Customer Reviews

Sleeping with Your Business Partner: Communications for Couples in Business Together (Capital Ideas for Business & Personal Development) (Capital Ideas for Business & Personal Development)

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The collaborative work of Becky and Michael Gross, "Sleeping With Your Business Partner: A Communication Toolkit For Couples In Business Together" is the newest title in Capital Books' outstanding 'Capital Career & Personal Development Series', and focuses specifically upon operating a 'Mom & Pop' business enterprise where the husband and wife work together. There are both benefits and detriments to such an arrangement that arise from gender differences, conceptual differences, the need to balance family and work, conflict resolution strategies and techniques, personal and professional communication skills, the demands of teamwork and the necessity of positive attitudes. Superbly written, deftly organized, and thoroughly 'reader friendly', "Sleeping With Your Business Partner" should be considered a 'must read' for anyone thinking about (or already engaged in) a business with their spouse.

This review originally appeared on the Boardroom Couple Blog: Sleeping with Your Business Partner, A Communication Toolkit for Couples in Business Together, by Becky and Michael Gross is a book that focuses on how to manage the daily communication issues a couple faces when they work together.

The book is full of questions, assessments, charts and tips that couples who work together can use to improve their relationship inside and outside of the office. The first chapter of the book is devoted to discussing who copreneurial couples are, what common problems copreneurs face, what is required to be a successful copreneurial couple and what to expect from working with your spouse if you aren't doing so already. They mention several real-life copreneurs and provide a wealth of questions and assessments that you and your spouse can take to start discussions that need to be had sooner rather than later.

Chapter 2 helps you identify you and your spouse's personality traits through the INSIGHT Inventory. This was the one part of the book that I found odd. The authors repeatedly mention the INSIGHT Inventory, which is not included when you buy the book. Instead, you must go to their website and purchase the assessment for $19.99. While they do provide an overview of the types of traits of the different personalities, they continually mention that you should go to their website and take the test. This doesn't mean that if you didn't take the INSIGHT test the chapter wasn't worth reading, because it is. I was still able to find value in the way they present the different personality types and could use it to understand the way my personality interacts with the personalities of not only my spouse, but my children and friends as well!

Chapter 3 covers the balancing of work and family life and has a helpful "Sharing Responsibilities" chart for you to fill out with your spouse.

Chapter 4 covers some of the relationship pitfalls a couple can experience when working together and discusses some negotiation techniques you can use to make negotiations with your spouse or business associates a "mutual gain" experience.

The remaining chapters cover the specifics of how to be successful with communication, listening, business communication, teamwork, and a positive attitude.

The book is good for couples who are considering working together and those who are already working together. While many of the assesments throughout the book you cannot answer until you already know what it is like to work with your spouse, the "Right Stuff" inventory in Chapter 1 alone is worth the purchase of the book for those considering a business with their spouse because the authors do a great job of bringing up much of what an entrepreneurial couple can expect to encounter.

This book differs from other copreneurial books in that it focuses more on the communication aspects of working with your spouse, and that is a good thing. So much of successful marriage and business revolve around communication that everyone can benefit from improving these skills by reading Sleeping with Your Business Partner.

I didn't know when I said "I do" that I would end up running a business with my husband. It's a challenging path and yet one that many couples choose, or end up on. This book gives lots of practical advice and tips to help make it easier, more effective and more fun. There's something about being in business with your spouse that is very different from any other partnership, and we need all the advice we can get.

The authors share from their own lives that it takes a lot of effort and energy to communicate successfully and find balance between business and home life.

One area that could be developed more is how to turn off the business relationship and turn on the personal intimacy and passion - even when there's not much time left in the day.

Diana Daffner
Author, Tantric Sex for Busy Couples: How to Deepen Your Passion in Just Ten Minutes a Day

Sleeping with Your Business Partner presents itself as a "communication toolkit" for couples in business together, who are also known as "copreneurs". It is written by Becky Stewart-Gross, PhD, and her husband, Michael Gross, PhD. Dr. Stewart-Gross has spent most of her career as a business consultant, with an emphasis on marketing and sales training; her husband, Dr. Gross, has spent most of his career as a senior administrator for various school systems, both public and private.

This book gets off to a good start; the first Chapter, called: "Couples Working Together" provides a solid overview of what couples can expect if they go into business together, along with some useful steps they should take to prepare for such an endeavor. For example, they describe the "blended lifestyle" where your business, family, and personal lives meld together, and become more or less impossible to separate They go on to explain that this is not necessarily a bad thing as long as you know what to expect; you can still work at balancing these different facets of your life without driving yourself crazy. Another interesting example is where the authors, citing third party research, describe how successful business couples offer what they call "intimate leadership" in which "the power [to succeed] comes from the core of the relationship." I interpret this to mean that the closeness of a successful copreneur couple can create a formidable foundation for business success.

