Partnerships

My husband and I have a very successful partnership. I mean that in every sense of the word, because not only are we happily married, but we are also co-owners and operators of a small Bed & Breakfast with four guest rooms.

We have very definite roles in this relationship. He is the creative genius and I am the worker bee. He is the big picture guy and I am the detail gal. Needless to say, there is a certain amount of delegation involved, mostly from Mr. Idea to Ms. Detail. But he usually delegates to me in a very respectful way, and makes sure to periodically mention how much he appreciates my work.

The day to day details of our business do, for the most part, fall into either HIS job or MY job. The tricky part comes with the gray areas – things that we both know how to do that need doing quickly while the other person is away. But we have worked hard to see that there can be more than one “right” way to do each task, and the other’s way should be accepted and respected.

Stu has years of experience in real estate and property management. For that reason, I tend NOT to get involved in communications with companies that he has contacted in order to get something done, such as repairs or improvements. Stu has this tendency to make a bunch of phone calls, leave a bunch of messages, and then go somewhere else because he can’t sit still when there is work to be done. If he tells me what questions to ask the company, unless they are simple and written down, I will usually miss something he considers obvious. Therefore, I usually just indicate that he’s not available and take a call back message.

The above situation has caused occasional frustration for us both, since he hates playing “telephone tag” (don’t we all?). On the other hand, I dislike having a person call and catch me off guard, me asking them the question(s) I was told to ask, and then having them ask me some follow up question about which I don’t have a clue. This is more like the children’s game of “telephone” with the tin cans and the string. I don’t make a particularly conductive “string” when it comes to property management issues.

The good news is that we have learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and each other’s wishes, by trial and error. Rather than trying to change me into more of a big picture/dreamer type, he accepts that I need clear instructions to follow and will do so well. He also knows that I will use my own judgment when necessary, which may or may not (usually not) be the same decision he would have made, and he can respect that.

The point here is that both he and I have made accommodations and adjustments of various sorts in order to do our well-choreographed “dance” together that makes this business run smoothly. Along the way, we have always tried to respect each other and treat each other with kindness, even during periods of stress or disagreement.

We also know that we each have our “deal breakers” in working together. One that we share is “Do What You Say You Will”. There are way too many people in this world who cannot be counted on to follow through on their word. He and I try to always honor our commitments to each other and to other people.

For example, I applied for a job a few months ago as a front desk person at another hospitality related establishment in this area. The woman with whom I interviewed was very pleasant and I felt we established a good rapport. I was very excited about the opportunity to go to work for them, and she seemed interested in me as well. I asked when the decision would be made and whether she would call either way, or should I call at a certain point to learn their decision. She insisted that she would call every interviewee either way, and that I should expect a call possibly the following night, but certainly within the next two days. It has now been nearly two months - and no call. For that reason, I do not feel compelled to recommend or even speak highly of their establishment to potential guests who, for whatever reason, cannot stay with us. That’s their loss, in my mind. There is another hotel just over a mile away from us that gets lots of our referral business, and we have received a fair amount from them as well. It’s a good partnership.

Another situation that didn’t work for me involved another creative person who wanted to tap into my more organized side. Had this person taken just a little more care to respect my basic needs, we would still be partners. If you tell me you will be somewhere at a certain time and for whatever reason are not there, all I require later is a sincere “I’m Sorry”. I do have certain “baggage” from my past related to men who never called when they said they would, or who actually stood me up on a planned date. Most people don’t mean to leave you hanging and have no idea that it actually causes some of us (ME) extreme anxiety and nightmares about the past.

But let’s face it. A successful partnership is rare. All of us have our areas of blindness to others’ needs and “deal breakers”. We have all lost at least one friend or business contact due to something similar. It’s not always easy to read someone’s mind and know what his or her basic needs are. The best policy when working with a partner, a customer, or a spouse, is to watch, listen and learn. Those are the keys to a good partnership.

