Episode 256 - Keeping Marriages Healthy as an Entrepreneur with Patrick Lencioni, John and Ashely Marsh, Les Parrot, and More

Most of us know, through stories, experiences, or statistics, that entrepreneurship can take a toll on marriages.

When you look up the numbers, you'll find that nearly 50% of business owners experience divorce. The added stress and risk of innovation can weigh heavy on families, but it doesn't have to.

In this episode, we're highlighting a handful of voices who have spoken about how we can keep our marriages healthy while still fulfilling our calls to create. Speakers include…

Click the links to listen to the full-length episodes of each guest. And don’t forget to follow, share, and review the show.

All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific advice for any individual or organization.

Episode Transcript

Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.

Henry Kaestner: Hello and welcome back to the feature, not for our podcast. Most of us know through stories, experiences or statistics that entrepreneurship can take a toll on marriages. When you look up the numbers, you'll find that nearly 50% of business owners experienced divorce. The added stress and risk of innovation can weigh heavily on families, but it doesn't have to. Today on the show, we're highlighting a handful of voices who have spoken out about how they can keep their marriages healthy while still fulfilling their call to create these segments. We're all pulled from existing podcast, and you can find links to the full conversations for each one in the show notes. Let's lean in.

Patrick Lencioni: Hi, I'm Pat Lencioni, I'm here to talk to you about the six types of working genius as it relates to marriage and family. So I came up with this theory because I was frustrated in my job and I didn't know why. And I loved what I did. It was my own company. I worked with people I loved and friends, and yet somehow I was going to work and getting frustrated and I thought there was something wrong with me. So one day I came up with this model to explain my own dissatisfaction, and then I realized it actually applied to others as well. It was pretty universal. And we call it working genius because it's about getting things done. But then I realized I work at home, too. In fact, my wife and I are the co-parents of our family, and most of what we do is actually work getting things done. And, you know, John and Ashely Marsh talk about having different kind of hats on. Like, am I a business owner? Am I a co-parent? Am I your spouse, am I lover, whatever else it is? And we mix those things up. Well, my wife, Laura and I realize we are working together. We are co running a household, and we had very interesting ways to look at that for years. That caused us to argue and to get frustrated at one another. When I came up with the six types of working genius and realized I needed to apply it to the most important organization in my life, which was my family. It changed my marriage and it changed the way we interacted with one another. It brought more unity and more grace. Let me explain what I mean. The sixth type of working genius goes like this. The first genius that God gives us. Not everybody, but some people have. This is called the genius of Wonder. That's people that like to sit around and ponder things and ask the big questions. Is this the right thing to do? My wife Laura has wonder as a genius. It's a beautiful thing. It's one of the things I really was attracted to her when I met her in college because she actually thought the big things mattered and she would be looking at truth and goodness and beauty and. And it was before she was actually really involved in her in our faith. But I knew that she had a heart for Jesus and she had a heart for truth, beauty and goodness. And that was her genius of wonder brought her to that. But that's only one of the six geniuses, and that's one that she has. The next genius is called the Genius of Invention, and that's people that like to come up with new ideas and invent new ways to do things. I had that genius, and so does Laura. We loved talking about new ideas. We would go on drives for hours and talk about, Wouldn't it be cool to do this? We invented a board game early in our marriage. She was writing a musical. I was writing books. We love doing this. Our both of our families thought we were crazy, but we had the genius of invention. We didn't know it, but it's one of the things we shared. The next genius that some people have. I have this. Laura does not is called the genius of Discernment, which is gut feel and intuition to look at a situation and evaluate it without data and kind of go, I think I understand what's going on here and I think this is what we should do. It's about integrative thinking and it's not magic. It's about intuition and seeing things even without expertise. But being able to come up with a pretty good idea or a pretty good assessment of an idea. So those were our three geniuses. Well, that's only three of the six. That means the other three. Everybody has two geniuses of these six. Laura and I were done after the first three. The next three that I'm about to go over. We did not have as geniuses in our lives. The next one is called Galvanizing. That's like getting people going. Let's inspire people to act. Let's. Let's get people moving and let's organize them to do something. Now, for me, that would be considered a competency. It wasn't one of the areas that gave me joy and energy because that's what you're working genius does. It's about where you get energy and joy. I was okay at it, but I didn't like it. But in my family, that was the thing that I had to do because Laura hates doing that. The next one is called enablement. Enablement is a genius. That means I like to come alongside and help people. Exactly. They want to be helped when people say, I need this. You say, Definitely, I'm there to help you. And when they say, Let's do this project, you say, I think I know what you need and I'm going to give you what you want. It's an absolute genius. It's a beautiful thing. Everybody