what’s interesting. So I manage all the money for the business, right? He pays the bills, but I manage the profit and loss. I manage the spending. I manage the budgets. If we have big decisions, I’ll go to him, because he manages the cash. I have no idea how much money we have saved for retirement, or if we have anything. I am laser-focused on us having a profit at the end of the year. And then I have no idea what happens to that money afterwards. And I shouldn’t say that. I’m exaggerating. I mean, I know we own a house, and I could go look and see how much—or, two houses—and see how much we owe on them and blah, blah, blah.

But ours is divided. He’s very, very good at the long-term thinking and the investment and all that kind of stuff. And so I joke with him, and I’m just like, “Have you gambled? Like, do we have money, or have you gambled it away? Or do you have three other families that you’re supporting?” And, you know, every couple years, “Can you show me proof that we have stuff?” But it’s this blind trust. He trusts me that I’m managing, and I’ve shown over 20-some years that we make a profit. And I trust him completely, that he is doing something with the money that we make from the business.

Loren Feldman:
But, Laura, don’t you have to have some idea how much money you have and where it is, when you’re making decisions about buying inventory or buying another business?

Laura Zander:
No, because I just trust him. I’m like, “Do we have 50,000 bucks? Do we have 75,000?” The idea is, 95 percent of the time, it comes out of the operating, the cash flow from the business itself. But every once in a while, it’ll be like, “Do we want to kick something in personally?” We need some extra money. “Or do we want to exercise our line of credit or whatever?” Like Jaci was saying, it took us a long time to figure out what our relationship was, and who was handling what.

And I don’t handle it well when he gets a little negative about, “Oh, cash is really tight.” And I’m like, “I don’t need to hear that. I don’t want to hear that. Like, it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine.” So he’s learned to just really suppress his emotions. We’ve learned how to be more passive aggressive, in some ways. And that just makes things easier. And he’s learned to just suck it up. And if things are tight, he knows and trusts that it’s short-term, and it’ll turn out okay. And we’ve learned when to raise the red flags, and when to bring something up and say, “Hey, do we have $50,000?” We’ve got a nice cash flow spreadsheet that it took us years to kind of come to terms with, when I need to pay $250,000 to a mill in four months. So I put it in the spreadsheet, and you know, we’ve just kind of figured it out.

Loren Feldman:
Do you guys negotiate salaries with your husbands?

Laura Zander:
Like, our own salaries or other people’s salaries?

Loren Feldman:
Your own salaries.

Laura Zander:
Oh, I don’t know. I mean, we’ve just set it at whatever the accountant tells us to set it to. And it’s been that way for probably 10 years.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, we don’t really have much debate. We did double our salaries this year, which was awesome, but we also weren’t paying ourselves enough. And we just kind of joke about it. I think I probably make close to double what he makes. But it’s all just coming into the household. There’s no ego involved with that.

Jaci Russo:
Michael doesn’t know what we make. He also doesn’t know what any of the employees make. When I say he’s out of it, I mean he’s out of it. And similar to what you were saying, Laura, if we have a discussion about money, it’s not going to go well. He’s going to be uptight. He’s going to second-guess everything I’ve done. It’s going to frustrate him. It’s going to piss me off.

Laura Zander:
We just don’t talk about it.

Jaci Russo:
As long as he’s comfortable not being directly involved, and I’m comfortable with him not being directly involved, it works great for us. It works great. We realized very, very early on that we have very different relationships with money in our personal lives. So when I met him, I owned a house in Los Angeles and had just bought a house moving back to Lafayette. I had come from a really good paying corporate job in L.A. and had a really good paying agency job in Lafayette. And he was living in an apartment with some furniture from his parents from like 30 years ago. And it flooded when it rained, but it was fine, because he just turned on a fan.

And he took me on our first date—this is actually in our book—we went to a friend’s wedding celebration, and then he said, “Do you want to go to TGI Friday’s and grab a drink?” I said, “Sure.” So we go to TGI Friday’s on the way back towards town from where we had been to this event. And we sit down and he said, “Would you like a soda?” Well, I’m on first-date behavior. So I said, “Sure, I’ll have a Diet Coke.” And he never said, “Do you want a drink?” He never said, “Do you want to order food?” It’s a new guy. We’re getting to know each other. I never asked.

