Episode 1575: Interview with Larry & Sue Pruett About Growing a Business as a Couple

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Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining us on episode 1,575 on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

Sue Pruett: Hi, I am Larry. And I'm Sue Pruett. We challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling.

Larry Pruett: Having the ability to prioritize your marriage in the midst of your life is key and one way to be inspired.

To do that is to listen to this The Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend Scott Maderer.

Sue Pruett: When we started into this entrepreneurial journey, as Larry said, at first it was just him. He kind of did his his thing for a while, and then when we started working together, I think for us the biggest surprise and what became a challenge was that we had very different ideas about what life was going to look like [00:01:00] once he came home and we were doing this business together.

Scott Maderer: Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, who will learn to invest in your.

Invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

In this podcast episode I interview Larry and Sue Pruitt. I ask them about why being in business as a couple can be risky if you don't do it right. Also, ask them to share with you their best advice to those couples that do want to do business together. And Larry and Sue also share why it's so important for couples of any type to communicate and dream [00:02:00] together.

I have a great book that's been out for a while now called Inspired Living. Assemble the puzzle of your calling by mastering your time, your talent, and your treasures. You can find out more about that book over@inspiredlivingbook.com. It'll take you to a page where there's information and you can sign up to get some mailings about it, as well as purchase a copy there.

I'd love to see you get a copy and share with me how it impacted your world. Larry and Sue have been married for over 35 years and are the parents of five adult children. They've been entrepreneurs for over 20 years with the last 12 or more years being full-time. Their business and marriage coaches who help married entrepreneurs.

Build the business of their dreams side by side. Welcome to the show, Larry and Sue. Hi. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks, Scott. Looking forward to it. Absolutely. So it's always different when you have a [00:03:00] couple, but in this case, I think it's really fitting, given what y'all's message is and what you're putting out into the world.

So why don't you share with us a little bit more? I shared a little bit in the intro, but I. Intros are kinda like Instagram photos. They never really show the whole story. So talk a little bit more about how y'all have worked together over the years, what what you've done, and then how you've gotten to this point where this is the message that you're putting out into the world.

Larry Pruett: Yeah, it's it's really interesting because we started working together within the first year of us being married. Obviously we weren't running our own business at that stage. We worked for an employer. And so we were together like all the time and we worked a lot of hours and such. We did, and we even had somebody make a funny comment to us during that time.

Sue Pruett: Oh, somebody asked me about two months into it. Don't you ever get a break from each other? And I was like, why would I want a break?

Larry Pruett: Yeah. We thought that was foreign. We just thought that was the normal thing is we [00:04:00] want to spend the rest of our life together and we want to be together. So we didn't even realize how unusual that was.

And so we navigated things even in kind of that, the beginning part where we're getting to know each other in our marriage and such. And then we went through a lengthy period of time where we were in one, a one income family.

As we started having children, we've got five kids and Sue homeschooled 'em all the way through.

And so that consumed. A

Sue Pruett: lot of the time. All the time. Yeah.

Larry Pruett: Yeah. And and then at some point it's been about 21 years ago that I actually had a little bit of extra time on my hands, which was a weird situation. My, I had a job that I was working full time, that was about 30 hours a week.

Which they don't make those type of jobs anymore, I don't think. But I started just saying I just thought let's just sell some stuff online, bring in a little bit of extra [00:05:00] income. And so at that stage it was all me doing it 'cause Sue was just so busy with the kids and homeschooling. And then about 13 or so years ago, we decided that we wanted to make this full time, and that's when.

Sue took over the business for at the beginning,

Sue Pruett: right? We had decided that we wanted to bring Larry home from his day job if we could, and discovered, I discovered a, another e-commerce course that I felt if we did that, that we could earn enough to bring him home. And so I started that business in that fall of 2012.

And then in February of 2013, Larry came home and we started working it together. And we've had. Different iterations where one of us is more in charge of it, the oth and then the other one, we've gone back and forth. We've shared a lot of responsibilities and navigated ourselves to the point where we really knew what we were doing and we were able to, a big catalyst for us or [00:06:00] big, reason for us to wanna go full-time was we wanted to show our kids that there was more than one way to do life. And we made that change and Larry came home and we started showing that to them. And so they got to see life in two segments. And it was really. A joy to do that. And then through all of that we taught other people how to do what we were doing.