thinks that every mom has it. And as a Christian father, I thought I was supposed to have it. I think it's my lowest one. Let me explain what I mean by that. My wife has it as a competency in the middle. For me, it's a frustration and I feel really guilty about it. So here's how it works in our family. My wife says, Pat, I want you to help me clean out the garage this weekend. Now, right away, I get a gut feel like this is not going to be good. But I say I will help her, but I will help her using my geniuses. So I say, Well, first tell me how you're going to go about using reorganizing the garage and then tell me what your reasoning is. Do we really need to? She's like, I don't want any of that from you. Just get out there. And when I hand you something, put it where I tell you to. This is the anathema of who I am. If I'm not allowed to invent and discern, it's really hard for me to enable. We have language around that now. You don't. My wife says now I'm going to reorganize the garage this weekend, will, you just come out there and sit and talk to me, because really, I just get lonely. I don't want you to [....] it up by overthinking it. And I really don't need that much help. But I hate doing it by myself. And I'm like, I would love to come out there and do that with you. One day she was you recently sending something to a storage unit and she had my sons help me. I said, I'll go too. And she says, No, no, no, you stay home. I said, Why? I want to help? And she said, Because you're going to try to analyze it and discern things. And I've already figured it all out. What a beautiful thing that we have that language to understand. She knows how I'm wired and how she's wired, now does that mean I never have to enable or galvanize or wonder? Not my genius is. No. But we now know that when we're doing those things that we're not good at and we don't enjoy that not being good at, it is not something to judge somebody about or to actually grind on. It's an it's a place for mercy and grace. Okay. The last genius that neither my wife nor I have is tenacity. That's the last thing. So it goes wonder. Up here at 50,000 feet, invention, discernment, galvanizing, enabling, and then tenacity. And that's finishing things. People with tenacity like to push it across the finish line, overcome obstacles. They're tenacious in getting things done and done well. These are not gifts that Laura and I have ever had. God didn't give them to us. We found ways to try to get around them, but we don't like it at all. What does that mean in running a household? It's not easy. It means I remember one day coming home from work and coming into my home and turning on the lights, and the lights didn't go on. Well, I live in California, so there's rolling power outages here all the time. And I said, Hey, Laura, I think the power's out. She goes, Nope, not in the neighborhood. It's still on. Oh, really? But they're not working. She goes, No, it's just our house. Oh, what's going on? And she said, Well, I forgot to pay the power bill. And I said, Well, don't they usually send you a note telling you that you haven't paid it before they shut it down? Oh, yeah. They send three notes, she said. I kept meaning to do it. I never got around to it. And back then, though, I would be like, Laura, that's what we have to do. Now I would laugh and go, Oh, my gosh, Tenacity is a crusher, isn't it? She goes, It is. And we would be able to understand that some of the challenges we face are because of our geniuses and we can actually try to overcome them but not feel bad about them. My marriage has changed after 30 years more in the last two years from understanding who she is and who I am. And it sounds weird to say that, but because so much of our relationship is about doing things and there are certain things she is beautiful and wonderful at and other things that I'm good at. There's a few that neither of us are, and knowing that can change everything now. Now let's look at our kids. I have a son that works with me. He's 24 years old. When we discovered working genius two years ago, I learned about him in ways that I'd never seen before. He lived in my home. I'd helped him with homework. I had done things with him for years. But until I realized that his geniuses were wonder that he was really a deep thinker and discernment, which meant he had really gut good gut feel. I never knew what to encourage him to do in his in his work, how to reward him, how to understand him and celebrate him. I also didn't realize that there were other things he did, that he needed some grace from me around. Because as a parent, you know what I did? I tended to look at what he was not good at and thinking, A good parent has to teach them how to do what they're bad at to prevent them from suffering in life. Now I say to them, Hey, you know, this isn't a strength of yours. Don't feel bad about it. Just realize you're going to need help from others. But love on yourself and who God made you and utilize that. I like to think that you can have two kids, one that's organized and one that's disorganized. One that's creative and disorganized and one that's not creative. And how often will we turn to them and say, Hey, you need to learn to be creative and you need to learn how to be organized. We do the very opposite of what we ought to do, which is let's celebrate the thing that you're great at. Let's make you aware of the thing that you're not. And as a result of that, they're probably going to become the young men and women that God intends them to be. So I hope that's helpful for you in your marriage and in your family. And I hope that drives well with the other things you're hearing about marriage and the hats you wear and the things we go through. God bless.

William Norvell: So working together in marriage. What works? What doesn't work? What advice? I know you're not the only team walking through this journey together, and as most entrepreneurs know, my wife doesn't technically work in the business, but she's sure part of it, you know? And so we have to talk about those things, too. What do you think of it, walk us through it.

