In this week’s episode of Boardrooms and Bedrooms,  I’m chatting with a couple who’ve been doing great things inside our Powerhouse program.

Raf and Dan Newnham run a tile repair service here in sunny Queensland.

But things weren’t quite so sunny when they first reached out to us for help last year.

As you’ll hear in today’s conversation, they were stressed, fighting a lot, and there was a serious lack of trust inside their working relationship.

They also lacked the confidence and direction to pursue the bigger goals they had for their business.

Since joining Powerhouse and working with Ed, that has all turned around in a very short space of time.

When I realised this episode would fall on Valentine’s Day, I almost changed the topic.

Being the day of all things LOVE, a podcast about How To Have a Successful Fight seemed a bit ill-timed.  

But when I thought more deeply, I decided that the BEST thing I could do for you today was to blow the lid off this topic.

You see fighting can suck so much that it makes love taste like lemons!

And I’m not just talking about yelling matches, big bad barneys or steam-out- the-ears blow-ups. Fighting can present as a disagreement, as one person feeling angry, or — my least favourite — no communication at all and a head buried in the sand.

Balance and Growth.

They are the two things that most couples who work together want the most.

The concept to getting it is simple: you need to move out of a Reactive Strategy and into a Proactive one.  You need to set aligned goals and then have a hands-on Battle Plan to make those things happen.

But, more often than not, achieving Balance and Growth feels like pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks.

There are many reasons why couples in business together struggle to create a Proactive Plan that fulfils both their needs and reaches their targets.  

After years of working together and supporting other couples in business, Ed and I know there are three specific challenges that keep dynamic duos from hatching the plan and running it through.

New Year’s resolutions. Who makes them? More importantly, who makes them stick?

A Forbes article I read said studies have shown less than 25 percent of people actually stay committed to their resolutions after just 30 days — and only 8 percent accomplish them.

The article goes on to talk about how resolutions won’t get you anywhere, but goals will.

To be honest, I suspect that the statistics on accomplishing goals are unlikely to be that much better!

Regardless of whether you are talking resolutions or goals for this year,  you are going to come across some challenges. And without the right structure and pathways to make them a reality, you’ll stay stuck instead of landing in the place you want to go.

This month we’re revisiting our three most popular podcasts from 2018 — our first year on the air waves.

Coming in at Number 2 is Let Go To Grow — aka, Stop being a Control Freak.

I’m active in a lot of groups (including the Couples in Business Facebook Group) where couples share the challenges of working with the person they love.

The number one challenge is always Communication. That is, an inability to make important decisions without getting heated; a lack of conversation outside of business, business, business; or just a constant feeling like your other half’s main aim in life is to rub you up the wrong way.

Welcome to our FIRST episode for 2019! I hope wherever this finds you in the world, you’re feeling rested, relaxed and ready to absolutely ramp up your results.

Today’s episode is the second in our two-part training series 'The Together Business Balancer - how to fix your broken business’ - and our FINAL episode for 2018!

It’s been a huge year for Ed and I, our two boys and our businesses.

The Business League — the business we DO together on the Gold Coast, Australia — reached its highest membership numbers ever. And our launch of the Institute for Couples in Business saw us reach hundreds of couples all over the globe through our platforms.

What we continue to see is how necessary this space is for couples to feel like they are not alone and how normal the challenges they are facing are. We are really excited about the transformations that couples are making through PowerHouse meaning 2019 is looking so much brighter for so many.

Last week we gave you the first part of this collaborative piece with Matt Jones from the popular tradie Podcast, The Site Shed.

You can listen to Part 1 here: The Business Balancer: Why It’s Hard

Today’s episode is the first in a special two-part series on the uniqueness of being a couple in business — starting with Why It’s Hard.

It’s a bit different to our usual episodes because someone else is asking the questions! That someone is Matt Jones from popular tradie podcast, The Site Shed.

The audio for this interview is extracted from a full webinar training we did for Matt and the team over at TradieMate Pro, which is a basic business building resource for tradespeople.

We do refer to some drawings and pictures in this conversation, so if you find yourself thinking, ‘I’d really like to watch this’, then drop us a line at [email protected] with the subject ‘Business Balancer’ or ask for it inside the Facebook Group for Couples in Business and we’ll hook you up.

Today’s guests are leadership consultants and newlyweds Dot Yam and Tiffany Baxter, who live in Sydney’s lovely northern beaches.

Married in April after a three-year courtship, Dot and Tiffany are also in business together. They offer motivational seminars and leadership programs teaching people how to know and care for themselves in order to become better leaders.

As many of you will know, navigating marriage and business together can throw up its share of challenges! Particularly when that involves one of you joining what was already the other’s business.

For Dot and Tiffany, that ride has, at times, been wild and the learning steep, but over the past year they’ve discovered the power of embracing both of their skill sets in order to break new ground and evolve what was Dot’s business for the better.

Welcome to today’s Superpower Secret Session where we hack how to create a single focus to get faster results.

All our podcasts are built to deliver a sense of being to you – an awareness that you are not alone in the complicatedness of being a couple in business.  But these particular sessions, with Ed and I, deal with the problems we support others to overcome every day — through the Institute for Couples in Business and the things we’ve learnt to overcome ourselves in the 8+ years we’ve worked together.

On that, if you aren’t a member of our Facebook Group you can join here. This global community will certainly show you that you are NOT alone in your efforts to kill it in business without killing each other.

In this episode, Ed and I share with you the strategy that:

Helped Raf and Dan make go from zero to six figures in one job;

Supported Shelly and Daniel to grow back together, and;

Tripled the business of Ben and Soonah.

Got questions?

Is there a question you have around how to grow your together business, communicate better, or maybe set things up so they are built for a couplepreneur and not a solo? Whatever it is, reach out through email hello@instituteforcouplesinbusiness or via the Couples in Business Facebook Group.  If you’ve got a question about something, there are probably many other people out there with the same question, so please reach out!

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Welcome to today’s Superpower Secret Session where we hack how to create a single focus to get faster results.

All our podcasts are built to deliver a sense of being to you – an awareness that you are not alone in the complicatedness of being a couple in business.  But these particular sessions, with Ed and I, deal with the problems we support others to overcome every day — through the Institute for Couples in Business and the things we’ve learnt to overcome ourselves in the 8+ years we’ve worked together.

On that, if you aren’t a member of our Facebook Group you can join here. This global community will certainly show you that you are NOT alone in your efforts to kill it in business without killing each...