Five hours later and a whole lot of free refills, I’ve been to the bathroom like 10 times. I haven’t eaten. I’m starving. He drops me off at my house. He barely left the driveway, and I’m in my car. I’m heading to Taco Bell. I’m hitting the dollar menu. I’m ordering all the food, because I’m so hungry. I find out later that he had taken another girl out three days before. I mean, like, we’re engaged when I find this out. It was just fine. It was our first date. I didn’t care that he had another date three days before. But he’d been out with a whole group of people. They had gone to a really fancy restaurant in Baton Rouge: steaks and bottles of alcohol. And his share for the dinner was like $250. So when we went out on our date, he had $2.85 in his checking account. So he picked TGI Friday’s and soda, because he knew his card wouldn’t bounce when he paid.

So when I learned that story, and I mean, he graduated college with student debt, and he had bought a car for above asking price. There’s a whole lot. And so, I’m like, “Okay, hold on. I appreciate what I need to bring to this relationship. So I’m gonna lean into this side of my skill-set, and this will be my domain. I’ve got it.” He can cook like nobody’s business. It’s a wonder I don’t weigh 300 pounds. We eat so well. He has dinner at five o’clock. It is tasty. It is Italian. It’s from his great grandmother’s recipes back in Sicily. And I am happy and he is happy.

Laura Zander:
You eat at five o’clock?

Jaci Russo:
Well, when we had four kids, we ate at five o’clock for years.

Laura Zander:
What are you, 90? [Laughter]

Jaci Russo:
Yes. Five o’clock on the dot.

Laura Zander:
Oh my God. I love that. You just made me so happy. We’re like 9 pm-10 pm.

Jaci Russo:
Oh my god. I’m in bed at 10. I’m up at five. Like, there’s no way.

Laura Zander:
I should say, it used to be. I’m in bed by like nine or 10. But okay, so we eat at eight. But it used to be like nine or 10. So now we eat at eight. Five is so much healthier, I’m sure.

Jaci Russo:
Loren, you asked a question about challenges. And I do want to share challenges with you, because Michael, as a co-worker, has a very loose relationship with deadlines. [Laughter] And so the question that you asked Liz was: What would you do if it was a regular employee? Well, if an employee had a relationship with deadlines that Michael does, they’d have been fired within their 90-day review.

Laura Zander:
Doug would be fired too, for some of his employee behavior.

Jaci Russo:
Yeah.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah.

Laura Zander:
Absolutely.

Liz Picarazzi:
Same.

Laura Zander:
But I’m sure I would be fired as well. So, you know.

Loren Feldman:
Did I mention that I’ve got Doug, Michael, and Frank lined up for next week’s podcast episode? Just kidding. Just kidding.

Laura Zander:
Loren, we’ve talked about this before. At some point in the business, we had to decide—or maybe I had to decide because I’m the gas one—whether to choose the business or the marriage. And I chose the marriage. So there are things that yes, if I had somebody, a third party, in his role, that we would demand differently. And I would ask to be done differently. But I’d rather be married, and I think the benefits outweigh the costs.

Jaci Russo:
Well, to chime in on that, I know for a fact that if either one of us had a different work partner, we would not have been as successful in our business. Because when he says, “I need to go back to work and take care of something,” I’m like, “Absolutely, go.” Whereas, if he was going to someplace where I didn’t work?