John Marsh: Well, that's still we're working at it. But it is this is you know, if I had to say on one level, what's it like to sleep with the bill collector or what is it like to have, you know, all these roles and hats at the same time? If you're sideways at work, you're sideways at home, and that can be really difficult. And how do you honor the different roles that we have? So what we've done is pulled down sophisticated business tools into our marriage. We've created frameworks. We have a weekly meeting that's her, and I'm meeting over what we say is a visionary integrator meeting using the kind of the rocket fuel mindset from iOS. And so we'll have the meeting and we'll do all of our detail, Guardian detail, we call it that Ash. It's all the details of what we're doing. And then the last section will move to another place and she'll let me just vision and be excitable and she will shoot me down because what used to happen, I called her the dream squisher, or I'd be getting all excited about stuff. Oh man, we can build an indoor skydiving train. A 700 horsepower diesel motor seats will be amazing. And she's like, how are you going to finance that. Who's gonna insure that? What about the permits? And so I'd say, Baby, it's like we get the room set up with beautiful candles and everything's going good, and you turn on a bunch of fluorescent lights. I said, You're killing the mood when I'm visioning here. And so we had to learn how to vision together. And so the second part, all she does is, hmm, tell me more interesting if she does that. She says that over and over, and I get more excited the more she says it. So it's a weekly meeting, just like our business meetings that are divided in such a way that we can work together and have our heated fellowship, which we call our conflict heated fellowship, and to engineer our heated fellowship weekly.

Ashely Marsh: He's right about every bit of that. And I will add that two of the things that actually I believe are key to what has helped us so much and working that way together well, but it's not always that way, our heated fellowship is really when it's heated, it's robust, and it gives us a great opportunity for just wonderful repentance and forgiveness, you know? But that's how we grow and that's how we learn about each other and how we continue to challenge and change. But honestly, learning which one of us has a future voice in the present voice, that's been really huge and I bet you can't guess between us, who has what? But John is very future oriented. He's always looking for the next greatest thing. Actually, his car tag says, Great idea on it, because he's always got a great idea, you know, and I'm very present. And so I have a hard time getting in the future. You have to convince me that it's safe to go there. Once you give me enough markers on that, then I'm your greatest person to help you get there. But if you try to drag me, I'm pretty ferocious on the other side. But the other thing is the plan. Promise and provisional. And so we speak a certain way, all of us do. I speak in promise? Definitely. That means if you if you hear me say it or if you say it to me, I think it's actually happening. That's what we're doing. John speaks provisionally, and pretty much everything he says is not really what we're doing, is what he's thinking about or have an idea about. And so if you are a promise person and you're hearing a provisional person talk, you're thinking this is what they want me to do. Oh my gosh. And so some at these meetings we have and when we first started these, I was so overwhelmed because all of these details that he's talking about that we go over are needed. But because there wasn't a direct information coming to me saying that these were again, their details are just ideas, that is that every one of them became a task to me that I was trying to accomplish. And so we finally realize that what I need to have is give me the top five, give me the top ten that I need to accomplish this week for you to feel good about where we're going. And then let me know when you're talking provisionally, because I call it open browser syndrome. I can't deal with it.

John Marsh: And the idea of plan. So what professionals know ideas A bad idea plan is we're going there, but we don't know how promises come hell or high water. We gave our word. And so she'll ask, Are we it? Sometimes I'll say we're plan vision or I'm moving from provisional to a plan and we get to a plan. You know, the greatest thing we have together as husband and wife is to get on the same page, lay our hands on something, get in unity, and ask God to bless it. It's the most powerful force for us in our life and even our we'll do one meeting a year. We call our State of the Family, where we bring in two of our mentors and they'll sit down and we'll try to do all of our year heated fellowship in one day. We'll talk about everything. We don't want to talk about trying to get aligned with adult supervision and then put our. Hands on it and ask God to bless it. And we've seen tremendous power. Because if you don't have a vision, you've got die vision. That's two visions, and that's not blessed.

Henry Kaestner: John And Ashley, I'm curious about what you have seen in your decades now of working with other couples and seen the most common areas of dysfunction and the best way to fix it. Clearly you just give some great tactics. And I think that there are a whole bunch of different things that we can employ as we endeavor to speak a different language to our spouse and work differently. But what do you see out there? Because my sense is that more couples come to you for counseling than most. What do you see is the common thing, common challenge and what you tell them to rectify it?

Ashely Marsh: I believe from my perspective, what I see and is typically the woman, but not always, but most of the time the woman, they don't speak up and actually bring their true gifts to the table because it can sound easily like we're being resistant or be controlling. Or maybe we're worrying or we're not trusting, but it sounds negative. Typically when we bring challenge, it can sound negative and it's not well received. Now, sometimes I believe that that's because of how we deliver that information. If we don't know how to really speak to our spouses in those situations or whenever we're trying to either dream or execute, then it can get sideways really easily. But that's the thing that I have seen, honestly, is that women a lot of times do not stand up and actually participate in a way that brings their greatest gift to the table. And honestly, I believe our husbands want that. I know they need it. God created us to meet each other. But like my husband and he says it, and I hope it's okay to say to someone he used to say, he's like, Hey, as long as sex is up or was okay, everything was fine. In other words, it's fine as long as nobody is fussed about anything. Obviously everything's okay. And I believe that most women have the ability just to put their heads down and do the work and they take care of the home. They take care of the kids to take care of their husband, to do all the things. So it's easy to think that everything's okay because they're not saying anything and they might not have a different opinion or a resistant opinion, but they might not give all of the information that they have that can actually benefit the decision or benefit the business. And so that's what I see most of the time, is that women are withholding their gifting and they're not being bold with what God has for them to bring to that. So that's my take on that one.

