Stop Waiting to Prioritize Your Marriage. The Business Will Never Be Ready.
I sat down with Ashley Anthony, a chiropractor who owns two clinics with her husband Zach, runs a mobile chiropractic business, and coaches entrepreneurial couples who are trying to figure out how to build something together without losing each other in the process.
Ashley has been a client of mine for a while. So this conversation was different from a typical interview. I know her story. I know where she started and how much ground she has covered. And I also know that what she has figured out about marriage, business, and the cost of grinding at the expense of everything else is not theoretical. She has lived all of it.
What hit me hardest in this conversation is something she said near the end. She looked at the couples she had worked for early in her career, three out of the four female chiropractors who employed her, all divorced. She watched what the grind did to those marriages from inside the businesses. And she decided she wanted something different.
Know Your Lanes Before Anything Else
The first thing Ashley will tell any couple running a business together is to get clear on who owns what.
When she and Zach were stepping all over each other's roles, nobody on the team knew which leader to go to. When Ashley held one standard and Zach held another, the staff got pulled in opposite directions. When disagreements happened in front of the team, the dynamic that followed made everyone uncomfortable, including the patients. None of this was because they were bad leaders. It was because they had not defined the boundaries between their roles clearly enough to make the business run without the confusion bleeding into everything else.
The fix was structural before it was relational. Defining who owned what, who made which calls, and who the team should bring which problems to. Once that clarity existed, a lot of the friction that had felt like a marriage problem turned out to be an operations problem.
That is a pattern I see constantly in the businesses I work with, whether a spouse is involved or not. Unclear ownership creates a vacuum that someone always fills, usually the most capable and willing person in the room, and usually at significant personal cost.
The Feedback Problem Nobody Talks About
Ashley said something in our conversation that I have been thinking about since.
She used to believe the tension between her and Zach came from his delivery. His tone. The way he said things. She spent a long time convinced that if he could just communicate differently, everything would be easier. And then she did her own internal work and realized his delivery was fine. What was not fine was how she was receiving it.
If a colleague, a consultant, anyone other than her husband had said the exact same thing, she would have heard it as data. As useful feedback. Because it came from Zach, it became personal. It became about the marriage instead of about the business.
She has seen this in nearly every entrepreneurial couple she has worked with since. The inability to receive feedback from a spouse cleanly, without it activating something older and deeper than the business conversation, is one of the most common things that derails couples in business together.
What helped was separating the contexts explicitly. Inside the business, we are co-founders working toward the same goal. Outside it, we are partners. And one of the structural changes that made that distinction real was changing when and how they had hard conversations. Not in front of the team. Not while solving problems in real time. In a designated space, with a clear purpose, where both people could come in as business partners rather than as spouses in conflict.
I have the same dynamic in my own history. Eric coached me in powerlifting for years while we ran the gym together. When he gave me feedback on my lifts I would sometimes cry. He would tell me he was not my husband in that moment, he was my coach. It took time, but learning to receive that feedback as a competitor rather than as a wife changed the whole dynamic.
The Structures That Saved Them
Ashley and Zach run two clinics. They see over a hundred patients in a day. There is nothing about their schedule that invites space for reflection or structured conversation. And yet they found a way to build it in, because they realized that not having it was costing them more than the time it would take.
Two meetings a week, with completely different purposes. One is pure strategy, no problem solving. What is going where, who is doing what, what is the plan. The other is for budget and problem solving, where the harder conversations have a designated place to land. Nothing gets solved in the pre-shift meeting. Nothing gets addressed in front of patients. The structure tells both of them where the conversation goes, which means their brains can stop holding it everywhere else.
Ashley also made a rule that her team could not interrupt her while she was adjusting patients unless something was genuinely on fire. That single change, allowing herself to be fully present in one role at a time instead of being pulled across all of them simultaneously, created more mental space than she had expected. She had not realized how much cognitive load she was carrying until she stopped carrying it.
She also got clear on something more personal: she had been avoiding direct conversations with her team as a way to control her environment. If she did not say the hard thing, she could keep everyone calm and maintain the appearance of harmony. She eventually recognized that was not kindness. It was control. And it was exhausting. The moment she started saying what needed to be said, clearly and directly, she described it as feeling like she lost a million pounds. Her team had clarity. She had relief.
The Math Nobody Is Doing
Here is the part of our conversation that I want every founder who has ever said "once we hit X, then we'll prioritize the marriage" to sit with.
Ashley said it plainly: if you just keep pushing and pushing toward the end result, the end result is often not a vacation in Tahiti. It is two people who resent each other and a business that has eaten the relationship whole.
I pushed on this because I think the people who hear this tend to frame it as a choice. Either the business or the marriage. And I do not think that is the right frame. My calculation, which Ashley agreed with, is that the only real difference between the founder who has both and the founder who sacrifices everything for the business is time. Not sacrifice. Time. The same wealth, built at a pace that also allows you to take the date nights, the quarterly trips, the walk before the call. It might take longer to get there. But you will still be intact when you arrive.
Ashley put it in terms of ROI, and I have not stopped thinking about how she phrased it: why build something if you cannot enjoy the path to it. Her oldest child just turned eighteen. She said she cannot believe how fast it went. And she is not willing to be someone who looked up at the finish line and realized she had been absent for the whole race.
The resentment cycle she described for couples who wait is a real one. Resentment toward the partner, toward the business, toward the employees, toward the revenue that comes or does not come. It compounds. And it does not wait for a good time to surface. It surfaces at dinner, on date nights that should be restorative, in small moments where the person you married feels like a stranger who is also your coworker.
What She Would Tell Her Younger Self
Stop trying to be so perfect. Stop trying to be everything to everybody. It does not make you important to be needed.
That was Ashley's answer when I asked what she would say to the version of herself who was deep in it, before she had figured any of this out. And then she said something quieter that I think is the most important thing she shared in the whole conversation.
She spent a long time believing that her softness, her emotional depth, her kindness, were her weaknesses. The traits she needed to minimize in order to be taken seriously as a leader and a business owner. She tried for years to be someone she was not.
She thinks she would have gotten where she is faster if she had simply let herself be who she actually was.
I do not think this is just Ashley's story. I think it is the story of most of the women I work with, in one form or another. The trait they have decided makes them too much or not enough is almost always the thing that would make them better at this if they stopped hiding it.
Two Ways to Keep Building
If this landed somewhere and you want to do the work of building a business that does not cost you the things you actually care about, two places to go from here.
The Mom Founders Table Mastermind is where we do this work alongside the operational redesign. Twelve months, thirty women, your people, your pricing, your processes, and the identity work that makes the infrastructure actually hold. Applications are open now.
City Girls is the dinner and half-day workshop I run for established founders across the country. Twenty seats. Atlanta in October and my house in DFW in December. If you want to be in the room, grab your ticket here.
And if you are working with your spouse and you want to talk to someone who has been through it and built a practice around helping others through it, go find Ashley. She is the real thing.
Find her on Instagram at @ashleyanthony_dc.
