Home Matters Mat Vivona Jr. learned from his dad that there’s a time and place to talk about work. But that’s not all he picked up. The 34-year-old remodeler credits his father with many invaluable lessons. Keep work and home life separate. If you have an argument at home, leave it there. And there’s nothing an open mind can’t work through.
“I was fortunate to work alongside my dad for eight years before his passing,” Mat says. His father died in a car crash in 1995, leaving 25-year-old Mat at the helm of Father ;#38; Son Construction in Troy, Mich.
The production supervisor-turned-CEO had another leg up. He worked with his fiancé both before and after his dad’s death.
Their relationship didn’t survive the dramatic change in leadership. “She thought she would help me become the boss,” Mat says. “But we had really different leadership styles.” He finally suggested a parting of the ways professionally. A romantic parting wasn’t far behind.
Four months after the broken engagement, Mat met Carrie. Today the two are not only husband and wife but co-workers, too. “We didn’t intend to work together,” Mat says. “But we started to think about it and took the plunge.”
Husband and wife benefit, Mat says, from laid-back attitudes. They also maintain healthy distance at work. Carrie, who works with the office manager, handles daily accounting. Mat has his own office and spends about half of his day checking jobsites.
Mat’s advice for other entrepreneurial couples: “Try to limit work talk at home to 30 minutes a day on average,” he says. “Don’t harp on it.”
Reconcilable Differences Mark Stephenson calls himself an open, ’90s kind of guy. Lynne, his fireball of a wife, teases that the ’90s have come and gone. But the sentiment is there — on both sides. These two never stop.
Admitted workaholics, the entrepreneurial couple revel in their differences. Their diverging personalities have always been a plus in their marriage. So when Mark started to think about adding someone to his remodeling practice, he immediately saw the benefit of adding his opposite, Lynne.
“I sensed a huge hole in the center of my business,” he says. “As sensitive and aware as I think I might be, I can’t cross the line far enough. I didn’t look at it so much as making room for Lynne. I saw it as her filling the void in my company.”
Not surprisingly, Lynne remembers a different rationale. “Mark was looking at paying someone more than I was making to help out at the company,” recalls the former elementary school teacher. “He decided to let me take on whatever I wanted to do and pay me instead.”
Their current setup turns the traditional model on its ear. Each has clearly defined job descriptions, with Lynne front and center. She’s the lead salesperson and follows through with most design, product selection, and the requisite hand-holding to bring a job to life. Meanwhile Mark manages the office (set up in their two-car garage). “Lynne takes a lot of the burden off me,” Mark says. “I can just settle back into what’s comfortable for me.”
The two typically go on sales calls together. “The odds are better with two,” Lynne says. “A consultant would probably tell us not to double our investment in time and resources. But I know our close ratio wouldn’t be as high.”
How do the guys in the field take to having Lynne at the helm? “She’s the carpenter’s friend,” Mark says. “They need her to fill the same void I need her for.” So when a problem comes up, they call Lynne. But it’s usually not a construction problem. “They know how to cut a 2×4,” Mark says. “It’s when they get down to telling the difference between the faucet with the nickel finish and the brushed chrome one.”
Even with clear-cut roles, Lynne and Mark still benefit from a little frank advice from time to time. Lynne recommends an unlikely source. “Go see Rob Becker’s Defending the Caveman,” she says of the one-man Broadway comedy about the differences between men and women. “Half the time you laugh at yourself. The other half you laugh at your spouse. It’s a great reality check.” — Wendy Ann Larson, a former managing editor at REMODELING , is a communications consultant and freelance writer in Bethesda, Md.