My Recession-Induced Reality

I started my professional career as a mainframe computer programmer at one of AT&T’s “Baby Bell” telephone companies, in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 1, 1981. Fresh out of college, armed with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Missouri at Rolla, I barely knew what to expect at the time. I did know that I was getting a good job with a good company, known for its employee training and benefits. But like most 22-year-olds, I didn’t think too much further down the road than that.

I progressed through the ranks at “The Phone Company” (as it was called then) at a slightly faster-than-average rate, making supervisor at about the five year mark. That was my first real taste of what I will refer to as corporate politics. It was all about communicating “their” way, dressing for success, making the right personal connections, attending networking events, and the like. While I knew the rules and was able to play the game, it always felt to me like I was playing a role, reciting from a script.

At about the eight-and-one-half year mark, I did something that was nearly unheard of at the time: I resigned from “The Phone Company”, having accepted a job elsewhere for less pay. The shock waves that reverberated around my resignation made enough of a distraction that my coworkers just assumed I was getting a raise to leave; the truth was that I just needed a change. Working for that company, for me, was like being a rebel child in a big family where I never felt I really belonged but was merely tolerated.

Every company, regardless of size, has its own culture and rules requiring some degree of conformity. Without reviewing my entire employment chronology, let’s just say that I realized at some point I wasn’t good at conforming. I could do it; I could do the work and get the glowing performance reviews, but I always felt like I was acting.

At some point I realized that I wanted to do something “real” for a living rather than sit at a desk and develop code for big computers to use to process lots of data quickly. Much as I enjoyed programming, what I really enjoyed was making things better and helping people. But in the 1980s and 1990s, it would have been hard to get paid as well as a programmer doing something more “real”, and I was reluctant to forgo the security I had.

During 2001 and 2002, in the aftermath of Year 2000 (“Y2K”) and the shock of our country going to war, unemployment first reared its ugly head in my reality. As I had done several times before that, I resigned from a job in March of 2001 without having another job secured. I had gotten to the point with that particular job where I couldn’t take any more of the stress and the culture; I was also desperate for some time off.

In the past, I had no problem quickly finding employment when I was ready to do so; this was no longer the case. It was scary, but after several short contract jobs, I did at last find a company that wanted to keep me, where I felt a greater degree of “fitting in” than at any prior job. I was securely and happily employed for about five years.

During this period, I barely noticed that jobs were becoming scarce for people like myself who were willing to do the less glamorous “system maintenance” jobs on mainframe computers. Companies were replacing their mainframes with entirely different configurations of networks and personal computers, and I was becoming obsolete.

My employers had not yet seriously considered outsourcing to other countries and I wasn’t worried about it. It now seems odd to me that I could attend department meetings where the department manager presented a slide show from his recent trip to India and still not realize (or believe) that my job was in danger.

September 10, 2007 should have been a day like any other day. But it was different for a number of reasons. First, I was out of the country, on a wonderful vacation with my husband at one of our favorite all-inclusive resorts in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. Second, it was actually (and ironically) the six year anniversary of my first interview with the lady who was to become my current boss. And third, and most important, notice was being served to most of my coworkers that their jobs were being eliminated – outsourced to India. Yes, mine too.

I wasn’t going to find that out for two more days. It would actually have been three more days – the first morning I went back to the office – had I not seen some strange things in my work email on arrival home, and phoned around the office until a coworker finally answered the phone. I was able to get enough information from her that I wasn’t blindsided the next morning with the official notification. Exhausted following a sleepless night, perhaps, but not blindsided.

I was one of the lucky few who was offered extended employment, until February 1, 2008, to train my replacements. I was also offered (and declined) the opportunity to hire on with the Indian consulting firm that was taking over the work. As it turned out, had I hired on for the longer term, our family finances would have kept us comfortable, but my own sanity would have seriously suffered.

The majority of 2008 and 2009 were spent desperately hunting for a similar full time job: something in computers, if not mainframe. I impressed enough people with my skills and intelligence to get a few interviews and two actual jobs, neither of which lasted. I also devoted 13 fifty-plus hour weeks of my life and a great deal of our money to get retrained in a variety of newer and more marketable technologies.

