For Richer, For Poorer

"I look over at my wife, sitting on her own, flicking through the TV channels with her phone in her other hand. We've just put the kids to bed and then I've washed the dishes whilst my wife has sat with our youngest until she has fallen asleep.

We reconvene in the living room, me at the dining table and my wife on the sofa in front of the TV.

I glance up now and then to see what she is watching. I doubt that she even knows what's on, as she glares at her mobile with the sound of the TV in the distance. I know that she is just catching up with her social life. Facebook is pretty much her contact with adult conversation, her outlet and her downtime.

A message appears on Skype and I look back to my computer. I'm in a conversation with a freelancer who I have outsourced some work to. He only works after 6pm so I have to catch up with him during the evening – along with a lot of my other clients, who like me, have families and work to look after during the daylight hours.

I've spent the day with my head down, trying to focus on what's in front of me and not get distracted by the office banter. A morning meeting with a client who needed their hand holding whilst they provided feedback on a site I had been working on, set me back a couple of hours and I have people chasing me on emails that I haven't replied to yet.

My head is full to bursting with emails and demands and people thinking that the button that isn't working on their site comes first on my schedule. I sat up until midnight last night and was up again at 6:30am to try and answer as many of them as I could. But it wasn't enough – it never is.

Cashflow is looking great this month – if only I can get these 5 jobs done on time.

There are several unopened brown envelopes sitting on the kitchen counter that look like they are from the Inland Revenue. What's the point in opening them?

Getting the Balance Right

This evening was the same as any other. We left the office at 5pm – any later and the wife gets mad. At home, I immediately start cooking the dinner whilst the wife greets the kids and they talk about their day and the childminder discusses what they have all been up to. I hear the door close and my wife busying herself about tidying up after all the fun the kids have had, and if she has time, hoovering and getting the kids ready for dinner. The pets are fed and by the time I present dinner, the living room and kids are all in order.

Dinner can take an hour with our very tired kids and we all start to get frustrated. My wife knows that she has a bundle of ironing upstairs to get on with before the kids go to bed, and I have umpteen emails and quotes on my mind. An hour sitting with empty plates whilst scolding the kids to eat is too long!

Bundled upstairs, the kids get ready for their baths whilst the ironing board comes out and there is a temporary lull. How long passes, I don't know, but my silence is broken by the sound of my wife shouting, “are you coming upstairs or what?”

Damn, how did I get so distracted? I press 'send' on the email I was writing – did I even finish writing it? I'm in trouble. I'll just run upstairs and get the kids in to the bath and let the wife get on with her ironing for a bit.

My head is filled with things I need to do. I am itching to get downstairs again to write a quote that I need to send out before the morning. But the kids are in a really good mood and as my son squirts his little sister in the face with Nemo, and she decides to laugh it off, we start a water fight and I end up as soaked as them. I love them. I enjoy their company so much. This is so much fun!

These little guys really keep me going. Everything I do is for my wife and my kids and our future together as a family. It's hard and we all have big sacrifices to make, but I wouldn't be putting myself through this if I didn't think that I could provide the kids with a brilliant future.

It breaks my heart when I can't spend time with the kids at the weekend. There are times when I have taken on so much work that my wife has no choice but to take the kids out for the day so that I can bury myself in work and try to get a good 6 hours quality time, undisturbed, working on a project. But when they get home, I run out to the car and give them great big hugs and instantly know how much I have missed them.

Days like that always end in a takeaway for me and the missus where we spend quality time on the sofa whilst the kids are dreaming in their beds, scoffing our faces, leaving the washing up until the next day, and catching up with a series we are watching on Netflix. I see her photos on Facebook of the day that they have had. I'm glad they had fun.

Bringing the Wife In

Last year, I took my wife on as an Office Manager to help take some of the strain off me. We were warned by many that we shouldn't work together but always believed that by sitting together, having totally different jobs to each other and by educating my wife about what I actually do, that we would work it out. A year later and we see each other a lot more and yes, my wife does know more about what I do. When I talk to her, she knows what I am talking about.

My wife's main role was to implement a few systems around the office whereby we were able to track our finances and the time that we were spending on each job. The boys and I suggested a few different online programmes but in the end, my wife felt much more comfortable designing her own spreadsheets and collecting the information from us all independently.

Bless her, she put her all into it and really believed that it would transform our cashflow every month. But did any of us stick to it?

The boys were given a sheet every week breaking up all the hours of every day and assigning them to different projects they were working on. But it didn't account for the clients taking days to get back to us with feedback or with providing us with content, and it didn't take into account all of the changes that the clients made. I felt my wife's frustration and I watched as every month our bank statements just didn't turn out the way that the 'Cashflow' spreadsheet had predicted.

The 5 jobs that I was working on had 2 hours a day assigned to them. However, if so and so shouted louder than someone else, ultimately I ended up doing more hours on one project than another. And then, if an old client reared their heads and demanded I look into their site and why their shipping wasn't working, that took priority. And sure enough, each month, all of those coloured figures that sat neatly on my wife's spreadsheet, were all taken out and placed onto the following month's sheet.

But quite often, the magic all happens in the last few days of the month. I have my wife and Business Consultant pestering me about whether some of the income we are expecting can be moved off the spreadsheet with no hope of them coming in. 'No' I say, 'That may still come in'.

And I sit up all night, busy in my work. I'm up again at 6am. I have to get this work done. I have to squeeze every bit of myself into this project, and then I have to squeeze some money out of the client. All too often, the people that have been crowding my inbox all month and clouding my head, will suddenly go to ground as soon as the word 'Invoice' is mentioned, but as I work my butt off, sure enough, D-day comes round and we just about manage to get some payments in just in time for payday.

Home Time

I get home sometimes and my head is just swamped. I need a bit of 'me' time, if only for a few minutes or half an hour or so. Sometimes that comes in the form of getting out Hungry Hippos with my babies, sometimes I get out my phone and play a game, sometimes I sit upstairs and read. Sometimes I just need silence.

I can read my wife's mind of course, and sometimes I also wonder if I could take a 9-5 job instead. But I don't believe that that is an investment in our future – and I think that my wife believes that too. I'm proud of my business and I want it to succeed and I don't want all of this to have been for nothing.

I feel I am spinning plates. I want to be the very best dad that I can be and I want to be the best husband. And my wife is strong. We have adapted well into this life and this routine. We have our own duties and our routine and for the most part, it works. I know when it gets to her and it doesn't work quite so well for her. I have those days too. But we do have flexibility and if I can do a few extra things at home to ease things for my wife, she knows that she only has to ask.

Sometimes, I think my wife has had enough. She goes silent and I feel her hostility about the business and about the amount of time I am spending on it and the lack of money showing in our account. I feel that something is going to blow. But usually, the next day, she wakes up having had a big think about it and there's a smile on her face and we are ok again.

Motivated

I am running along with my boy, I've just let go of the saddle of his bike, and he is riding clumsily alongside me. We can hear my wife whooping at the kerb whilst she films this momentous occasion. It's 9:30am and we should have been in work already. I realise I haven't looked at my watch though and I'm not stressing about getting to work. I've already answered a few emails this morning over breakfast and so far, all my clients are satisfied. And, anyway, here lies my inspiration. This is what I am working for.

If I can't take an hour out every now and then, when I know that the rest of the world is hard at work, and we have the road to ourselves, when we can enjoy the kids whilst they are still too young to go to school – if I can't do that, what's the point?

Enjoying these tiny guys and seeing them grow and develop is my motivation. And I go to work with a smile on my face and it's a new day and I'm ready to do some work!"