Source: Nancy Landrum, Authority Mag
Embarking on a business venture is challenging, but doing so with your significant other brings a unique set of dynamics. While many couples find great success and fulfillment in this arrangement, they will inevitably encounter unforeseen difficulties that can test both their professional and personal relationships. From communication hurdles to balancing work-life harmony, the journey of couples in business together is filled with both triumphs and trials. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kenny Rosenblatt and Jessica Rovello.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to go into business as a couple?
Jess: We met in 2000 while working together at an early “dot com” company called On2, which was a predecessor to YouTube. Within my first month of starting, Kenny found a reason for us to have a “business lunch” where we talked about zero business. We started dating after that, believing no one at the company knew about our budding romance (ha!). So, from our earliest days, we got to know each other’s business chops while we were developing our relationship.
Kenny: We had both experienced working at well-run companies and knew that On2 probably wouldn’t survive. I had started a small business right out of college, so I was always coming up with business ideas and running them past Jess.
Jess: One night, we were out on a date and talking about growing up around arcades and our favorite video games. When we got home, we tried to find some games to play online to see who was the better Ms. Pac-Man player. When we couldn’t find a website to do that — remember this is 2001 — Arkadium was born.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to both of you since being in business together?
Jess: Well, certainly, the Arkadium news story that was most reported on was having an office of 100 people in Simferopol, Ukraine, the city that Russia first took over in 2014. I mean of all the places to randomly start your business….
Kenny: For me, the most interesting thing is the number of people who have met, married, and started a family while working at Arkadium. We’ve got to have as high a batting average as any company in the world in that department.
Jess: Because we were a married couple running a business, we never discouraged people from dating while working together. Over the past 20 years, we’ve had at least 7 marriages, all of which are still together.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Kenny: I had just signed a contract with a big client that included a clause about needing to do background checks on new employees. That same week we made an offer to a new salesperson who was set to start just a few days later. Following the new contract, we ran a background check (our first) — and it turned out that our new salesperson had open warrants for his arrest for drug and gun charges. Lesson learned? Always do a background check!
Jess: We couldn’t catch a break during our first three years in business. We had nothing going on, we were grasping at straws, and we had very well-capitalized competitors.
We were trying anything we could, up to and including me trying some amateur voodoo to turn our luck around. In a sad attempt to help us, I wrote down the names of some competitors on slips of paper and then froze them in the office ice cube tray (reading someplace that it would slow them down). We were working in a shared office at the time. A few days later a guest of another company went to get ice and got paper stuck in their mouth. I remember hearing them say, “Who would put paper in the ice cube tray?” So I guess the lesson I learned was don’t freeze paper in the ice cube tray because, one, it doesn’t work, and two, you piss off your co-workers.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Jess: For me, it would be Kenny’s mom, Barbara. In 2001, we were agonizing over whether we should quit our jobs to start Arkadium, going back and forth, back and forth. One day, we went to lunch with Kenny’s parents and told them that we were thinking about starting a video game company.
By the end of lunch, Barbara pulled out her checkbook and wrote us a check for $2,500. Just knowing that there was somebody who believed in us and was willing to take a chance on us — when we weren’t even 100% confident in ourselves — was really a big catalyst for us quitting our jobs and starting the business.
Kenny: One of our mentors, Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, comes to mind for me. Early on we were working out of his office when we got our first real lucky break. A company had found us online and reached out to license our poker software. At the time, in the early 2000s, poker was really hot. We didn’t have anything going on as a company, and we were really poor, but we had incredible poker software. We took a deep breath when we finished our proposal for a $25,000 license, knowing it would be more money than we had ever seen.
Before sending it off, we talked to Strauss, who told us that we needed to add a zero to the proposal. We were like, “What? Nobody’s going to license this for $250,000!” But we took his advice, revised the number, and sent out the proposal. Within a week, we had won the deal and, for the first time, had enough money to really put us in business.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Most of our readers — in fact, most people — probably don’t have an idea of what it is like as a couple to be in business together. In just a few words can you explain how being in business with your romantic partner is different from other business partnerships?
