Better Together: Essential Conversations When Business and Personal Partnerships Overlap

Running a farm or agribusiness with your spouse or life partner is like tending to a garden—it takes thoughtful planning, regular maintenance, and lots of care to help it grow.

While you can’t totally avoid conflict, there are important conversations that you can add to your farm business planning that will help you avoid the stress that can arise when business and personal relationships intertwine. As a result, both sides of your relationships can thrive.

The special nature of intertwined partnerships

Working with family, especially a spouse or significant other (SO), offers many benefits for your agricultural business. You already have a strong connection, you trust each other deeply, and you understand each other's strengths and can leverage them for the benefit of the business. Your complementary skills make your business stronger.

However, just as different crops need different care, your business relationship and your personal relationship need distinct attention and boundaries to flourish. Otherwise, when business disagreements arise, they can follow you from the field to the dinner table.

That's why clear and honest conversations about your business partnership are so important.

Essential conversations to have with your partner

These important conversations create mutual understanding and expectations that can help you get through even the toughest situations with respect, honesty, and success.

1. Clarify roles and responsibilities

Just as you wouldn't plant crops without a season plan, you shouldn't run a farm or agribusiness together without a plan that spells out shared goals, roles, and responsibilities. This helps prevent confusion, overlap, and missed tasks that can be critical for farms and other agriculturally-based businesses.

Start by mapping out who will handle different parts of the business. Define things like:

• Who will manage the business’s finances and make purchasing decisions. Set a spending limit for purchases that don’t need approval from both of you.

• Who will oversee daily operations and/or employee relationships. Along with this, determine whether some tasks, like bookkeeping and payroll, should be outsourced.

• How you’ll divide responsibilities for marketing, customer relations, and planning.

Some responsibilities may naturally fall to the partner who has the most interest, skill, and/or experience, but it’s important not to make assumptions about work roles based on your personal knowledge of each other. Listen to what your partner wants to contribute, their concerns, and the areas that they’d like to grow into and have them do the same for you.

2. Set a shared vision of success

It’s important to discuss what success means to each of you. Ideally, you’ll have a shared vision but sometimes, one partner might focus on financial goals, for example, while the other might prioritize work-life balance. Finding agreement is key.

Talk about:

• Shorter-term goals: Envision where you want the farm or business to be in one year, three years, and five years.

• Mid-term goals: Talk about your business a decade from now, including whether your goal is to maintain current operations or to expand.

• Long-term goals and/or exit strategy: If your goal is to pass the business on to your children, it’s important that they be included in that conversation at some point. If that’s their dream, too, then you can work on that goal together. If not, you and your partner should also discuss potential exit strategies down the road, such as an eventual sale.

While this may evolve over time, having a roadmap that you develop together can alleviate a lot of stress when new opportunities arise or difficult decisions need to be made.

3. Manage money matters

Disagreements over money are one of the leading causes of personal and business relationship problems—and for owners who are also personal partners, this point can be particularly difficult. Take time to clarify:

• How you'll split profits and handle losses

• How much each person will invest in time and money

• How you'll keep personal and business finances separate

• Specific spending limits for decisions that don't need both partners' approval

• How you'll handle major purchases or investments

  
  

Simply put, money discussions can be hard—and that’s also why they’re essential.

4. Establish regular business meetings

Set up regular, scheduled business meetings with your partner. This might feel formal, but it's essential for success—just as they would be for any successful business. Try these tips:

• Create a written agenda that includes shared issues, as well as challenges or ideas that you may come to separately.

• Schedule meetings at consistent times (weekly or monthly) and treat them as non-negotiable time to work on the business.

• Focus solely on business matters during these meetings.

• Keep written records or other documentation of important discussions and decisions.

• Review financial reports and upcoming plans together, including important topics like major purchases, improvements, or applying for grants or loans.

Depending on your situation, you may need to include other key employees or family members—just be sure that the time is spent focused on the business.

5. Set boundaries between work and personal time

Balancing personal time with business obligations is essential to avoid burnout and maintain healthy personal relationships. While some discussion of business will inevitably pop up from time to time, partners need to make a concerted effort to set and keep boundaries.

When determining what works best in your relationship, consider:

• When work discussions are off-limits (such as during family meals)

• How you'll protect family time

• Ways to keep business stress from affecting your personal relationship

  
  

Agree that you won’t bring business disagreements to your home life and vice versa. Also, acknowledge that there will be times when one or both of you may not be as present for other family members and friends as you’d like to be—during planting or harvest seasons, for example, farmers don’t have the luxury of putting off work for pleasure.

Ensuring that you, your children, extended family, and friends understand this is key to helping you establish boundaries that work.

What to do when differences arise

Disagreements are unavoidable, but ongoing conflict, hurt feelings, and resentment aren’t. When differences arise, acknowledge your different viewpoints with respect, honesty, and a sincere desire to find a solution together. Depending on the source of the conflict, referring to your plan, shared vision and goals, and roles and responsibilities can help.

If your disagreements go beyond your ability to come to a shared solution, you can seek the help of a trusted advisor, such as a business mentor or consultant. A neutral third party can offer a fresh perspective without escalating the situation further. If it has to do with a financial decision about the business, such as a major purchase or financing, talk to your accountant, who can provide an unbiased, business-based perspective.

Keep the conversation going

If you’re already in business with a personal partner, consider scheduling your first farm business planning meeting this week if you’re not already in this habit. Start by creating a simple agenda and reviewing these key conversations together. If you’re not yet in business together, take advantage of the opportunity to have these essential conversations before you launch.

Just as crops change with the seasons, businesses evolve over time. Be sure to keep these conversations going so that roles, responsibilities, and goals evolve along with you and your partner. Remember, even the strongest partnerships benefit from clear structures and regular care. By clarifying expectations, checking in regularly, and maintaining open communication, you're building a stronger foundation for both your business and personal success.

HVADC can help build shared agribusiness goals

While choosing a lender can provide financial support for your shared goals, when you work with HVADC, you gain much more.

Qualified farms and agribusinesses can participate in HVADC’s innovative Business Technical Assistance (BTA) programs. They include Incubator Without Walls and additional specialized accelerator programs to help with business planning, growth strategies, analysis, marketing, succession planning, and more.

To learn more about these programs and HVADC’s farm and agribusiness loans and grants, contact HVADC today.