{"id":332,"date":"2012-02-10T07:00:16","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/?p=332"},"modified":"2012-02-01T07:01:58","modified_gmt":"2012-02-01T12:01:58","slug":"interview-with-wendi-goldsmith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/interview-with-wendi-goldsmith\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Wendi Goldsmith"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Wendi<\/a>

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.<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u2019s business as they would a child\u2019s passionate hobby.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 You were young when you founded your business.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0\u00a0 I was 26 and married to my college sweetheart.\u00a0 My starting a business was surprising not only to my friends and family, but to me as well.\u00a0 My first husband was supportive, but not really comfortable with it.\u00a0 He felt like I was too much in the driver\u2019s seat. He had less of the excitement of the dream and more the downside, without the rush.\u00a0 It was tough.\u00a0 I did everything that entrepreneurs do but probably shouldn\u2019t:\u00a0 maxed out the credit cards, took a second mortgage on the house.\u00a0 Sometimes he\u2019d agree to my doing that, then resent it later.\u00a0 It was understandably out of his comfort zone.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 In retrospect, would you have done anything differently?\u00a0 Maybe prepared your former husband for what company-founding might entail?<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong>\u00a0 There\u2019s not much I could have changed.\u00a0 Entrepreneurs jump in and fake it \u2018til they make it, even when we start with a detailed plan.\u00a0 You can\u2019t have a legitimate discussion with yourself\u2014let alone your spouse\u2014about what you are getting into.\u00a0 It\u2019s just words, not a profound understanding.\u00a0 You can\u2019t really predict how it\u2019s going to hit. \u00a0My ex-husband and I didn\u2019t understand the full implications until we were in the thick of it. \u00a0It\u2019s like having a child.\u00a0 Even though it\u2019s a universal human experience, you don\u2019t really get how profound that is, and all the ways it changes your life, until you have one of your own.\u00a0 I\u2019m not saying don\u2019t have the conversation; I\u2019m just saying you should both recognize the futility of it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 So how is the spouse supposed to take it all\u2014the risk and insecurity and the entrepreneur\u2019s obsession\u2014in stride?<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 It\u2019s a time when unconditional love should be mustered.\u00a0 Imagine the entrepreneur as someone who has developed a serious illness.\u00a0 The sickness might be a gravely stress-inducing event, and the spouse is going to have some anxiety around that.\u00a0 But in the face of it, he or she will muster love, accommodation, support.\u00a0 That\u2019s the playbook when a loved one has an illness\u2014what we know should be done.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 The obvious place where your analogy falls down is that illness is involuntary, and company-hatching is not.<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong>\u00a0 I don\u2019t agree. \u00a0The desire to start a company is very much like having an illness\u2014it\u2019s a bug that burns in you, forces you to create your vision and drive yourself hard.\u00a0 Some people just have to go out and make things happen in their own way.\u00a0 That\u2019s who we are.\u00a0 If you told us to go back to our cubicles and our day jobs we\u2019d be miserable.\u00a0 For the family, sometimes it works well and they reach the pot of gold, but of course that doesn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 But again, if someone is in the hospital, you don\u2019t blame them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 This sounds a lot like the old debate about whether alcoholism, or homosexuality, is genetically predisposed, or more a lifestyle choice.<\/p>\n

A:<\/strong>\u00a0 I don\u2019t think being an entrepreneur is as voluntary as people think.\u00a0 It\u2019s our <\/ins>nature, and wild horses couldn\u2019t prevent it.\u00a0 There\u2019s a measure of inevitability to it.\u00a0 It would be helpful for the spouses of entrepreneurs to understand that.\u00a0 Maybe another analogy is to think of the entrepreneur as having a passionate hobby. The spouse can either think it\u2019s frivolous, or support it, the way we endlessly encourage children who have a passion. But <\/ins>with our spouses we can get small minded and defensive, instead of being loving and appreciative.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To some extent entrepreneurs are restless souls.\u00a0 We just don\u2019t fit into the confines of a corporate structure.\u00a0 With my second husband, I told him early in our relationship that this is who I am.\u00a0 You can\u2019t expect me to have a different set of priorities. You are not going to change me.\u00a0 Even now, although my company is established, its fortunes rise and fall with the economy.\u00a0 In business the stakes are always high.\u00a0 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t end, does it?\u00a0 In any stage of a business, it\u2019s always a wild ride.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 The entrepreneur and the spouse need to understand that once they head down that path, it\u2019s almost impossible to step off the treadmill, unless the company fails or is sold.\u00a0 When people create businesses, they don\u2019t understand that closing one down for any reason is as hard as starting one up.\u00a0 You borrow money, you hire employees, you incur costs.\u00a0 Once you start down that road, you lose a lot of choices, because of all the obligations you take on.\u00a0 The business overtakes you, sometimes at the expense of your family members.\u00a0 It\u2019s the child that remains at home.\u00a0 It\u2019s hard to give it the boot.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Q:\u00a0 Tell me about balancing your business with your family.<\/p>\n

A:\u00a0 I\u2019m proud of the ways I manage work-life balance, but still, It\u2019s a lose-lose proposition.\u00a0 There aren\u2019t enough hours in the day to do both jobs well.\u00a0 But my business has a mission that my family finds worthy\u2014and that makes all the difference.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s business as they would a child\u2019s passionate hobby. Q:\u00a0 You were young when you founded your business. A:\u00a0\u00a0 I was 26 and married to my college sweetheart.\u00a0 My starting a business was surprising not only to my friends and family, but to me as well.\u00a0 My first husband was supportive, but not really comfortable with it.\u00a0 He felt like I was too much in the driver\u2019s seat. He had less of the excitement of the dream and more the downside, without the rush.\u00a0 It was tough.\u00a0 I did everything that entrepreneurs do but probably shouldn\u2019t:\u00a0 maxed out the credit cards, took a second mortgage on the house.\u00a0 Sometimes he\u2019d agree to my doing that, then resent it later.\u00a0 It was understandably out of his comfort zone. Q:\u00a0 In retrospect, would you have done anything differently?\u00a0 Maybe prepared your former husband for what company-founding might entail? A:\u00a0 There\u2019s not much I could have changed.\u00a0 Entrepreneurs jump in and fake it \u2018til they make it, even when we … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,25,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-the-entrepreneurial-personality","category-the-spouses-concerns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":500,"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions\/500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.meghirshberg.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}