And in the course of that, we coached several couples. And in the course of that, we realized, okay, marriage is, has always been a big deal to us. Let's marry the business and the marriage coaching. And so that's how we've come to what we're doing today.

Scott Maderer: So I definitely wanna unpack some of that a little bit more.

But before I, I do that one of the things I like to highlight on the show is that intersection between our faith journey and our life journey and the decisions we make around business and all of the other components of our life. 'cause I think so [00:07:00] often we try to separate 'em and yet.

They affect each other. So for y'all how has your faith journey affected the decisions you make and the journey you've been on?

Larry Pruett: Yeah, I think that it's been very impactful for us. Our faith has, and whenever we, when we made the decision, actually even to homeschool our kids, and I know there's, every family's gotta make their own decision on that, but we really felt called to that.

And so that therefore meant that we were gonna be the A one income family. And we knew that was a financial, that could be a financial challenge for us. And so we were making decisions pretty early on in our marriage that were completely dependent upon our faith and what we felt like the Lord was calling us to do.

And so then as we went forward with that. There was a moment where I was working the day [00:08:00] job and I was working long hours and I was not seeing the kids at all. Like from, basically from Monday through Thursday, Friday was a shorter day generally, and so I would see them Friday for supper and there was one particular evening even that I was coming home from work.

To be honest with you, it was the winter time. It was dark. It was when I was going to work and when it was dark, I was coming home when it was dark. I didn't even know what time of day it was. It was that kind of a disorientation was going on. And as I was driving on the road, I was thinking, what time is it?

What's gonna be going on when I get home? What am I gonna be walking into and such? And I went by a bank that had the time and temperature thing, and it said 9:35 PM. And I just thought to myself, what in the world am I doing? What? What kind of a dad am I right now? What kind of a husband am I?

What kind of a Christian am I in doing this? And I know that there are seasons of life where you have to do certain things to provide for [00:09:00] your family, but this had been going on for quite a while and I just realized the kids are gonna be in bed. Supper has been it's gone several hours ago.

It's in the refrigerator. It's in the refrigerator. I missed out on that opportunity and I just thought, what in the world am I doing here? I've gotta make a change. And so that's was a very strong moment of intersection for me of. I say that I am wanting to be a loving husband. I'm saying that I wanna be a great father, but I'm not there, so I need to make a big change.

And so entrepreneurship for us was that opportunity to make that switch. One of the things that is said a lot around business is when you have a partnership, and here I'm not talking about a marriage partnership, I'm talking about a business partnership. You know that always I don't wanna say always that often can create.

Scott Maderer: Problems. [00:10:00] Often around communication, around clarity, around whose job is that? And oh, this person's working harder, and but oh, you're getting all blah, blah, blah. Whatever it is. And how do y'all see that? You've managed to look at it a little differently because you do have a marriage partnership and then you also have a.

Business partnership. What do y'all see as the balance between those or how you negotiate those to manage to help both work, if that makes sense? Yeah.

Sue Pruett: It's so interesting, Scott, because I think that when we started into this entrepreneurial journey, as Larry said, at first it was just him. He did his thing for a while, and then when we started working together, I think for us the biggest.

Surprise. And what became a challenge was that we had very different ideas about what life was going to look like once he came home and we were doing this business together.

And [00:11:00] we didn't realize that we had different ideas and we different expectations. And so he came home and he started doing what he thought he should be doing, and he started not doing what I thought he should be doing.

And and it became this tension developed and we started. Feeling this this an, I don't wanna say animosity, but a disconnect between the two of us. And finally one day I was like, okay, something's gotta change 'cause this is not working the way we thought it was going to.

Obviously I'm not getting to experience what I thought I was gonna get to experience. He was thinking, I'm not experiencing what I thought I was gonna experience. And we just assumed since we had a great marriage that this was gonna be really smooth. And one day I just came into the home office and I sat down and I said, okay, listen, we have to talk because I'm about to break and so we need to change some things here.