After the training and quickly getting hired, only to be FIRED after 8 weeks, for the first time in my life, I lost my desire to continue hitting my head against the brick wall of the St. Louis MO Information Technology job market. I still wanted to do something more “real”, deep down. So I was willing at last to consider my husband’s desire for us to buy and run a business together, forsaking forever the 40-hour work week and the regular paycheck with benefits, and also forsaking the corporate phoniness, the daily commute, the “dress for success” and everything else I didn’t consider “real”.

There is a whole other long story about how my husband and I wound up as owners of a small Bed & Breakfast in a small town in Central Florida, but let’s instead fast forward to the present day: October 5, 2010.

My life these days is, to a large degree, about as wonderful as it could possibly be. We have succeeded in winning a handful of regular guests who have booked subsequent stays with us. We are meeting people we enjoy networking through the local Chamber of Commerce and playing shuffleboard with a Seniors’ club less than two blocks from our home.

I am singing with a ladies’ Sweet Adelines chorus again, although a much smaller and less award-winning one than the one I left in St. Louis – but also a lot less pressure and a lot less expense involved. And most recently, I have become an on-air personality and writer/editor/researcher for a new AM radio station in town – something I loved doing in college and have dreamed about since.

In order to be “real” in this narrative, I must also share some of the not-so-lovely aspects of our current life, as follows.

• The work days are very physical – lots of cleaning, housework, yard work – as well as easily interrupted, since we need to stop for any telephone inquiries or drop-in visitors wanting a tour of our place.

• The hours can be very long – we have done check-ins as late as 3 a.m. (although we try to avoid these) and breakfast services as early as 5:30 a.m.

• The list of things we each need to do around here (housekeeping, yard and grounds maintenance, marketing, networking, bookkeeping, research of local attractions and restaurants for guests, and more) never seems to get shorter, and we both wind up working as many hours as we can stand each day.

• The pay, at the moment, is actually non-existent, since in this our first year of owning a fledgling business and building our reputation, we still do not have guest income to meet expenses for the business. We are currently living on what we had intended to be our “retirement savings” and are scrambling for odd jobs to provide whatever income we can attract outside the business itself.

• Our “health insurance” is neither affordable nor useful – it’s what they call “catastrophic only” coverage, meaning everything is out of pocket unless an accident or hospitalization occurs. We opted to go this route after learning that every health issue either of us has ever had would be excluded as “pre-existing conditions” and the cost would be about 50% higher to cover almost nothing.

Despite the financial worries, we work very hard to keep our spirits up – and living in Florida, with its beautiful weather and flora and fauna year round, certainly helps us do so. It’s now getting back to that time of year when the northerners are shivering and our friends back in St. Louis are starting to worry about driving in snow and ice, not to mention scraping windshields and shoveling driveways and walks. We also have renewed hopes for more guest reservations as the “snowbirds” return south for the winter. We have more friends and social life here than we ever had back in St. Louis, and we’re not sure whether this is a consequence of our living in a small town or being surrounded by retirees with time and energy to socialize, or something else. Technically, we aren’t yet retirement age ourselves, but when guests are sparse and our spirits lag, we do try to take time to enjoy the many wonderful things in this area.

We also pray a lot more than we ever did in the old full time paycheck days. While many of our prayers are for financial security, avoidance of disasters and our own continued good health, surprisingly we also find ourselves giving thanks for our wonderful, “real” life. Thank you, God.

It's All About Perspective

There is an old saying “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes”. (I must admit I had to Google “walk a mile in his shoes” to even get something close, and not all the online sources agree on the real original or its origin.) While the original wording of this saying may have been lost in the many paraphrasings and translations, the sentiment is still true.

The value of anything – a service, an object, a meal in a restaurant – depends heavily on the perspective of the individual experiencing it. This perspective is usually the result of the person’s life experiences and how the particular object or service measures up to or compares against other experiences he or she has had in his or her life.

