That is an operations claim more than a romantic one. She runs a household that would put most companies to shame.
We have five kids. We travel full time in an RV. We have visited 38 national parks together. She has homeschooled all five children for the last eight years across multiple grade levels, each kid with their own curriculum and their own schedule. She is also my business partner, my social media manager, and my marketing director.
Before all of this, when I was still going to sea as a merchant sailor, she ran the entire household alone for months at a time. The budget. The utilities. The cleaning. The kids once they started showing up. Church volunteering. A full-time job on top of it for the first four years of our marriage.
She likes to joke that she has spent eight years of our marriage pregnant. The math holds up.
She has taught me more about leadership than any book I have ever read. Most of it through observation.
Good Systems Enable Good Leadership
Bad systems will destroy you.
Every single time Jenn felt like she was behind, it was because she was scattered. Throwing things together. Trying to keep five different kids’ lives in her head at the same time.
Those were her hardest weeks.
Her answer was the same every time. Build a better system.
So she did.
The Spreadsheet That Runs Our House
Jenn built a massive Excel spreadsheet from scratch. It tracks every kid, every grade level, every curriculum, every day. She pulls the plan for any given day and writes it on each kid’s whiteboard so they know exactly what to do.
If a homeschool inspector or auditor walked in tomorrow, she could show them every kid is on grade level or above. Every assignment logged. Every standard hit.
She does that on top of running our travel, managing our budget, partnering with me on the business, and being an incredible wife and mother.
I will say it plainly. I won the wife jackpot.
You can disagree. I am confident in the statement.
What This Has to Do With Your Business
Most owners I talk to are stuck in the same place Jenn used to be. Scattered. Throwing things together. Holding the whole company in their head.
They call that leadership. The team experiences it as chaos.
Real leadership requires systems underneath you. You cannot lead a team that does not know what to do tomorrow. You cannot delegate work you have never written down. You cannot scale a business that lives only in your head.
If you are missing systems, your leadership will suffer. Your team will suffer. Your family will suffer.
The fix is the same one Jenn figured out years ago. Stop trying to remember everything. Build the system. Let the system carry the load so you can lead the people.
What to Do This Week
Pick the one area of your business where you feel most scattered.
Open a blank spreadsheet or a fresh page in a notebook. Write down every step in that area, top to bottom. The way Jenn would write out a school day for a third grader.
Make it visible. Make it repeatable. Make it something you could hand to someone else.
That is the first system. Build five more like it and you have a real business. Build twenty more and you have a company that runs without you in the chair every day.
That is the goal. That is the freedom Jenn has built into our family. That is the freedom every owner I work with is reaching for.