How to Get Your Spouse Onboard! An Entrepreneur’s Best Friend and Worst Enemy!
June 26th, 2008 Filed under: Uncategorized — Small Home Business AuthorYou have always wanted to break free from that job and run the show on your own. You’ve found the best business opportunity in the world and know you will be able to be free from the boss in two to five years of hard, dedicated work. You learn the system, test the marketing approaches, and live, breath, eat, and sleep this grand opportunity. Meanwhile, you are still putting in forty hours a week in at your job. Time is not your greatest commodity right now, that’s for sure.
After a few weeks, you start running into obstacles that you weren’t used to when you were just working a job. The extra three to five hours a day you are putting into your entrepreneurial efforts is taking its toll at home. Even though you are working at home and can see your husband or wife every few minutes, your mind is in your work. An occasional kiss and hug here and there, but something is seriously missing.
You may not notice it right off. Your mind is bending every which way, thinking about becoming free in a few years. Your spouse, meanwhile, is getting very bored. She hasn’t seen you all day and since you got home from work, you are hard at work at home. You spend an hour at dinner catching up on your day at the job, and then disappear into your office to work your entrepreneurial magic.
You start hitting obstacles here and there in the form of distractions. At first they are subtle, but quickly escalate into more and more severe annoyances until you are forced to stop working and have to divert all of your energies and attention to your spouse.
When you work all day and bring home a few thousand dollars a month to help support the family, your spouse noticeably appreciates your work. He or she doesn’t disturb you at work all day because they understand that your work is very important and that the money will stop if you get fired. But when you are an entrepreneur and work from home, especially when you are just starting out, your spouse may not seem as appreciative as they are for you time away at the job. It is a little different for the entrepreneur who doesn’t have a job and relies on the continuous efforts from the home. If you work a job and are an entrepreneur on your off time, that’s when it gets very complicated.
A lot of the distractions for entrepreneurs caused by the spouse at home are from jealousy and loneliness, especially if you also have a job. The distractions start off minor and work their way up to a stopping point of all work. The jealousy and loneliness comes from your lack of attention toward your spouse.
Persistent and dedication is a must when you are an entrepreneur, but there is a line you must draw in your work ethic that will keep you on track as well as keep your spouse happy with your relationship. Learning how to get your spouse onboard your entrepreneurial boat is essential in making everything in your quest for financial-freedom come together. The question is where do you start?
When you have a family involved, you must treat everything as a partnership. What you do, how you do it, when you do it, and why you are doing it are all something the entire family must agree on for the plan for financial freedom to work. The following is a suggested process how to get your spouse onboard the same path as you:
Determine a Family Goal. Sit down and discuss your goals and dreams with your spouse and ensure they totally understand what your passions are and why you want to pursue your dreams. You should definitely include your spouse in your dreams as well as consider all of their dreams and passions when deciding on a family goal. Your family goal must include what you want to accomplish as a family, the financial equivalent to that goal, when you want to accomplish it by in day-month-year format, and what the reward will be for accomplishment.
Identify the Family Plan. Once your Family Goal is established, now you must discuss how to achieve that goal. In order for a family to achieve a goal, the entire family must be involved with the work to get there. When identifying the family plan, figure out who is going to do what to help achieve the family goal. This varies from opportunity to opportunity, so it’s difficult to put jobs to faces. Just be sure to include all functions of whatever the family has to accomplish and who must do those functions in order to become successful. Even if you have children, you must involve them with your plan.
Determine a Schedule. Time is very important in everyone’s lives. When time is randomly utilized throughout the day, that is when the entire family suffers and you are doomed for failure. Time management is one of the most difficult parts of family management. You must sit down with the entire family and determine the best course of action for everyone’s day. And remember, treat the entire timeline as a business. Everyone should be on the same time chart starting from the time the first person wakes up until the last person goes to bed. Fill in everything in between such as breakfast, lunch, dinner, work time, play time, sleep time, family time, and education time. You must manage your days down to the minute for everyone. Once everyone agrees to a schedule, have everyone sign it binding them to that agreement.
Take Action. Now that you have determined a family goal, identified everyone’s key position within the family plan, and determined everyone’s daily schedule, you must take action on this plan to put it all together. Action is simply performing everything that is discussed and planned out as planned.
Follow-up once a week to ensure everything stays on track. Things change throughout the course of the week that affects accomplishment of goals. Each week discuss different sub-goals that are designed as stepping-stones to help you accomplish the family goal. If you have found a new opportunity, call a meeting together and discuss the opportunity before adding it to your overall plan. If something isn’t working out with the time schedule, discuss it and make appropriate adjustments to ensure everyone is happy with the situation.
Don’t let your best friend become your worst enemy. It’s never too late to salvage what you once had before your dreams took over in your life. Learn how to get your spouse onboard with your dreams by making a family plan to include your spouse and children in everything that you do. You and your family will maintain a constant connection and your road to wealth and happiness will be paved with gold.
Jason W. Moser is an entrepreneur from Martin City, Montana. He develops niche businesses and helps other entrepreneurs realize their dreams through his http://www.wealth-building-principles.com and http://www.website-cashflow-generators.com system websites.