We have invested, because this is the biggest piece of our retirement—we do have others. If you talk to him later, let him know, this isn’t all of it. But we built a company so that, at some point, we could retire very comfortably when we sell it or do whatever we’re going to do with it. And so, I love that he has even more work ethic than I do, which is a lot. And he’s even more dedicated to this being successful. And so, no one would have put the heart and soul and sweat into this like he has.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yep. I feel exactly the same with Frank. I mean, I have to say, since he joined, I work less than I used to. He works insane hours. He doesn’t mind doing it. I don’t need to crack the whip on anything that he’s doing himself. There are things that drop, there are deadlines that are missed, but sometimes it’s hard for me to come down on him, because then he’s doing all these other things that I didn’t even realize needed to be done, because I’m not close enough to operations. But our skill-sets—he came from operations and planning. And he definitely is more hands-on day-to-day. And he’s the implementer and I’m the visionary, using the EOS terms.

If it was someone else in that role, I don’t know if that working relationship would last. Because it’s kind of the chemistry and how we’ve been able to do things that has made it what it is. And yes, it has its flaws. But I’m pretty sure that if I was myself working with someone else and had big expectations, and they didn’t want to work more than 40 hours a week—like, he works a lot. And that’s part of the reason why everything, for the most part, is getting done. But yeah, I’m really grateful for it. And I would say the other thing I’m grateful for is that it’s really lonely to be an entrepreneur. Before he joined the business, there were so many things I was stressed out about, that I could kind of talk to him about, but he had his own job to think about. And so he would try to relate and help as he could.

But now, everything we have in common to talk about anything with the business, and that is maybe what the business needs—for now, at least. And it definitely works. And I don’t feel lonely at all. Once he joined, I lost that feeling of loneliness. And for me, that’s worth a lot.

Loren Feldman:
That makes sense.

Laura Zander:
There’s so much synergy. Like you said, you can’t call your other—well, I mean, I do—but I can’t call my other integrator on Sunday morning, while we’re unloading dishes, and talk through a problem. So it’s all these little things that just seem to really add up.

Loren Feldman:
Laura, you mentioned early on that you guys are still operating on a 25-year-old software platform that Doug built for the business. You’ve previously mentioned on the podcast that he’s really the only one who can work with that platform. He built it. He’s the only one who knows it, and that he’s come to view that as kind of a cage that’s kept him trapped in the business, even though he’s had thoughts about leaving the business. Have you made any progress with that?

Laura Zander:
Yeah, we’re migrating to Shopify this summer. I mean, we’re in the middle of it right now. So yeah, he’s fully on board. We’re fully on board. He broke in about October or November, with having just all the maintenance that’s required, and being lonely, and being the only one that really can make updates and make changes. So yeah, we’re on a great path.

Loren Feldman:
You had concerns about making the switch. I think you’ve hesitated to do it for a long time. What kept you from doing it sooner?

Laura Zander:
He just wasn’t ready. He needed to be fully. And this is, you pick marriage before you pick the business. So yeah, I mean, I had to wait for him to be fully on board and for him to be ready to make the switch. And he was ready this fall. And so that’s when we did it.

Loren Feldman:
And it’s going well?

Laura Zander:
So far. I mean, we’re in the development phase. So, yeah. I mean, it seems fine.

Loren Feldman:
Is this one of those big investments? Is it costing you a lot of money?

Laura Zander:
You know, it’s not as much as I thought it was going to be, but we’re going to need to hire more people, obviously, to maintain it. It’s gonna be ugly this summer. It’ll take about a year. But the out-of-pocket cost, the direct out-of-pocket cash, wasn’t nearly as much as I expected. It was about half of what I thought, but it will definitely cost us in other ways.

Loren Feldman:
Can you give us a hint?

Laura Zander:
Of how much it was going to cost?

Loren Feldman:
Yeah.

Laura Zander:
Between $50,000 and $100,000.

Loren Feldman:
And is the goal for Doug to be able to leave the business?

Laura Zander:
You know, yeah. I mean, eventually, yes. Yes, it is. And the goal is for other people to be able to manage this stuff. But yeah, the goal is for him to do what makes him happy and to be creative, instead of having to do maintenance all the time.

Liz Picarazzi:
I have a question, actually.

Loren Feldman:
Yes, please.

Liz Picarazzi:
So I know for a lot of us, we’ve done, like Vistage or EO. So we have a peer group that we’ve created. And for me, that’s been really important. Do you make your spouses, require them, to have some sort of an external peer group, or professional development, or something that’s outside of the day-to-day that gets them focused externally for a little while?

