A geologist, Wendi Goldsmith is the founder and CEO of Bioengineering Group in Salem, Massachusetts. Wendi launched her company in 1992, and now has about 70 employees and revenues of $10 million. Its mission is ecosystem restoration and the application of sustainability principles to the operation of large businesses and other entities. Her largest client is the United States Department of Defense. Wendi and her husband have three teen-aged children.
Wendi Goldsmith on the futility of trying to prepare your spouse for the roller-coaster of business; how starting a business can be likened to falling gravely ill; why the spouse should support the entrepreneur’s business as they would a child’s passionate hobby.
Q: You were young when you founded your business.
A: I was 26 and married to my college sweetheart. My starting a business was surprising not only to my friends and family, but to me as well. My first husband was supportive, but not really comfortable with it. He felt like I was too much in the driver’s seat. He had less of the excitement of the dream and more the downside, without the rush. It was tough. I did everything that entrepreneurs do but probably shouldn’t: maxed out the credit cards, took a second mortgage on the house. Sometimes he’d agree to my doing that, then resent it later. It was understandably out of his comfort zone.
Q: In retrospect, would you have done anything differently? Maybe prepared your former husband for what company-founding might entail?
A: There’s not much I could have changed. Entrepreneurs jump in and fake it ‘til they make it, even when we start with a detailed plan. You can’t have a legitimate discussion with yourself—let alone your spouse—about what you are getting into. It’s just words, not a profound understanding. You can’t really predict how it’s going to hit. My ex-husband and I didn’t understand the full implications until we were in the thick of it. It’s like having a child. Even though it’s a universal human experience, you don’t really get how profound that is, and all the ways it changes your life, until you have one of your own. I’m not saying don’t have the conversation; I’m just saying you should both recognize the futility of it.
Q: So how is the spouse supposed to take it all—the risk and insecurity and the entrepreneur’s obsession—in stride?
A: It’s a time when unconditional love should be mustered. Imagine the entrepreneur as someone who has developed a serious illness. The sickness might be a gravely stress-inducing event, and the spouse is going to have some anxiety around that. But in the face of it, he or she will muster love, accommodation, support. That’s the playbook when a loved one has an illness—what we know should be done.
Q: The obvious place where your analogy falls down is that illness is involuntary, and company-hatching is not.
A: I don’t agree. The desire to start a company is very much like having an illness—it’s a bug that burns in you, forces you to create your vision and drive yourself hard. Some people just have to go out and make things happen in their own way. That’s who we are. If you told us to go back to our cubicles and our day jobs we’d be miserable. For the family, sometimes it works well and they reach the pot of gold, but of course that doesn’t always happen. So to the family it can feel like the entrepreneur is selfish, pursuing this ego-driven enterprise that puts the family finances at risk. But again, if someone is in the hospital, you don’t blame them.
Q: This sounds a lot like the old debate about whether alcoholism, or homosexuality, is genetically predisposed, or more a lifestyle choice.
A: I don’t think being an entrepreneur is as voluntary as people think. It’s our nature, and wild horses couldn’t prevent it. There’s a measure of inevitability to it. It would be helpful for the spouses of entrepreneurs to understand that. Maybe another analogy is to think of the entrepreneur as having a passionate hobby. The spouse can either think it’s frivolous, or support it, the way we endlessly encourage children who have a passion. But with our spouses we can get small minded and defensive, instead of being loving and appreciative.
To some extent entrepreneurs are restless souls. We just don’t fit into the confines of a corporate structure. With my second husband, I told him early in our relationship that this is who I am. You can’t expect me to have a different set of priorities. You are not going to change me. Even now, although my company is established, its fortunes rise and fall with the economy. In business the stakes are always high. Since in my company the buck stops with me, I need to keep up that high level of drive. Entrepreneurship is all-consuming, a hot burning fire.
Q: It doesn’t end, does it? In any stage of a business, it’s always a wild ride.
A: The entrepreneur and the spouse need to understand that once they head down that path, it’s almost impossible to step off the treadmill, unless the company fails or is sold. When people create businesses, they don’t understand that closing one down for any reason is as hard as starting one up. You borrow money, you hire employees, you incur costs. Once you start down that road, you lose a lot of choices, because of all the obligations you take on. The business overtakes you, sometimes at the expense of your family members. It’s the child that remains at home. It’s hard to give it the boot.
Q: Tell me about balancing your business with your family.
A: I’m proud of the ways I manage work-life balance, but still, It’s a lose-lose proposition. There aren’t enough hours in the day to do both jobs well. But my business has a mission that my family finds worthy—and that makes all the difference.