John Marsh: I think it's hard because most I think spouses don't know enough to comment. They think and that's on the husband. If your spouse doesn't know enough to comment intelligently, that's on you. And you don't have to have logic in everything because there's a Holy Spirit guiding us. And so, you know, people are down on what they're not up on. And so Ash and I had to get to the place. My thing is I did promiscuous visioning with everybody but her and then came back to sell her heart on what I wanted to do. And I just overwhelmed her. And she would say about three questions and I'd just get mad and holler at her. So I didn't strap myself to the Unabomber because we can't get to a decision with everything I try to do. You're telling me, No, your dream squishier. And so she would say, Now do you want me to help or do you just want me to say yes to whatever you say? If you want me to do that? And I'm like, No, no, no, that's not blessedable. So we be in this trap situation. And what I realized is we had to learn to vision together at some level because without a vision, people in relationships perish. And so I had to slow down long enough. And it took us three years to get aligned, envisioning where now my number one vision partner is my wife and I could have done that all along if I would have taken the time, been patient enough and asked myself, Do I really want to make half brained decisions or do I want to stand there with my wife and make decisions about how it's going to shape our life.

Ashely Marsh: Tack on that. To give an example, when he told me a dream squisher and that has been a real term that's been used for me, so to say, I'll know that on my end the bill collector as well. But you know, the questions that I would bring were ones that to me were very logical. I'm a very logical person. I don't deal with a lot of emotion in my decisions, but I would ask things like whenever he would say, I don't know, I think he's giving the example. He want to do an indoor skydiving. He really did want to do that. But that's not a made up conversation. But my questions were, okay, so how are we going to pay for that? Why would you ask me a question like that? But the next question was, what about the liability? Where do you I mean, how do you even insure that? I mean, what if somebody hurts themselves or dies, you know? And so I'm asking these questions and all he's hearing is rejection, rejection, rejection. So it took us a few years for him to trust that when answering these questions is because I'm trying to help you resolve all of the avenues that could possibly come against this very idea to make sure it's bullet proof. And then if it needs to go forward, it's not because I'm trying to shoot it down. I have no desire to shoot you down. Of course, he taught me how to bring those questions and challenge to him. And as both sides, he has to hear the questions. And I had to learn to be quiet and let him actually give the explanation.

Henry Kaestner: We had a guest on not too long ago that shared some really interesting research that entrepreneurs are much more likely to suffer from different mental illnesses and 2 to 3 times more likely to experience divorce. So obviously, you've got lots of advice. You've been thinking about this a long time, but you're in this unique spot in that not only you're a marriage counselor with lots and lots of years of doing this, being married yourself, but you're also an entrepreneur and to boot, you're an entrepreneur with your wife. So you are well acquainted with the stresses of running this business and what it looks like for your marriage. And you've undoubtedly counseled lots of business owners and entrepreneurs. What's the sense that you have of what they're struggling with, and what would you encourage our listening audience with about how to focus on their marriages?

Les Parrott: Well, I love your question, and yeah, I can certainly identify with it. Even as recently as the last few weeks and months as a wife and a business acquisition that I've been through, that was just one of the most stressful things I've done. But let me back up from that and just tell you a quick story. My friends Neil Warren, Neil Warren and his wife Marilyn, living in Los Angeles, beautiful home over the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, had us over for dinner. Leslie Me And we'd gone out to have some fun and kind of the leader dinner that Marilyn made. And we're sitting around the dining room table and just enjoying each other's company. And this was more than 20 years ago. Neil said, Hey, you know, this new thing called the Internet? And we're like, Yeah. He said, I wonder if we could use that to reduce the divorce rate. And I said, What do you mean? He said, I wonder, like, if we can match people online, like for a better match so that they could have more success in their relationship. I said, You know, I think you've lost your marbles. Now you have to remember that 20 years ago the Internet was the Wild West. It was nutty. It was just weird stuff going on and not trustworthy in any fashion. Yet we had all this knowledge. We had all this research on how people tend to meet and where they tend to meet and so forth. And Neil had written a book called Finding the Love of Your Life. Obviously, we had written Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. And and anyway, that conversation that night turned into a really late night discussion that turned into several years of work. And we launched eHarmony together, really the first of its kind. The first thing on the Internet is help couples make a serious match. And it was an uphill battle, I got to tell you. In fact, I remember being in a hotel room with Neil and Marilyn Weston out there and remembering Neil, literally putting his hands on his face with his elbows on his knees and weeping. This is never going to work. And we had just been through a big round of funding and we had Sequoia. It was just like, Oh my goodness, we have failed after all of this is just not happened. And I won't bore you with the rest of the story. But as you probably know, that company went on to have unimaginable success financially and it is still alive and well. But that process that was so difficult on our marriage. Here we are trying to help married couples. It was so stressful for us because because every entrepreneur knows you get obsessed. You get completely obsessed with your dream and your vision of what you want to do with this company that you're starting. And it becomes like your mistress, right? And that can't help but to drive a wedge between you. So when you give me that information about the divorce rate is higher and so forth, I have no problem believing that it's not the first time I've heard that either. And so you have to really be intentional. And if there's any message I have to everybody that's listening to us today, it's an entrepreneur out there. It's that word intention. If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur and succeed as a husband or a spouse, you've got to be intentional. And that can be a challenge because, you know, back in those days, 20 years ago, we didn't have cell phones to be distracted by even when we were on a date night, you know? And so even today, it's all the more important to be intentional. So I guess that's my first word of wisdom out there.

