Marry well. If your spouse or significant other doesn’t like roller coasters, your life is going to be very, very difficult.
When asked for the top 10 lessons they have learned so far, invariably a member of Tiger 21 says this at our meetings: Marry the right person; it makes all the difference.
“My ultimate success wouldn’t have happened,” recalls one member who left a secure job to start a business funded with a very large personal loan, “if I hadn’t married a woman willing to take a risk. I know so many people who won’t let their husbands or wives take a risk to get ahead.”
Sometimes, the spouses end up working together which allows them to share the challenges together.
Linda and Magid Abraham are a particularly inspiring example. They met through work. Linda was a marketing analyst at Procter & Gamble, and Magid, who had recently earned his PhD from MIT, was working for a consulting firm that Procter & Gamble had hired. As Linda puts it: “Ours is a relationship steeped in very geeky data.”
“We are very complimentary,” she adds. “He is very good at the strategic vision. And I am very good at commercializing.”
More than two decades later, they are still working together. Today it is at Upskill, a platform for wearable software like Google Glass. And they’ve managed to raise four kids along the way.
“Magid’s been my partner at every single step,” says Linda. “A lot of women are faced with the choice of being all in or all out,” she says of the decision to focus on children or continue to pursue an ambitious career. “I was able to do both.”
When the partners don’t work together, and one is an entrepreneur, the other needs to serve as a ballast.
Rick Gornto and his wife Janice, married for 45 years, are a case in point.
“It didn’t start out so well,” Janice confesses. At first, Rick had trouble finding and keeping a job. Then he grabbed an opportunity with an insurance company in a suburb of Houston, moving there while Janice was pregnant with their second child. “It was kind of crazy,” she admits. “It was commission only.”
But Rick quickly proved to be a natural salesman, the commissions increased, and so did his confidence in his business abilities. “Rick was such a go-getter and self-motivator,” marvels Janice, conceding that by nature she was way more cautious and analytical, just the kind of person Rick needed to balance out his attention deficit disorder and impulsive nature. With Janice as his anchor—“I’m always keeping him on track”—Rick soon became a partner in another insurance company in town and eventually founded, and now serves as president of First Financial Benefits where he manages the day-to-day operations of the Houston-based retirement planning consulting firm.
As Rick’s career began to take off, Janice considered returning to school to become a nurse, but she quickly realized Rick’s work was becoming too unpredictable for her to take a regular job. “Someone like Rick, eager to run his own businesses, needs a partner who can turn on a dime,” she explains. “He might call me from work on a Monday and say, ‘We’re going to Hawaii on Friday. There’s this meeting we have to attend. If I had a career, I wouldn’t have been able to do things like that.”
For Janice, sharing a life with an entrepreneur requires one trait, above all: “You have to be flexible.”
As I tried to frame the takeaway here, I was reminded of my own good fortune. My wife of 40 years has also gone along with an ever-changing entrepreneurial life. Katja came from an extremely successful real estate family. If I had lost everything along the way, our kids would never have starved. This allowed me to take risks I might otherwise have thought long and hard about.
When I had to drop everything for a deal or something related to a business I owned, my wife has been, in a thousand ways, more flexible and tolerant than most other wives would be, for which I am forever grateful. (Family emergencies still come first, and so do major life events, most of the time.)
For Rick and me, the model was pretty conventional. Our wives played critical support roles, often doing most of the day-to-day work of raising a family and running a home, a career that can be just as taxing as running any business.
Yet this is only one way of doing things, of course. But here’s a statement that is always true: The right partner—or certainly the wrong one—will inform every stage of your journey.
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