1998. All get-out has broken loose. Charlie, my entrepreneur husband, has been involved in four ventures over the last couple of years - all with varying results: one flop, one hanging in there, one too-new-to-tell and one which looks like it has some legs. This is not a bad track record considering typical success rates with new businesses.
According to Fisher and Reuber (Statistics Canada, 2010), about 50% of businesses make it to the 5-year mark and according to research conducted by Bradley University and University of Tennessee (reported by Statistics Brain, 2014), by year 10, the failure rate is over 70%. So you see, Charlie’s approach was actually a great strategy on his part. The best entrepreneurs I know keep many irons in the fire, never just one. It’s a strategic way to beat the odds, which, they know are always stacked against them.
In the meantime, I am juggling three children: my 3-year-old toddler, my 2-year-old baby, and my recently-born PhD candidacy in the field of New Product Development at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University. School runs from 9-5. This is followed by the 5-9 shift at home which begins with the ‘nanny pass-off play’; a smoothly executed shunt of both kids into my arms, as I take on the evening shift.
With Scott still in my arms, I would quickly reach for a wine glass. While I had just spent my day working on my PhD (which took 9 years to complete), my real work only started when I got home each night. I had to find time to whip up dinner, try to study a bit while attempting to feed and bathe the kids, find clean pj’s (on good nights), briefly wish Charlie could come home from work earlier and then fall into bed. While Scott was still very dependent, Haley was thankfully pretty self-reliant for a 3-year old. She was my number one helper, diaper-finder, sous-chef and wine-bottle-getter; not necessarily in that order. In a world of disorganization and chaos, she helped bring a little order to my life; something I was craving desperately.
I was always the type to plan vacations a year in advance, while Charlie would pack his bags on a whim and go online for the best deal before heading to the airport. These two vastly divergent personality styles have probably been the greatest source of frustration between us over the years. It has also been incredibly important to keeping our business successfully on track though and I believe we make a good team because of it: one constantly pushing out in new directions and the other carefully organizing the clean-up crew. Or, as I told an MBA class at a speech at McGill – Charlie is the gas and I’m the brakes.
And so, with all of the demands of Charlie’s entrepreneurial life, my PhD and related teaching and research became a safe haven for me; it became a counter-lever against the natural tendency of all of the household and secretarial tasks falling in my lap. I used to jokingly say TGIM (Thank God it’s Monday) because it meant I could go to school and turn all of the entrepreneurial reality off for a little while; in other words, I could put the voice mail on at home and not have to deal with everything and everyone on the spot all the time. It also helped to ease the constant state of worry which was the natural outcome of being married to an entrepreneur. The long-run upside also meant that eventually we would be able to rely on a stable source of low-risk income.
My intuition was also telling me that Charlie’s business involvements at the time were about to run their course and the natural entrepreneurial cycle was about to kick start again – I didn’t know exactly when or how this would happen; but, I was doing whatever I could do to feather the nest and prepare for this next birth.