Rusty Rueff: I want to keep on the vein of the marriage thing, because you have a very interesting phrase that you use where you say a marriage can be slipping into the future. And I immediately thought, you know, Steve Miller band and fly like an eagle, right? Time keeps on slipping into the future. But you say a marriage can slip into the future. What do you mean by that?

Les Parrott: Well, you're referencing our book, Your Time Starved Marriage. And in addition to doing entrepreneurial things Leslie and I write and speak around the country together, and this book, as is true with most of our books, came out of our own need. We just felt like men. We cannot seem to capture quality time together. And I mentioned my friend John Maxwell. John and I wrote a book called 25 Ways to Win with People. And one of the things I learned in that project with John and he's been a longtime mentor of mine, and he said, Les you can't give leftover. To Leslie. And I said, What are you talking about? He said, If you're like most guys, you go through your day and all these cool things are happening. It's cool meeting and get this great phone call and you have this win over you and you share it with everybody in the office or whatever. And by the time you get home, you're just kind of depleted and exhausted and, hey, what's for dinner and where's the mail? And she says, How was your day? Fine. And you just kind of give her the leftovers of your energy. And so when he said that, it was just like a wake up call. And I realized I am I'm giving my best time to other people, not to my spouse. And because of that. Leslie, of course, you know, was like, go. John right. She was like, yes, great, great message there, John. And out of that little kind of word of wisdom came this idea for this book, your time starved marriage. And it set us on a course to really recover the moments we've been missing together, the time that was slipping into the future. And yes, I'm glad you're of a generation that identifies Steve Miller band with that, I appreciate that reference. But we thought, how do we do this? How do we get practical? And so we went to the bookstore. You know, we talked on a book on managing marriage. Well, there's tons of time management books and some classics out there on time management. And you go to the marriage section, you can't find anything on time. You know, you find stuff on in-laws and sex and conflict and communication and on down the list. Nothing on time. And one of the things that we first discovered in our own research is it's the second biggest complaint that couples have in their marriage, whether they're entrepreneurial or not. It's the second biggest complaint. The first is communication. We don't communicate the way we want to. But second is we don't have the time that we'd like to with each other. And so that was a compelling reason for us to dig down even deeper into the research and write this book. Your time starve marriage, because we wanted to recover the moments that we're slipping into the future. And that's exactly what we did. For us personally, it may be one of the most important book projects that we've ever done because it really changed the way we interact.

Rusty Rueff: Are there a few tenets of that book that you would want to share with our listeners?

Les Parrott: Well, let me give you one real quick practical thing that everybody can do starting today out there, and then I'll give you one that goes a little bit more in depth. But do you know what the single most important minute of your marriage is? You tend to kind of just sideswipe it every day, but this single minute can make or break your evening tonight with your spouse. It's that single minute that you have, that 60 seconds that you have when you come home at the end of the day and greet each other. And like I said, if you are like me working hard and you're coming home late and you're on the phone, probably even if you're walking in the door, you just kind of come in and where's the mail? And, hey, you know, give me the report. How are the kids? Any homework tonight that I got to be concerned with? What's for dinner? All that kind of stuff is just a jumble of of messy communication. Right. And what the research says, if you'll take 60 seconds to totally focus first thing on your spouse. Have a tender touch, have a hug, have a kiss, and meet eye to eye and say, how is your day? Now everybody listening to us can do that. That's so easy. And what that research shows is if you do that for 60 seconds, it sets the tone, the tenor for your entire evening together, and you will begin to notice just an attitudinal change in your home because of that little 60 seconds investment. And so this book is chock full of stuff like that, really practical things that you can do. So that's the simple one. The other thing that really changed for us in kind of recouping the moments that we've been missing together as a couple was to understand our time styles. And this was the result of a lot of research on our side because we haven't seen this anywhere else. But God made each one of us with a unique way of processing time. And the simple way, just to kind of visualize this for our listeners out there, is to think of a continuum that's that's scheduled and unscheduled, and one is not better than the other. It's just kind of how God made us and the DNA of our personality. And so just think about just self-diagnose how you scheduled or unscheduled. Which of those would you say you are?

Rusty Rueff: Oh, I'm definitely scheduled. Henry. William, What are you guys?

Henry Kaestner: I'm definitely I'm in constant conflict between the two. I want to be on schedule. I want to be on schedule.

