My kids are in the car on the way home from judo right now. I am not in that car. I am sitting at a desk working on Game Over, which is the business I bought eleven months ago, and I am writing this instead of watching my seven year old throw somebody on a mat.
That is the honest opening, and I will come back to it. But first I want to tell you about the part of this story that genuinely surprised me, because I think most men reading this are bracing for the wrong thing entirely.
The conversation I was dreading never happened
I first heard about Game Over from a buddy of mine. He was a minority owner at the time and he still is one now, and his business partner was looking to get out. We were standing around at Trail Life, which is a Christian scouting program my two boys are in along with his son, and it came up the way most real opportunities do, which is sideways, in the middle of something else, while you are supposed to be watching your kids.
I brought it home to Raquel that night.
Here is where the story is supposed to get good. This is the part where I tell you about the tense conversation at the kitchen table, the spreadsheet I had to build to win her over, the three nights of cold silence before she finally came around. Every book written about this has that chapter in it somewhere.
She was excited.
She thought it sounded like a fun business for the family. She was getting ready to retire and it sounded like something she could be part of rather than one more thing that would take me away from her. She did not push back on much of anything. The only thing she said was that we needed to pray about it, and we did.
Then we invited the sellers over to the house, because we did not know them well yet and you should not buy a man’s business without first finding out who he is. I smoked a brisket, which is what I do when I want people to relax, and the kids ran around in the yard, and we spent an evening figuring out whether these were people we wanted to be in a deal with. That is how the whole thing started. No fight, no convincing, no pitch deck for my own wife.
That is not because I married an agreeable woman
I want to be careful here, because the easy read on that story is that I got lucky and married somebody who says yes to things. That is not what happened, and if you walk away with that lesson you are going to get hurt.
Raquel did not say yes because she is agreeable. She said yes because we had already done the work, years of it, on where this family is going. Outside of following Christ, marrying the right woman is the highest leverage decision a man makes, and a large part of what makes her the right woman is that she will tell me no. She has told me no. She has told me no on things I was extremely excited about, and she was right to.
She did not tell me no on this one because it fit inside something we had already agreed on together.
If buying a business takes a big conversation with your wife, you are already late
When somebody asks me what question a man should ask his wife before he buys a business, I want to hand them something clever. Some question nobody else thinks of. The truth is I am not sure I asked one, because I am just like everybody else.
The questions come long before the decision does.
How much alignment do the two of you actually have on the direction you are going? Are you both making decisions with the same end goal in mind, or does each of you have a private version of the future that you have never once said out loud to the other one? Are you genuinely on the same page about what you are building and who you are building it for?
If the answer to all of that is yes, then you almost do not have to ask anything when the opportunity shows up. All you have to do is say, here is where I want to go, and here is why it fits what we already decided we were doing. And then you go.
If the answer is no, then no clever question is going to save you. You will be standing in your kitchen trying to sell your wife on a business, and what you are actually doing is trying to sell her on a direction the two of you never agreed to in the first place. The business is not the disagreement. The business is just the place where the disagreement finally became visible.
This is not a one time conversation either. It has to get refreshed, annually at the minimum. Are we still moving the direction we said, and what changed this year that ought to change how we decide going forward? People change. Kids get older. The plan you agreed on four years ago might be one neither of you wants anymore, and if you never check, you will find that out in the middle of something expensive and hard to reverse.
What the first ninety days actually cost
Time. That is the honest answer. It cost time, and it is still costing time.
I was at Game Over constantly. Training new employees, then training their replacements, because turnover in this business is real and you had better plan for it. Learning every system myself, because I refuse to run something I do not understand. Recording videos so the next person would not have to learn it the hard way. Interviewing. I was just there, all the time.
The part I did not expect is that it was not bad. The kids came with me. They loved the escape rooms, they talked to customers, they watched something new get built. When I was running the education company they did not get this, and when I was doing real estate they did not get it either. Both of those are mostly a man on a laptop, and my kids could not see the work. Now they can walk straight into it.
More is caught than taught, and for the first time in a long while there is something in front of them worth catching.
But I am still missing things. Judo is tonight.
The part I got wrong
Before we closed I sat my kids down and told them this was going to be a different season. Dad is going to be working a lot, you are going to be part of it, and this is temporary.
I stand by every word of that. I do not wish I had said it differently.
What I wish is that I had known how long the season was going to be, because getting this business running well is taking a lot longer than I expected. I told them a season. I never told them a length, because I did not have one to give. And a season without an end is not a season. It is just how things are now, and kids work that out faster than we give them credit for.
Life is never balanced. It moves in seasons, and your family needs to know which one you are in. I have said that for years and I still believe it. What the last eleven months taught me is that naming the season is only half the job. You also owe them a checkpoint. Not a promise, because you cannot honestly promise. A date where you come back and say, here is where we actually are, here is what I got wrong about the timeline, and here is what I am changing.
The other thing I got wrong is that I should have brought the kids in earlier. Not brought them along. Brought them in.
The Practical Side
Have the direction conversation before there is ever a deal on the table. Sit down with your wife when nothing is at stake and nothing is on a clock, and get honest about where this family is headed. Not goals. Direction. What are we building, who is it for, and what are we willing to trade for it. If the only time you can have that conversation is with a deal in front of you, the deal does the talking, and deals are terrible negotiators on behalf of your marriage.
Put the refresh on the calendar like it is a real appointment, because it is. Once a year, somewhere you are not also folding laundry. You are not hunting for problems, you are looking for drift, and drift is quiet by design. That is what makes it drift.
Give the season a checkpoint and not just a name. Tell them how long you think the hard stretch will be, then tell them plainly that you are probably wrong about that, then set an actual date to come back and tell them the truth. My kids can handle a long season. What they cannot handle is a father who announced a season and then never mentioned it again.
Bring the kids in during the first week, and give them a job. Not a tour, a job. Something with a real outcome a real customer will experience, where it matters whether they did it well. My kids loved walking into those escape rooms, but walking in is not the same as owning something inside it, and I lost months of teaching by treating them like guests in my own business.
Feed people before you do business with them. I smoked a brisket for the sellers and their family before anything got serious, and I learned more about who they were in one evening than I would have from any amount of paperwork. You cannot read a man’s character off a profit and loss statement. You can read a lot of it off how he treats your kids in your own yard.
My kids are pulling into the driveway about now. I am going to go find out how judo went, and I am going to hear about it secondhand, which is nobody’s fault but mine.
The only reason I get to be in this season at all is that my wife and I did the boring work years ago, in living rooms and on long drives, in conversations that had no deal attached to them, no urgency, and no money on the line. That work is what bought me the right to say yes quickly when the thing finally showed up.
Do that work now, while nothing is happening. It is going to feel pointless while you are doing it. It is the only thing that will make the yes easy when it counts.