And that was the. Moment that we had a really transformative [00:12:00] conversation between the two of us about, okay, what is this going to look like and what are you thinking this is gonna look like? What are you thinking this is gonna look like? How can we meld these two things together and make things begin to work?

And fortunately that happened just a few months in to our journey and that really helped us navigate the rest of the journey pretty well.

Larry Pruett: Yeah, and that really helped us with some key words that you hear a lot like boundaries. And roles. Things like that. We just had not established any boundaries as of yet, and we realized that we needed to do that.

Then we needed to figure out who was gonna do what. And just a big key that we have realized over the years now is that first of all, the roles within the home can and probably will be different than the roles within the business. And sometimes you don't know which hat you're wearing, so you've gotta figure that out and make sure that you you know that you're both on the same page.

What kind of a conversation are we having here? Is this a [00:13:00] marriage conversation? Is this a parenting one? Is this a business one? But then also with the roles within the business. Just to give you an example here whenever I came home from my day job, I did not want to manage people anymore.

I was burned out on that terribly. And so that kind of became a problem for us because we didn't we didn't build up the business very quickly because of that, and that really stunted our growth. So then we started, we realized that mistake. We realized we do need to add a team here, get some help.

As we started doing that, then I just started managing the team. I guess maybe we thought that because that's what I had done in my day job,

Sue Pruett: right? You'd had the experience of being a manager in your previous work and we thought, oh, you know what you're doing, so go

Larry Pruett: for it. But I don't necessarily know what I'm doing.

And so some problems came up. It was just adding so much stress to me and everything, and I just realized [00:14:00] this is everything that I hated about my day job. So why am I still doing this? And then. And the kids were getting older and more independent and some of 'em were even moving outta the house.

And so we realized Sue's got a little bit more time on her hands. She's much better at this.

Sue Pruett: I've been doing it for a while. You homeschool five kids, you manage people.

Scott Maderer: Oh yeah. And often manage people that don't really wanna be there. They don't wanna do what you asked them to do.

Yeah, exactly. I was a school teacher for 16 years. I'm very familiar.

Larry Pruett: Yes. Used to dealing with people who don't. Cooperate and don't do what they're told and everything. And so don't necessarily really wanna be there right then. You don't wanna be there. And so our kids were our employees also along the way, so that's also kind of part of the equation.

But we had other people as well, and we had built up a team of about 10 people. At one point. I just realized I hate this. We just sat down, had a conversation, we just reassigned some roles, and so Sue took over that end of [00:15:00] thing that end of things. And and it just really, it took a lot of pressure off of me.

I was no longer doing something that I'm really not designed to do. Sue was more in her lane and it was just this beautiful thing. I'm like, why didn't we do this several years ago?

Scott Maderer: What's interesting too to me is what you're pointing out is, 'cause again, I I work with a lot of business owners.

I work with a lot of small business owners like y'all do. Not necessarily married couples business owners. And when they talk about a partnership. Everything that y'all just said applies whether you're married or not. Because quite frankly, if you're in business together, you're married in a way maybe not the same way you're spending a lot of time together.

You're spending a lot of energy together. You've got a lot tied together in terms of what happens to one of you affects the other of you. And so having those conversations and that clarity, I think is important in business. [00:16:00] Stop. In marriage stop it just, y'all happen to be blending them in a way.

Yeah. You, when folks come to you wanting to thinking about it, you know the boy everyone always tells us, this is crazy, but we feel like maybe we should be working together or doing business together, or maybe they've already gotten started and stumbled into it. It's just not going the way they want it to.

But they still feel like it's something worth doing. What's some of the advice you give 'em or what what's the first step for people that are exploring that idea of maybe doing life together and doing business together in their life?

Sue Pruett: Yeah. We oftentimes start with who are you as a family and what is your mission in life.

In fact, one of the first exercises we do in our program is creating a family mission statement. Some people have probably already done that, but many people that we run into have [00:17:00] not. And we. We're blessed to have that cross our path many years before we even became entrepreneurs, and we had a family mission statement from the time our first child was very young, and we've tweaked it over the years.