Les Parrott: Ok. So if I asked you, Hey, can we have lunch next Thursday? But it has to be at 130 for me to make that happen. There's someplace you would go to look at a schedule, at a calendar, Right, To figure that out?

Rusty Rueff: Correct? Totally. It's in my hand all the time. Yep, it's in my hand. I'd look right there on my calendar, on my phone.

Les Parrott: So an unscheduled person would kind of look up to the right a little bit with their eyes and go 1:30 next Thursday. Yeah, that feels good. Let's do that. Right. They wouldn't consult anything necessarily. All right. So that's the difference. So as you're listening to me, self-diagnose schedule or unschedule. And then think of are you this is the second continuum. And are you present oriented or future oriented? In other words, do you get energy out of the here and now and what's happening in this moment? Or do you get energized by what's around the corner and what you have planned and what's coming up? Which one gives you more energy? The present or the future.

Henry Kaestner: I'm embarrassed to tell you that it's the future. I don't think that's the way to live. But that's been my my course.

Rusty Rueff: Me, too. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Live in the future. Missed the present too many times.

Les Parrott: So nearly every entrepreneur is okay. And by the way, I don't know which one of you said. I know it's not the right way to live, but unfortunately, the way that if I was in front of you, I would give you what I call a guilt free drop. Quit saying that to yourself. It's not the right way to live. That's how God made you. God hardwired you for the future. That's a gift that you bring into your marriage. And in every other relationship, one is not right or wrong. It's just how things are. All right, so most of you said I'm scheduled and I'm future oriented. So that puts you into a category that is also my category. No big surprise here. We entrepreneurs, we stick together and we're planners. We love a plan. Let's dream about the future, but let's get concrete and let's get scheduled and let's implement plan. It's going to succeed. Now, if you're just the opposite of that, maybe you're married to somebody who is more subjective. They're unscheduled, like my wife Leslie, and they're present oriented, like my wife. Leslie Well, they're what we call, in their case, an accommodate or not a planner, but an accommodate accommodating. In other words, they accommodate time. They might have something that they're supposed to do. But, hey, it's a really sunny day in Seattle. Let's forget that and go to the park. It's a great park right now. If you're a planner, you go, No, no, we got to stick with the schedule. Right? And Leslie, I'll say sometimes. We joke about this because she drinks so much coffee at Starbucks and she'll go, Hey, we've got a few minutes. Let's go down to Starbucks. And I'll say, We don't have time to say it's just 5 minutes from here. I'll say, Well, sir, 5 minutes is 20 minutes. She said, it feels like 5 minutes. Well, I don't care what it feels like. It's 20 minute walk down there. And so that's the difference between a accomodator and a planner. If you're present oriented and still scheduled, you're what we call a processor. And a processor is a person that I often liken it to like a help line or something that we used to have those for computers and stuff, and they'd call in and say, Hey, I can't get this thing to happen, okay? And it just they're so invested, they're so fully present. And then the clock reaches a certain point and it's like having lunch with a friend and they're like, Oh, hey, it's 1:00. Boom. It's like they don't know you anymore. They're onto the next thing, they're processor. And then the last quadrant is the person that's unscheduled and future on it. And they're dreamers. And so as entrepreneurs, if you're not a planner, you will tend to be a dreamer. And unfortunately, those are the entrepreneurs that typically are not as productive as the planners because they're always casting a vision. And so they really need people on their team that can make those visions come true, that can get concrete in that. But that was that little I've skated over that pretty quickly here to give you insight into these four tiny styles, but that was the game changer for us. And so we have a full chapter built on that in this book, Your time starved marriage. And by the way, people can go to a lesson Leslie dot com to find this book in his or her workbook set as well. But that little insight of your time style was such a gift to our own relationship. There's a school of thought in psychology that says awareness is curative. In other words, once you're aware of something, then you can do something about it. And that's what this did for us. It was just like looking in the mirror and it's like, Oh, I never saw it that way before. And I always used to get frustrated with Leslie because she wasn't more scheduled. Well, she's a gift to this relationship of our marriage because she's not scheduled. Right? She has something. And as iron sharpens iron, as Proverbs says, we help each other to become more whole and healthy. And so anyway, does that make sense?

Rusty Rueff: Totally makes a lot of sense. And, you know, we'll link something to the book on our site so our listeners can go back and get that. I think knowing where you are in that quadrant many years ago someone said to me that especially in our marriages and our relationships, it's the commonalities, the common that brings us together. It's the differences that keep it interesting. And I think what you've given there in those four quadrants is we need to know where we are. We need to know where our spouses so that we can see the differences and the commonalities. And I'm going to make sure that I, I start to practice a better one minute I'll have to tell my wife that you recommended it, because if I just come in tomorrow and do that, she's going to go, okay, what have you done? What are you going to go for?

Les Parrott: Right. So what do you set me up for.