My perspective on things sometimes varies greatly from that of my husband, who has a very no-nonsense straightforward approach to most issues and problems. I, on the other hand, tend to circle the issue and view it from many angles before reaching a final conclusion. Sometimes I do my verbal circling aloud in his presence, which nearly makes him crazy. Maybe this is a guy thing versus a girl thing, but it’s definitely a difference between this guy and girl. He said to me “Nothing is simple for you, is it?” and I would have to agree the answer is No. I am reminded of the diagram of Man versus Woman where the Woman has dials, rheostats, and switches of many types, and the Man has just one switch labeled “On” and “Off”.

Adding to our differences in perspective is the fact that, unlike other people we know in our age group, we have only been married eleven and a half years. We each had entire lifetimes before getting together, which included many heartbreaks and at least one prior marriage for each of us. (We sometimes refer to this as our “baggage”.) I can’t speak for him, but I tend to envy those of our friends who have been married since very young adulthood and therefore have a rich and lengthy shared history. There is also a difference of ten years in our ages, which normally goes totally unnoticed until one of us watches a movie or listens to music that we remember fondly from our youth. The 50s, 60s and 70s are very different decades.

My husband and I own and operate a business together which is all about customer service. To serve each customer in the best way, you have to have a basic understanding of each customer. Some of that understanding comes from observation, some from direct questions and the resulting answers, and some from just a “gut feel”. We have had customers use our business who primarily wanted to be left alone. We have had other customers who desired a high degree of human interaction with us. And we have had every variation in between these two. The trick is understanding approximately what any given customer desires in order to give them a positive service experience. Sometimes it seems a delicate balance between providing the best service possible and “hovering” too much.

We are often asked to recommend local restaurants and attractions to our customers. Having only lived here seven months ourselves, that sometimes presents a challenge. We have made a serious effort to learn about and experience as many of these as possible, but on at least one occasion, the customer’s experience of a local restaurant was quite different than ours. Where we experienced a delightfully casual dining experience with delicious home cooked food, they came back to describe a terrible meal of chicken soup that was greasy and heavy. Sounds like comfort food to me – but then, unlike this couple, we are not millionnaires with our own small airplane accustomed to fine dining. A very different perspective indeed.

A few months ago, in frustration, my husband commented that he found me difficult to work with and wished we hadn’t gone into business together. At the time, I was a little hurt by the comment, but I have come to understand his perspective better in the past few days through my own frustration. One day this week, I was deeply concentrating on something at the computer that was related to our work. He walked into the room and started watching TV, and I was less than courteous to him (I think the specific term for my behavior starts with “B” and ends with “itch”). When we were discussing this later, I told him that it is hard for me to switch between being the coworker and being the wife, since these have such very different requirements. When we were both working for other people in different locations, the time we shared together, while limited in quantity, could be devoted more fully to each other and to non-work issues. We did share with each other our successes, failures, and funny stories from our respective jobs, but when we were home with each other, neither of us was actually AT work.

Owning a business together can be a real challenge for a husband and wife, and I think that’s an understatement. In speaking with other people with similar businesses, it is interesting to note that many, many of these businesses started out being run by a husband and wife, and wound up being run by the now-divorced wife all alone. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Such issues as scope of responsibilities (who does what) and what happens when one person has to be away, and even differences of opinion on how (or when) problems should be solved, can ignite some spirited and occasionally explosive “discussions”. A marital relationship between a man and woman who have good chemistry and shared values between them can also include an intimate knowledge of the others’ inherent strengths and weaknesses. In times of stress caused by business downturns and financial problems in this unstable economy, it can be all too tempting to use this knowledge (mostly of those weaknesses) as fuel for venting or fingerpointing.

In a better economy, both of us would probably still be working for other people, earning nice regular paychecks and having that “Holy Grail” known as employer provided health insurance. Those two things alone would relieve a tremendous amount of stress from our collective shoulders. But that’s not our reality at the moment. Our best options right now are to continue to work to make our business profitable, to seek other income streams, to pray a lot, and to communicate openly, and hopefully kindly, with each other about our very different perspectives. Otherwise, marriage and business are like oil and water.

My Father's Legacy

A friend of mine on Facebook commented today that one of her relatives has collected everything their grandchildren ever wrote in their lives. She was enjoying a trip down memory lane that took her back to the 1970s and a favorite family vacation.