We've changed things about it. But when you create that. Mission statement. We have a whole procedure that we go through. What that does for you as a family, as a business, as a couple, it sets up the boundaries. It tells you what you know. We like to use baseball analogies a lot 'cause we have baseball fans in the family and the foul poles on the baseball field, they let you know what's fair and what's foul. And if you look at a baseball field from the top, it's oftentimes kind of part of a circle. And the field itself is a pretty small part of that circle. And so what, what lands in bounds or in fair territory.

That's the stuff that it's okay to pursue, but the things that fall outside of that, those are the [00:18:00] things that you should let go, at least for now. Maybe not ever come back to them, but that's one of the things that we do. And when you have a really clear idea of who you are as a family and what your goals in life are, and you've talked about those and you've laid those out together.

Then making big decisions like do we go into business together? What business do we pursue together? How does that look for our family? All of those things have a framework to fit into. And so that is something that without a framework, you're feeling your way through and that can work. But it's you're a lot more likely to be successful if you have a good framework to work with.

Scott Maderer: Larry coming at it from your point of view as somebody who you worked outside of the home, you had all of those things, you had a business life, and you mentioned earlier there was part of your [00:19:00] day job that you didn't like and parts that you like coming home to do business with your partner.

What's better about that? And then what is still the things that you know, aren't necessarily always the best part of the world? Whenever you're going to work in the morning, so to speak.

Larry Pruett: Yeah there's so many positives that I could focus in on and really there is a, such a deeper connection that we have as a couple because of the business.

It it's any entrepreneurship journey. It's a rollercoaster ride. And riding a roller coaster is fun, but it's even more fun whenever you're doing it with other people and you've. You've got people you love right next to you and such. I don't know. I haven't ridden a rollercoaster in a long time, but you get the analogy.

Yeah. Whenever we are struggling, we're struggling together, when we're excelling, we're excelling together. And [00:20:00] so there's just, there's a deep connection that is really hard to duplicate, I think in almost any other way of doing life. I'm sure there are some examples but it'd be hard for me to think of some.

And then I'll include this, the entire family situation as well. Whenever I left my day job, our oldest was 18 years old and our youngest was seven. And so during the next during these last 12 years the amount of time I've been able to spend with my children has been, I don't even know.

It's infinity more than what it was before. And to the point where I would have these trips that I would take to source product and they'd be a 12 to 14 hour day. And at some point I thought, why don't I just take one of the kids with me every time? And so that. That connection that we had as, as with my kids was irreplaceable because of this as well.

[00:21:00] And they have such good memories of all that and such, even to the point where whenever I would go on a trip, the kids were arguing and fighting over whose turn it was. And I had to come up with this written schedule of who had gone when and all that type of stuff. And they had their certain criteria, they had to get a free meal for it to count.

So if we just went for an hour or two and came back home, that did not count. They were still still their turn next and such. So there's just so many positives on the negative end of things. We made a lot of mistakes and we learned a lot. Some of it, Sue has already referenced not really having our rules outlined very well.

The expectations that we went into it with were separate. And just to really have a vision and a dream that we're on the same page together is so crucial. And there's been moments where we start, where we're seeing our, we're drifting, we're going, I'm going this way. She's going that way.

And then [00:22:00] there's just red lights going off and everything. It's we gotta get back together here. So there's potential downside if we were talking to someone not long ago, a couple, and they're in this, they were running the same business and they had a lot of different ideas on how to do it.

And one, one of the spouses just opened up a separate business that was basically competing with the first business. And there was plenty of room for competition and such, but it's just oh my goodness. You're taking those opposites, like the opposite skills and the opposite personalities and you're looking those at negatives.

You need to realize that the two of you're completing each other as a couple and as business partners here, and you need to just stay in your own lane and do your work. And so the downside is that it can be divisive if you're not really careful and you don't have that foundation set.

Scott Maderer: So for [00:23:00] you, when you think about.

Going into business. And so when Larry came to you and said okay, I'm thinking about quitting my day job and let's go do this together. What was your biggest hope and then what was your biggest fear about changing to that kind of point in your life?

Sue Pruett: Scott, it's really interesting because we had talked about it. Off and on for years about Larry perhaps coming home and not being in a day job anymore. And actually I was the one who was pushing for it.

And there was finally a time in the summer of 2012 that Larry came home.

