How Eight Years Is Both Forever and (Just) a Day

I have done a pretty good job keeping this site all professional and not personal, but when I was thinking about where to post this for today, I realized that most of my professional posts are personal anyway. My business is an extension of my life: my values, my ethics, and my relationships.

Well, this is my BIG relationship. Most of you probably don’t know the Mrs. behind Petersen Media Group, but I can assure you that I married way up. When we met, I was full of potential, but a quick label indicating me to be a less ambitious man based on my status at the time would have been warranted. Shoot, a lot of people still had their doubts as they were eating our wedding cake, I’m sure.

Thinking back on eight years, I simultaneously can’t believe we’ve done all we’ve done in less than a decade and also feel like we’ve hardly begun to grow old together yet. Maybe another 18 foster kids will change that feeling but I’m not ready for a walker quite yet. Maybe a one-story ranch, but not a walker.

While I was a guest at Treehouse filming my course for Genesis Framework Foundations, I took a few moments to write a script and loaded it into the teleprompter and asked my producer and audio tech if we could film something really fast. They gladly obliged and handed this over to me, so Babe, this has been waiting for over a month. I hope you like it.

The funny reality of out business is that Kristin is the one with the business and marketing degree. I’ve got the professional writing degree – the grammar nazi. She’s the organized one; I freak out when my white board has 4 projects and a couple are lingering after I start a new one. She’s the financial whiz; Kristin balances the books while we figure out running a business together. She’s the hobby blogger and I’m the theme developer and site consultant.

Just last week, I went to her completely overreacting about something out of my control and did my best Hulk impression and she calmly smiled and said what she’d do. “I’VE ALREADY DONE THAT! RAAWWWRRRR!!!!” I took a Xanax and went back to work. She’s awesome.

A month ago, we had just come off a 2-month special needs fostering a newborn and I’d just wrapped up about 3 weeks straight with only 3 hours of sleep per night and client work was really getting behind… and so was our income. It was a super happy ending: he was adopted, and I said, “calm down, watch what I’m going to do.” We’ve been sick the last week and all is good because we met our needs about a week and a half ago because she let me ignore the little things and just work.

We balance each other out and my clients are the big benefactors of her input and conversations at dinner and in the car.

It’s more than fair to say that we wouldn’t be where we are today without her input into our business on a regular basis, even though she doesn’t know how to write code or price out a project.