Les Parrott: Yeah, exactly. It's got to become a habit, right? It's a routine. We often talk about carving a new groove into a relationship. We tell newlyweds, you know, choose your reps carefully because you're going to be in them for a long time. Right? But this is a way to carve a new groove into your relationship, no matter how long you've been married. But I love that little equipment, you see, because it is those commonalities that bring us together as the differences that make it interesting. But it's also those differences that can drive us apart, of course, and that's why it comes back to intention. Once you are aware, then you get intentional by doing things like practicing the single minute that matters most in your marriage and those kinds of things.

Rusty Rueff: How do you keep from work becoming all consuming, almost like becoming nothing that could distract you away from the other things, whether it be family or God or other friends? Where do you build your guardrails?

Ben: Yeah, well, I can say there's been a lot of intention in Liz and I's life from really the beginning to make sure that we built those guardrails. So when we really launched Go as a couple being both us full time. So Liz had been working on it for about a year and a half, and I had been working full time in Kansas City and we got to a point where we were like, okay, it's not sustainable for us to not do this together. Let's do it. We went on a six month road trip around the US to essentially launch the company, and we were selling into retailers at that point. So we packed up our car. We went city to city. We slept in our cars, slept in people's homes that just we met that day or that week or that our friends introduced us to. And part of that trip was finding the city that we wanted to live in, post the trip. And one of the key things for us was what is a city and what's a place that we feel like will help us have a thriving life outside of work. And we're sitting in Portland, Oregon today because we really felt like one of the key things here was it felt like there was one a community of people that were pursuing the Lord that we were really excited by. They invited us into their lives when we came. We were here for a couple of weeks. They opened their home to us. They invited us to gatherings. They kind of talked about other things that they were doing in the city or around the world, and we were just really intrigued by being in an intentional community of people. And then too, and I think this is something that's been deeply important for Liz and I is we're surrounded by things that speak to our life that aren't work. So for me, it's the mountains, it's the ocean, it's being outdoors. And I think for us, having really quick excuses to not be working, we would default towards work. I think if we were in a city that didn't have easier access to things that we wanted that we were also passionate about. So it's been really like, I think from almost like day one of us working together. We were intentional about finding a space, an environment that would enable that.

Liz: We also have a rule that if we are outside of office hours and one of us has a workshop which both of us do all of the time, it's just kind of how we're wired and to change that feels like going against nature in a way that would be exhausting. And so instead we kind of have this practice of if I have a workshop and it is outside of office hours, I have to ask permission to talk about that before I just start laying out this idea or the thought or this problem that I have. And the other person always, always, always has the opportunity to say, not right now. So I would say, Hey, then I have a workshop, can I share it with you? And he gets to decide, Am I in a place emotionally like where I want to get into that? Does it feel like a good use of our time right now? And then we definitely have places where we just don't. When we go out on dates, it's like a general rule. We don't talk about business. If we're doing anything that feels like it's kind of more marriage focused when we're laying in bed at night and falling asleep like so we have these kind of rules of places and spaces within our home and within our relationship where we do try to protect.

Ben: And it's so easy to cheat on that because we both love the work that we write. It's creative, it's fun, it's energetic, but you really do have to honor that space. I would say the third thing that we've done is make sure that we have relationships in our life that are outside of our entrepreneurial circles. And in some ways we kind of wish that we were maybe more embedded into a group of entrepreneurs, But we're going to have an intentional community that we live in, in Portland, where we bought basically three or four houses that are all touch each other and we all bought houses at the same time with our friends. And none of those friends are entrepreneurs.

Liz: No, they're all like, have the most stable jobs and don't have no interest in fashion on social media. So on the one hand it's like these people, they just don't care. They care about what we're doing because they care about us. But like the metrics and the growth and all of these things that it's so easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in said, This is where my value comes from. We have this incredibly grounding community that's like, What's that? You know.

Rusty Rueff: I'm not going to let you get off the hook and go, Hey, Ben and Liz got the perfect marriage. You know, they always agree on everything. What do you do when you disagree?

Liz: We are over communicators, I think to a fault in the sense when we disagree, I think our saving grace and let's be very honest, like our marriage is not the weight of conflict. And I think we have more opportunity in a 12 hour workday. There's so much we get up against. We have so many things we can disagree on. There's so much I mean, running a company, all of your worst parts get exposed, right? Your insecurity, your ego, your pride. Your shortsightedness, whatever it is. And when we dip into those kind of shadow sides of ourselves because we work together, oftentimes that affects our partners, our partner, in a really difficult way. So I would say we're just relentless about reconciliation and relentless about not feeling feelings that don't get communicated and put out onto the table and that we just normal life doesn't really continue until we've reconciled. And we've gotten better at it over the years. But there's still conflict. But it's like, Oh, I wish that should have taken 5 minutes to resolve and here we are 3 hours into it like it's 11:00 at night and we both want to go to bed. But I think that that would be the biggest thing. And then touching the end point, I think for us as a community, it's having people, men and women, we meet separately. We're fit literally every single week. We're so committed to these friendships. And a big part of what we both talk about is our marriages and having no secrets and kind of having a place where when we are struggling, we have kind of these grounding sounding boards that we get to be honest with and they get to kind of speak and reflect truth back to us. So we don't start to kind of believe the stories that we're making up about one another or hugely important things in our marriage.