He'd had a very frustrating day at work. He had gotten home late that night, and so the kids were in bed and everything and he was sharing with me his difficulties at work that day. And just verbally just shared everything and [00:24:00] then he finally said something that I had been waiting for him to say, and he said what do you think about that?

And I was silent for a solid minute because I knew. The words I use right now are gonna be super important to what happens next. And they can be very impactful. And I can go the way of supportive cheerleading wife, or I can go the way of ranting lunatic. And I just basically, I, the Lord just dropped it in my brain.

Just say this, how long are you gonna let them keep doing this to you? Because I wanted him to see that what he was experiencing, he didn't have to continue to experience and I wanted him to be able to leave that environment. And when we had that conversation, that was the night that we decided, okay, let's.

We gotta figure something else out. You've gotta do something else. And started keeping our eyes open for what could [00:25:00] we do next? What could work? And shortly after that, the Lord brought that training across my path that I ended up taking. So for me it was a lot of excitement because I knew I crave.

Just that physical presence of him all the time that that's my love language is physical touch and closeness. That's one of the big ones. And we didn't have that hardly at all at that time, and I really wanted, was looking forward to having more and more of that in my life. So there was some.

Probably trepidation over how is this gonna work financially? Is this gonna work for our family? Are we gonna navigate this well? But frankly, as a one income family, we had never been wealthy. We had never experienced a time that I didn't have to think about being careful with money and everything.

So that wasn't a piece that I really feared. I just wanna make sure we would have enough, and we have the Lord's blessed us all the way through. And [00:26:00] I don't think I can say that there was a lot of fear for me. I'm actually the bigger risk taker than Larry. But that was something that I was really excited that we were gonna be able to pursue.

Scott Maderer: So when you think about couples that are. Working on their marriage and again maybe it is that one income family or maybe they are thinking about starting a business, one of them, or both of them. What's the most important things? You mentioned earlier having a family mission statement starting on the family side.

So let's assume we've done that and we've communicated that and we've arrived at, okay, this is the plan and how it's. It's gonna work for us and our family. This falls within that, that baseball field. This is fair. When they start thinking about the other side, the business side, what are some of the first things that you encourage them to think about?

Larry Pruett: I just think it's so important [00:27:00] for couples to be on the same page, to have the same dream, to have the same vision together. And so part of that family mission statement is doing just that. And so the family mission statement. Just moves really nicely into that business mission statement or vision statement, whatever you wanna call that.

So again, these are all foundational things that are just so important that we have the, have these things in place so that when problems come up, because they will. You've got something to fall back on to get your bearings again. So we really work with people to to have that mission, to have that foundation going.

And then to make sure that that again, that they're dreaming together, they're on the same page, that they have got their margins built into their life that they can focus in on where they are to be going [00:28:00] that they've got that connection. We use that word a lot, that they're connected as a couple.

They're connected as a family. And then honestly, once you get all of those foundational things going. Then there's a million different ways you can go as far as the business aspect of things. So we work with people in all different kinds of industries and fields. Our backgrounds e-commerce. So we've kinda had a tendency to draw some e-commerce sellers who into our fold, into our audience.

But but again, once you get that foundation going, then you can build on it a lot of different directions and there's a lot of freedom in that.

Sue Pruett: Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Maderer: I've got a few questions that I like to ask all of my guests, but before I ask those, is there anything else that the two of you would like to share about the work you do working with couples and entrepreneurs as coaches and as guides?

Larry Pruett: I think the first [00:29:00] thing that comes to my mind is that most of us say the word yes way too often. And we encourage people to say no more often and to say no. Guilt-free and with confidence, and that's part of what Sue is talking about again, with those the foul polls and such because. We all kinda suffer from shiny object syndrome.

There's always something new and exciting and you are just about to succeed, and then you go and you jump off to something else. We get distracted, we get overwhelmed. We're just trying to do too much. And so I just wanna encourage people to to really be selective and to be careful about what you're saying yes to, because there is a cost that comes with that.

Again, one of the things that we have really started doing recently is we've taken our mission statement. We put it into an AI tool [00:30:00] like chat, GPT, and we've got this list of these prompts that we use now. And chat. GPT can't make decisions for us. It can't rule our lives, but it can really help us to think through some different things.

