ISSUE 11 FEBRUARY 2010

The involved wife

‘I was 20 years old when I married and I didn’t have many expectations about the family business. I was a student physiotherapist and was planning to work in a hospital. I lived in a different world to the business.

The shock came when I found that the business had to come first. I had to cancel many things of my own. But I learnt that I had to do it, I got used to it, and in the end I treated it as a game. I taught my children also to treat it as a game. Then it became pleasant.

I also learnt that to be an entrepreneur is a great adventure. When you have a firm of your own you stick to it, it’s like having a child. Just as you’d want to be spend time with a child, entrepreneurs want to spend time with their business.

It’s your work and your life and it becomes like a second skin. You feel like a fish in water. When a fish is swimming, it feels the water against it and it’s very comfortable. As the wife, I had to learn to swim too.

My husband was always going to people, talking to people and finding out what they needed. It was not like the job I had at the hospital. There we had endless work and sometimes we needed to say ‘enough!’. My husband might spend long hours but there was no guarantee of reward. He had to create the business. It was a cause of great admiration in me.

At the start the business was my husband’s child. Then I adopted that child. Later it became my own child.

Now we are getting older and we are handing on our child to others. I am so grateful to our non- family CEO who is now taking care of this child. He is also mentoring our son and daughter who work in the business. We really appreciate all that he is doing for our family.’

The wife on the outside

‘When we married, my husband was not working in the family business. We had the usual life of earning salaries and we were happy. I thought that we had a shared dream of bringing up our children and enjoying a good life.

Then my father-in-law died suddenly and my husband felt he needed to work full-time in the family business. This meant leaving our home, friends and the children’s schools. Our new house was nice but I felt very alone. Especially as my husband now had to work long and unpredictable hours.

I had never been very close to my in-laws but it hadn’t mattered when I didn’t see much of them. Now they were around a lot more and there was usually some business matter that caused discussion or disagreement. I didn’t know much about business and they didn’t want to involve me. So I felt more excluded than ever.

One day I had arranged a special birthday treat for our daughter but then my husband didn’t bother to come. He claimed that he was too busy at work. This was a very low point as I realised that we no longer had the same dreams. I felt that the business had become another person in our marriage and family. He wanted to spend time with this other person rather than with me and our children. I resented it.

I began to get very negative, thinking back over the past. ‘If only we hadn’t moved here.’ ‘If only we had an ordinary life.’ ‘If only I had married someone without the pressures of the business.’

My husband didn’t want to talk about his work when he was at home. He claimed that work life and home life were quite separate. But it felt like he was hiding part of his life from me, refusing to share it. It was hard for me to feel as close to him as before.

At last I realized that I had to accept the situation or else our marriage would be in big trouble. When we married each other we had promised to stick together whether things were good or bad, whether we were rich or poor, and whether we were healthy or sick. Maybe we should have added: ‘whether we are stressed out and whether we are very short of time together!’ Anyway, I knew that I had to keep my side of the marriage agreement.

We talked about how I could support him and I focused on practical ways that I could show love to him. Sometimes it’s very hard when you don’t feel that you’re getting much back. But I managed to get through the difficult days and then start to enjoy the good days.

I now realize that there’s never a time when my husband can completely switch off from the business. It’s always in his mind. But that’s become part of him and part of our family life. I can’t change it and I’m trying to accept it. I’m trying to do what I can, day by day, to be a wife to the man I promised to be with until the end of my life.’

In this issue

Onvest Oy and Maarit Toivanen-Koivisto
Onvest Oy is a leading family business in Finland.

How families manage risk Taking risks is at the heart of entrepreneurship.

How to build trust during difficult times
Trust is a special form of business capital.

Never waste a good crisis (Part I)
Family leaders came together for a unique "ideas café" at the FBN's 2009 International Summit.