The authors conducted a survey as part of their research in writing this book, and some of these questions, with the most common answers nicely summarized, are presented near the end of the first Chapter. Overall the authors do a commendable job of incorporating the results of their survey (along with examples from their own client relationships) into the book in an informative fashion. For example, when asked: "How has your business relationship affected your marital relationship?", the most frequent answers were that it "...created more tension in their marriage and that it caused us to develop a greater appreciation of each other." From my own experience, I think many copreneurs couples would agree with this.

The quality of the book begins to slip after the first Chapter. Chapter 2, called: "Make Your Differences Work for You" is lacking in several respects. First, it serves primarily as an advertisement for a proprietary personality assessment called the INSIGHT Inventory, which Dr. Stewart-Gross has used in her consulting practice for many years. Readers are told by the authors that: "We are excited to be able to offer this personality assessment at a special discounted rate off the regular cost..." The assessment is relatively unknown and not widely used; it also, in my view, has some serious shortcomings. For example, it assumes that personality characteristics appear in groups, so that if you are "Direct" (which includes being straightforward and frank, among other things) that you cannot also be tactful and approachable, because these are only exhibited by those who are "Indirect." It may be somewhat true, sometimes, but not something to rely on as a hard and fast rule.

Also, the INSIGHT Inventory apparently requires, in order to apply its principles, that you know the personality characteristics of the people that you are interacting with - but how can we know this unless they have taken the assessment themselves, and shared the results with us? I will also admit to my own bias here: in my own coaching and consulting practice, we use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality instrument. With over 100 years of clinical research and experience behind it, we find that nothing else comes close to providing an accurate and useful look at one's personality characteristics and preferences. In any case, Chapter 2 goes on to include a mind numbing set of summaries and charts showing how people with certain personality traits can best interact most effectively with others. While some of this information might be interesting, I found it much too tedious to be useful. The authors also suggest on a few occasions that the reader can improve their communication skills by learning to "flex their style," but they never even mention what they mean by this. It is only by going to the INSIGHT Inventory web site where on learns that it means things like "don't interrupt someone while they are speaking." This is not exactly ground breaking advice.

Each Chapter includes one or more tests, questionnaires, worksheets, and self assessments that couples are encouraged to complete in order to assess their strengths and weaknesses, etc. in various areas. Many of the questions were interesting in that they raise questions that copreneurs and future copreneurs should discuss, preferably before going into business together, such as: "Are you stronger as a team than you are separately?" and: "Do you agree on how to decide household, child care, and business responsibilities?" On the other hand, many of the questions are rather silly or insipid, and don't do much of anything to foster meaningful discussion. This includes, for example: "Can you deal with the unknown?", "Can you accept change in your business?" and "Do you share responsibilities?" Taken as a whole, the questions and worksheets are helpful, but I think their impact could be greatly improved by reducing their number and retaining only those that can readily promote constructive and probing conversation.

I found this book to be almost frustrating in a way; there are times when good ideas come to the surface, only to quickly disappear and not reappear again at all. For example, in the Chapter titled "Turn Conflict into Bridge Building", readers are told, in a section called "What is Negotiation?" that: "Trust is the glue that binds the process together." I found that concept very intriguing and wanted to learn more, but the word "trust" was never mentioned again in the Chapter. So what were they getting at? I just don't know.

The book has two different Chapters about communication, the first being "Communicate for Success." It starts off reasonably well, and has a great section called "Why Copreneurs Have Trouble Communicating." From there, however, the quality rapidly declines to silly discussions about topics like "Communication Busters" where we learn about people like: the "Rambler; just doesn't know when to stop talking", the "Slicker; sure his/her way is best and always name drops" the "Squeaker; shrills into phone when answering your call." It is unfortunate that the authors chose to include such inane material in what could have been a much better book.

Chapter 7, which is also on communication, is called "Business Communication" and is adapted from another book written by Dr. Stewart-Gross called "The Leaders Communication Toolkit." The majority of the information covered in this Chapter is so simple, and so basic, that I suspect most readers will not find it very helpful. Here, for example, we learn that when an email is marked "URGENT" that we should open it immediately, that we should proofread our emails before sending them, and write professionally. Don't get me wrong - I know for sure that there are entrepreneurs out there who do need help on basic communication skills - and this information would help if they bothered to read it. My concern is that the content of this Chapter is so basic, and so elementary, that most readers will wonder why a book that is fairly sophisticated in some ways would include material such as this, which is much more suitable for someone just about to graduate from high school and enter the work force for the first time.

In spite of its shortcomings, I do think that many current and prospective copreneurs will find this book worthwhile. I would simply skip over the parts that you don't like (such as, in my case, most of Chapters 2 and 7) and instead focus on the content you find helpful.