The written word really is that powerful, as any of us who love to read books knows only too well. A great story can transport you into a completely different place and time, distracting you from the mundane details of your own sometimes boring existence.

One of my own great personal treasures consists of written words left to me by my dear father, who died in 1993 and whom I still miss every day of my life. Dad loved to write and did so frequently in a number of formats: letters to friends, letters to businesses, and even articles that were published in a trade newsletter. Dad was a man of great character whose strong opinions and quick wit practically jumped off each page he wrote.

Dad’s primary writing instrument was an old manual typewriter. I can still remember the feel of those keys and the smell of the cloth ribbons it used. It took strong fingers to type on that machine, unlike today’s computer keyboards or even the electric typewriters of the 1970s and 80s. Dad would lovingly sit for hours pounding out his messages on that machine, creating a rhythmic clacking cadence broken only by the ringing of the bell at the end of each line and the subsequent ca-chunk of the carriage return.

When my mother died in 1998, I had to quickly clean out the large old house in which she and my father had lived since the late 1960s. They were too busy with their lives raising children and making a living, and too frugal, to do all the meticulous cleaning and frequent remodeling that keeps a house ready to sell quickly. However, their middle class neighborhood was having a resurgence of popularity that resulted in a quick sale almost immediately after listing, before the family could even hire painters or start the cleanup.

Like many other children of the Great Depression, both my parents saved everything: every greeting card they ever received from their children, parents and other dear ones, every report card and school drawing by any of us kids, every news clipping or photo either of them had ever owned. At least that’s the way it seemed to me while going through two full floors plus basement of rooms with drawers, cabinets and closets stuffed to the brim with boxes of these goodies.

I remember hastily glancing through these paper treasures, trying to make quick decisions with eyes, body and mind tired and grief stricken. Anything that looked like it might be of emotional value or closer examination to me when I had more time was thrown into one of a large collection of those office storage boxes. My boyfriend at the time, shortly thereafter to become my husband, was very supportive of me throughout this whole process. He continued to be patient with me through the ten subsequent years those full cardboard boxes sat in our basement collecting dust as I considered, and procrastinated, going through their contents.

The time finally arrived, thanks to a pending cross country move following months of unemployment for us both, when I was forced to go through all those boxes, examining every item and making decisions about disposition of each one. Our new home was not going to permit us to have storage for a lot of “stuff”, so I took the opportunity to read and savor every item I could before it mostly went directly into the trash.

Within those boxes were stored thousands of pages of my late father’s writing: handwritten notes and postcards, letters typed on the old manual typewriter with lots of crossed-out “corrections”, and every copy of his monthly trade newsletter that he had ever received, most of which contained articles he had written.

I spent hours lost in memories as I read, or at least skimmed, every single piece of his writing contained in those dusty old boxes. Through his written word, I began to know my father in a deeper way than I had ever taken the time to do growing up or even as a young adult. Back then, in my youthful innocence, I just assumed he would always be around to tell me stories or give me advice.

Unlike most of the original copies, his printed trade newsletter articles were in good enough shape that I could scan them into text on the computer, and with some minor editing against the printed original, convert into Word documents that I could save on my computer. I spent hours lovingly scanning and editing each of these articles, ending up with over 300 pages of his writings I could keep, print, reread and share with others who knew and loved Dad.

I learned many things about my father and about myself during that process. Dad loved to write and was good at it. Whether or not I am any good at it would be up to the less partial reader to judge, but I have always enjoyed writing, whether it was published in a school newspaper or just in my own journals.

Lately I feel I have things to say that might be of value to others, or at least must be documented for my own reflection and catharsis. So, Dad’s written legacy to me forces me at last to pick up, on my relatively soft touch keyboard attached to my computer, where he left off in 1993 on his old, worn and beloved manual typewriter. Had he not been taken from this planet by cancer, he would be doing so himself, either on the typewriter or on a newer medium. But in his absence, I now feel compelled to do so, with him looking gently over my shoulder from the other side.

Thanks, Dad. I’ll always love you and miss you. I’ll try to do you proud with my words.