Pillow talk tax strategy
If you’re launching a new venture, do it with a partner you’d trust with the life of your newborn child. That sounds extreme. It isn’t. In a small business there’s nowhere to hide. Your partner will sign contracts with your name on them, talk to clients when you’re not in the room, and make calls you’ll live with for years. You don’t need someone who’s good. You need someone you never have to check. So does that advice still hold when your partner is also the person you married?
In one sense, absolutely. There’s no one I trust more than my wife (Laura Collard). I’ve never doubted she’ll make the best decisions for our family. Honestly, I’d rather she make most of the hard ones. But working together brings a whole new set of problems. Who has final say? What happens when you disagree on how to solve something? What if you think the other one isn’t pulling their weight?
It’s March 2024, my birthday week. I’m in Medellín with Laura, my girlfriend at the time and my wife now, having cocktails at Náufrago Rooftop, and we start talking about what we want out of life.
One month later, an ex-colleague reaches out. “Anthony, we need help with social media. Do you know anyone?” Long pause. “Funny you should ask… my girlfriend just launched her agency. I think she’d be a great fit.”
This was not entirely true. The agency only existed in our heads. But it felt like a sign. We rushed the paperwork before onboarding the client and agreed to reinvest every dollar back into the business we’d been dreaming about a month earlier.
At this point I’m a silent partner on the LLC. I have a full-time job elsewhere, so I have it easy. I watch from a distance and casually drop suggestions. “I’m helping!” I remember thinking. I wasn’t. I was adding noise to the signal.
The first real sign of friction: I overhear Laura open a client conversation by drawing three circles, pointing to the middle, and asking them to “think about their why.” My partner, it turns out, is a huge Simon Sinek fan. I have slightly different feelings, which I explore in “The most watched bad idea in marketing.”
This might sound trivial, two people who like different marketing books. But to me it’s a fundamental difference in how we see the world. That’s fine in a marriage. Is it fine in a business?
Fast forward to October 2026. I fall victim to corporate chicanery and lose my job to an acronym I’d only just learned: RIF (Reduction in Force, for those lucky enough not to know). I see it as a blessing in disguise. I can finally put my time into building our agency, Odd Matter
But it’s an adjustment. I think I can just jump in and build. Honestly, I’m a bit lost. No one directs me, sets my goals, or holds me accountable. That’s on me now. What a shift. The bigger adjustment is working directly with my wife. We schedule meetings with each other. She tags me in ClickUp asking for changes. I email her reminders to register for Adobe MAX.
At first we’re not careful, and it drifts into our life. We talk lead-gen over dinner. We discuss pricing while walking our dog (her name is Maya, and her picture is here for your pleasure). If we’re not careful, pillow talk will cover tax strategy. Luckily, we catch it. Here’s what we did:
Meet 3x times a week. Instead of interrupting each other and talking shop at dinner, we put work on the calendar. Is it awkward scheduling meetings with your spouse? Very. But it helps. Monday, we review the team’s tasks for the week. Wednesday, we check client deliverables so everything ships by end of week. Friday, we shoot content for Odd Matter and our clients.
Clear roles. This was another awkward conversation. Remember the questions I started with? Who has final say? What happens when you disagree? This is the answer. I own GTM, positioning, and pricing. Laura owns the content engine, client delivery, and digital channels. We both weigh in on everything, but each of us decides alone in our own area. If we disagree in mine, I make the call. In hers, she does. No votes, no tiebreakers, no reopening it over dinner. It sounds cold but without it, every disagreement becomes a vote on the relationship. With it, it’s just a decision. It’s also how the Sinek problem got solved. Laura is free to use the 'Why' framework in client delivery. If she wants to draw circles, she draws circles.
Change the scenery. We both work from home. We sleep, work, eat, and relax in the same 900-square-foot apartment, sometimes for a whole week. That’s not healthy. So we work from a coffee shop nearby. We hold a two-person team happy hour where the goal is to get creative over negronis. We take walks to talk through one specific topic. New routines and new surroundings keep us sane.
To me, the awkwardness is a small price for working with someone I fully trust. I never have to check Laura’s work. I know it’ll be exceptional. We don’t want the same things from marketing books. We want the same things from life, and from the business. Turns out that’s the part that matters.