Ben: Yeah, it's interesting. I would say one of the things that we've learned and this is through lots of iterations, is this commitment to reconciliation sometimes doesn't get to happen. And I'm kind of speaking specifically as an entrepreneur and as someone who runs their company with their wife is sometimes that doesn't get to happen in the moment. I can think back to our road trip, and I swear, Liz and I, we drive to a new city, we drive over to someone's house. That night, we're going to go share the story of how we started our company. And so now it's like right before we're getting ready to walk into this event with 50 people, some bikers, for something that we are not in agreement on. And you have to walk into a meeting and you have to know that like, hey, part of the reason that they're there is they want to hear the story of the two of you and they want to hear it. How what is it like to run a company together? And I think for Liz and I, learning how to balance that as an entrepreneur, that you don't you don't get there's not necessarily a perfect time, but it's the next closest time has been something that we've had to build in to our life. And I'd like to say that that never happens. But truly, like we've just had to learn through iteration that it's like we're there's a deep, deep commitment to reconciliation. But knowing sometimes, like, man, I have to walk in and I have to go pitch a room in that I don't feel great about that, but I know that I have to do it. And we've worked to that over and over again. But again, knowing that one another that we deeply love and care for each other and that we're deeply committed to reconciling that kind of muscle gets built up over time.

Rusty Rueff: I think that's fantastic for our entrepreneurs who are listening, who have co-founders. They should be taking notes. And not that we're not saying that they should get married, but we're saying they should do this right. This idea of reconciliation and over communicating and a lot of the principles that you've adopted are not dissimilar to the same challenges that co-founders have. They just don't have to have the same last name or cohabitate, you know, So what's really great?

Henry Kaestner: So you've been married over the last six years and the entrepreneur journey is hard, man. I mean, it's a huge risk you end up co-creating with her. She's involved in leadership maintenance for moms. The entreprenurial journey is not easy. What counsel would you give to a younger version of yourself or a new entrepreneur starting out about being a good husband through this next five or six years of their life?

Speaker 1: When I started on the journey of Shop Maggie, I was very, very intentional because a lot of wise counsel and a lot of people I trusted and admired and respected advise me to do this. So I would do the same. I stopped. I stopped and I said anything I want. I desire your alignment and your blessing for me to do this. I want to be on the same page that I'm going to give up the luxury of my job, take on all this risk, and navigate these waters together. I learned to do it together. So what do you think? Are you okay with this? Do you support it? She said, Let me think about it. So she took a couple of months. 2 to 3 months maybe. I don't remember. Wow. And it was like day. She took a lot because she wanted to be super prayerful because, you know, I was very honest with her on what this would mean and the different ways that this could go sour, because I had seen it before. So I was sober, too, that one day she pulled me aside and she said, I've been praying and I'm all in like, I'm in. Let's go. And that was my green light. That's when I really, like, went after it and knew I'm not turning back. Right? So it was like percolating and developing and I was kind of starting to look into it. And one other tidbit I wanted to add to that I would recommend entrepreneurs for sure do, which has paid off tenfold for me. I had one of my mentors say, Hey, look, you're an entrepreneur. I was like, Yes, of course I'm ready. Let's go. He's like, How many ideas have you shared with your wife in the last six months? I'm like, probably like seven. And he's like, okay, so let me guess if you share another idea with her, she's kind of like, There he is again. I'm like, Yeah, how did you know that? He's like, Look, here's what I recommend you do. Don't share your idea. If you have one, sit on it for a year, 12 months, Just don't speak about it, journal about it, look into it, but don't share it. If you can sit on it for 12 months and it's still burning a hole in your mind and you really know you want to go after this, take her out to dinner and tell her what you want to do. So I waited ten months. I couldn't wait twelve months. I waited ten months and someone was burning a hole in my mind. She hadn't heard a single idea. She hadn't heard about Shop Monkey. And we were in Big Sur. And I took her out to dinner and I said, Hey, looks like I've been sitting on this for ten months before I even said what it was. It just had a different gravity to it already. Like, Well, you're serious about what you're about to say, aren't you? And I was like, Absolutely. Look at ten months. Here's what I want to do. Here's what I'm thinking. And that kicked off her season of prayer before we both went all in on the business. So I would recommend not sharing your ideas for a long period of time with your spouse, especially if you've watered them down with previous ideas. To sit on an idea for a long season, more than six months, and to have your spouse's blessing. We have not had a single serious conflict about Shop Monkey today, about my time investment. And now look, I know how to set different boundaries and things like that, but it has been conflict free and it's been humungous for my peace of mind and our marriage to do that. So that's what I would leave. But wow, that's countercultural.

Henry Kaestner: Waiting that long for an entrepreneur is that's completely different. But you do get a sense that God's timing can be different than our own timing, especially in this area that we live in, in Silicon Valley, where it's just it's like you do it yesterday. So that's something to think and pray about.

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