Kenny: Having a partner who’s aligned on both life goals and business goals is a secret weapon because when there’s alignment at the top, everything else flows a little easier. Many companies have broken up because the founders lack alignment or their life goals conflict with the needs of the business.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a couple running a business? Can you explain what you mean?
Jess: One myth is that to have a healthy relationship, you can’t talk about work when you’re at home. For us, that’s absolutely not true, and frankly, if we followed that advice, it would be a disaster. We don’t practice work-life balance; we practice work-life harmony. Our personal lives are interlaced with the workday, and our business life is discussed when we’re at home.
Kenny: There is also a myth that you can’t work with your romantic partner.
There are a lot of new (new compared to us) businesses that have husband-and-wife teams that are hugely successful.
It’s really old-school thinking, this idea that if your relationship doesn’t work out, it poses a major risk to the business. Isn’t that the case with any partnership?
I’ve always felt that many people map their own relationship dysfunction on us. They assume our relationship is the same as their relationship with their spouse and say, “Well, I could never run a business with my spouse, so how can you run a business with yours?”
What are the most common mistakes you have seen couples make when they start out in business together? What can be done to avoid those errors?
Kenny: I think it’s a mistake when it’s not an equal partnership. I’ve seen real trouble when one of the partners is “superior” or has more equity than the other.
What are your “Five Things You Wish You Had Known As A Couple Doing Business Together”?
- Growth is everything, so we set personal and professional budgets for ourselves to continue learning throughout our leadership journey. This can be as easy as reading books, attending conferences, or learning new skills to share with one another.
2 Create a routine of weekly 1x1s. Just because you’re married doesn’t mean you are always communicating on everything that’s important. To make it super efficient, we decided to include personal and family items in our 1×1 agenda.
- Establish a format for giving each other feedback. This is tricky because feedback can be tough. Suppose one of you misses a deadline or revenue numbers. How do you plan on giving the other feedback in a way that prioritizes your relationship AND the business? This format must come from a supportive place and be candid and honest.
- Create a morning routine together after handling your personal and family obligations. We start our day with the following 4 questions:
What are you grateful for today?
What are you empowered to accomplish today?
How can I support you today?
What would be a very nice surprise that could happen for you today?
- Shaking things up is healthy if they become routine or stagnant. For example, Kenny ran sales for many years, and I ran product. After Kenny had received a ton of feedback from speaking to many potential clients, we decided to swap responsibilities and have Kenny run product since he was intimately familiar with what the partners wanted.
Jess: I wish we had planned better for our leaves when our three kids were born. As the person who gave birth, the demands on me and the toll it took on my body, were different than what Kenny experienced. As a result, I had to extricate myself much more from the business in the years that I was having babies.
Having an infant is really the most beautiful thing in the world, but it’s also just really physically demanding on both people.
We were such doers, such achievers, and our opinion was that if there were this many billion people in the world in all sorts of circumstances, it was not that big a deal to have a baby. In reality, it was really tough. We should have asked for a lot more help than we did and had better plans for managing that transition.
In your opinion, what are a few ways that couples can ensure they are successful in business with each other? Can you share a story or an example?
Kenny: The best thing we did to get and stay in alignment was to work with an outside coach on a semi-annual basis. The time we spent with our coach always helped us to bring issues to the surface and collaborate on what was most important to us.
Before we started regularly working with a business coach we had a very hard time transitioning from home to the office. During our morning walk to work, for example, we’d jump right into what needed to be fixed that day or what was wrong with the other person’s area of the business. It wasn’t a good time to give each other feedback, and it set us off in an unhealthy direction for the day.
After working with our coach, we came up with a routine that made the day a lot easier. Each morning, we would go through a guided discussion on our walk to work, where we always covered: What are you grateful for? What do you want to accomplish today? Today, you can support me by… Once we started implementing that, we communicated in a much more positive way, and the day just got easier.
You are a couple of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Jess: I’m very passionate about work culture, and I fear that the move to remote and hybrid work is eroding the relationships humans need to thrive. We are social creatures, and we need to be with one another — at least sometimes — to spark creativity and really connect in meaningful ways.
I’m building a work retreat in the Catskills where companies can bring their teams together. It’s a place to relax, be in nature, reconnect, work, and play, and I think it’s going to be what a lot of the future of work looks like.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.