In this #AskEvan episode, Evan Carmichael answers a viewer’s question about navigating a business partnership with a spouse. He explains that most partnerships consist of an "optimist" (aggressive, growth‑focused) and a "worrier" (risk‑averse, conservative). He advises first understanding the partner’s perspective through careful listening, then testing big ideas on a very small, low‑cost scale. By running minimal‑budget experiments, couples can see what works before committing resources. Evan shares his own experience helping his wife’s business, using successful experiments from his own ventures as case studies to build trust. He emphasizes iterating: scale the experiments that succeed, shut down those that fail, and use proven examples to convince a hesitant partner. The video ends with a call for viewers to comment and engage.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my YouTube and Facebook viewers, Cozy Blankets, who is in a partnership with her business with her husband and is finding that they disagree on how to grow the business and wanted my advice on how to work out partnerships. So with my experience, right now I'm the only owner in EvanCarmichael.com. In my previous businesses, I've had partners, and my wife also owns her own business, and I'm almost a partner in that business in terms of giving advice and trying to help her out with her company as well. It's especially hard when you're married to your partner because there's a whole other set of issues that, you know, come in beyond just the business part of it. But usually what I found in any kind of partnership situation, if you're married or not, is you have one person who's a little bit more, you know, aggressive and wants to grow and has riskier ideas, and the other person is a little bit more play it safe, risk-averse, conservative, doesn't want to try as many new things, or is worried about the downside. So you have the worrier and the optimist. It's typically how it works out with a lot of different partnerships. So I don't know which one you are, if you're the worrier, if you're the optimist, but what you need to do, in my experience in working with partnerships, first is understand the other person. You got to sit down, understand where they're coming from, you know, try to explain your part, listen to to what they're saying, you know, really carefully. Try to get a really firm grasp of why they're concerned with what you want to do versus what they want to do. And then the next thing I would do is try to start it on a small scale. So whatever big idea you have that you want to go after, start small. Start it on a really small scale, something that you can see if it works. You commit really minimal time and budget to it, especially the money side. Usually that's what's more of the concern than the time. We're going to spend all this money on something that's not going to work out. So try to get it started without spending a lot of money or without spending any money. Just your time, and see if you can build a little bit of momentum. I know with my wife's business, I encourage her to do a whole bunch of stuff, and we slowly get into things. She's definitely the more conservative person, and I'm the more, "Let's try something out." And I'll try a whole bunch of stuff with my business, and we'll have a whole bunch of failures, and then the ones that really work, I'll give to her and say, "Hey, this worked for me. You should go and try it, and it can hopefully work for you." And again, you start on a small scale and then build it up. So that's the best strategy that I would give you is start small, find a way to make it work, find a way to make it start generating some attention and start generating some revenue and build it up from there. The other thing that can help is if you show case studies. So if you show other companies that have done it before, if you know you see me giving advice that's worked for me, you can say, "Oh, it worked for Evan, so let's give it a shot." Or whoever else you look up to, if it's a famous entrepreneur or something else you've read online, Show that it's worked for somebody else, and it's a lot easier to kind of convince them to want to take that first step. But again, step 1, the small step, launch it. You know, it might fail. We launch a ton of different things on EvanCarmichael.com, and most of them don't go anywhere. It's a whole bunch of small tests, and then you see the ones that are working, and you start to expand those. And the ones that don't work, then you shut them down and move on to new things. So you want to encourage trying out new things. As long as it's not so risky that it could sink your company because you're spending a lot of money on it or all of your time on it. I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I love seeing those thumbs in. Makes me wanna make more of these videos for you guys. And I'd love to hear how you're working with your partner. If you wanna leave a comment under the video or if you have anything else to share, please leave a comment below and we'll see you on the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]