Laura Zander:
I would say, for me—and this is just based on our relationship—if I were to require him to do anything, we would be divorced. [Laughter] We’re both very independent, rebellious, don’t like people telling us what to do. And that goes back to that kind of passive aggressive, like, I don’t tell him what to do. Ever.

Jaci Russo:
Ever.

Laura Zander:
No, yeah, that’s not our relationship. I trust him. He’s got to find his own way. He’s got to figure it out. And that means, like a kid, that sometimes we’re going to slow down, or sometimes he’s not at the same pace that I am, or whatever. And that’s the kind of forgiveness, and we recognize that it’s a partnership. I mean, I can make suggestions and stuff, but I’m not going to force him to do anything. And I don’t know that I would force any of my employees to do something. I mean, I’d suggest it, and if they’re not into it—because if they’re not into it, they’re not going to get value out of it.

Liz Picarazzi:
Yeah, absolutely.

Jaci Russo:
Ditto what Laura said. Everything I do, I think: Would I request this of a co-worker? Or someone else on the team? Am I saying this just because it’s him? What would my expectation be? So I always do a gut check on that. And require? Oh my gosh, if he thought I was sending them out and to quote-unquote teach him a lesson, that’s going to piss him off. There’s a lot of balance there that has to happen. But I will say that he has been egoless in me being the face of the company and me attending all those things.

Liz Picarazzi:
Same.

Jaci Russo:
Getting all the accolades. Really, to his credit, because I think there’s a lot of men who would not be nearly as comfortable as Michael has been. I got him to finally leave the house and the office and go out into the world and do his first thing, which was 21 Hats in Fort Worth. That is legit the first time he’s ever done anything like that.

Laura Zander:
That’s so funny. It’s the same with Doug. I’ll go to conferences, and people are like, “Does he really exist? You know, I keep hearing about this mythical guy.” But he has no interest. He has none.

Jaci Russo:
For us, it was even more so, because husband-and-wives ad agencies, that’s not rare. There’s a lot of that. And a bunch of the ones that Michael was familiar with were very small, two-person operations. And we were building an agency, like we were clear on that, once we kind of got going. Like, okay, this is going to be a thing. And so he didn’t want it to ever feel like it was a husband and wife working out of the garage or their house kind of a deal.

So he had a rule for the first, I’m gonna say, 20 years, that whoever introduced themselves first in the meeting was allowed to use the last name, and the other person could only use their first name. So when we walked into the bank board for a meeting with the board of directors to present the campaign for the year, if one of us said, “Hi, Michael Russo.” The next one said, “Hi, I’m Jaci.” Because he didn’t want somebody to say, “Wait, are y’all related? Are y’all married? Are y’all whatever?” We had clients for years that had no idea we knew each other outside of work. And when we did introductions, I would say, “I have four kids.” And then he would say, “I have four kids,” no one knew it was the same four kids. [Laughter] Which is ridiculous now, but I got it at the time. It was very important to him that we not look less than.

Liz Picarazzi:
I may complain, but I wouldn’t do it any other way. I wouldn’t. I mean, I think it’s really great for our family, too. I mean, my daughter, she gets to be involved a bit in the business. We get to travel together with work-related stuff. We went to China in December. It’s really good, but it definitely has its tension. And most people cannot believe that spouses can work together. Like, they’re incredulous. So the fact that we’ve done it for four years, and we’re still very happily married and happy at work is—I don’t want to say it’s a miracle. I think it’s really wonderful. It is really wonderful. But a lot of adjustments needed to be made. And if I had to pick a different COO, I wouldn’t pick. I would always want him to be there. Because he does most of his job really well.

Laura Zander:
I love it.

Loren Feldman:
My thanks to Liz Picarazzi, Jaci Russo, and Laura Zander—and to our sponsor, the Great Game of Business, which helps businesses use an open-book management system to build healthier companies. You can learn more at greatgame.com.