And so anywhere from just simply going and. Helping somebody with something. We want to do that, we want to be helpful for other people, but we have to realize that that is a, it costs us time, it costs us energy, and is it going to help us to continue on towards our mission?

Yeah, just encourage people to feel that freedom to say no without being a jerk, without being unfriendly or whatever. 'cause there's times where you do need to say yes to things that aren't going to make you money, for example. There are a lot of times where we serve in that way, but we have to be selective about it and we have to be careful about it.

Sue Pruett: Yeah. And I [00:31:00] think that quick way to say that is to say no to everything that's not. Exactly right for you right now. And so saying yes to only the best things and when you can get to that point, that's when you reach the level of you're living out exactly what God has made you to do, what you are wanting to the purpose you wanna fulfill your life with.

That's just a quick way to say it. Yeah,

Scott Maderer: so one of the things I like to ask all of my guests is my brand is inspired stewardship, and I run things through that lens of stewardship, and yet I've discovered that's one of those words that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

So for y'all, when you hear the word stewardship, what does that word mean to you?

Larry Pruett: Yeah, the first thing that comes to my mind is the management, the responsibility. To a lot of times we think about money to manage and to use it money effectively, but not just money, skills, abilities, [00:32:00] talents and in our situation just as a practical way of answering this for example, Sue is an extrovert.

I'm an introvert, all right? So I don't like. Necessarily to be recorded whenever I'm talking, like what we're doing here today. This is out of my comfort zone, but I believe that I need to steward the passions God has given me, the talents, the abilities, the time, the energy, everything.

And to, convey the message that he's laid upon my heart and in our situation, we are passionate about encouraging and challenging and cheerleading, married couples, and in particular married couples who are doing business together. And so that means. To be a good steward. I need to step outta my comfort zone and I need to come on your podcast here and I need to do other things, even being up in front of people live and such.

And [00:33:00] just recently I've decided I actually enjoy public speaking. I've made that decision and partially just because I have this message that God has given to me, I need to be a good steward and to share that with. Anybody who will listen.

Sue Pruett: Yeah. I don't know, Scott, if you remember the movie that came out many years ago called Chariots of Fire?

In that movie there's a Yes. Exactly.

Scott Maderer: No, I'll probably get, I'll probably get a copyright right because the music, I kidding. I'm kidding. Can cut Don. I don't think my hum will be mistaken for the real thing.

Sue Pruett: Fix

Scott Maderer: it. Opposed? I think I'm saying, but there's a conversation in that movie between Eric Liddell and his sister, and Eric was a runner.

Sue Pruett: He was an Olympic runner. He was the son of missionaries. And his sister was upset with him that he was running and not leaving for the mission field like she thought he should be doing at that moment. And he says to [00:34:00] her. God made me for a purpose for China and I'm going to go, but he almo also made me fast and when I run, I feel his pleasure and if I do not run that is holding his gift in contempt.

Scott Maderer: So

Sue Pruett: I think that stewardship means you take everything that God has given you. Every good gift comes from above. You take everything God has given you and you use it well, and you use it for the purposes that he has laid on your hearts, and that's when you're a good steward.

Scott Maderer: So I've got a question for both of you and Sue.

I I want you to start on this one and y'all may end up with the same answer, but I still wanna hear both of you. If I invented this magic machine and with this machine, I could pluck you from where you are today and transport you into the future, maybe 150, maybe 250 years. And through the power of this machine, you were able to look back and see your entire life.

See all of the connections, all of the ripples, all of the [00:35:00] impacts you've left. What impact do you hope you've left in the world?

Sue Pruett: I hope there's a lot more people in God's kingdom because of what I've done. We obviously have a sincere desire to spread the gospel. And the verse always springs to mind.

And I should. Memorize the reference too, but it talks about there's nothing that gives me more pleasure than to see that my children are walking in the truth. So I'm hoping to see that my children and my children's children and their children all follow suit in pursuing the Lord. And in seeing we talked about, one of the things we wanted to do was show our kids that there was more than one way to do life.

And our kids are doing life in different ways. We've got some that are more entrepreneurial, some that are more employee minded, some that are doing different things. And so I hope that just continues in our family line. What about you,

Larry Pruett: Larry? Yeah, good answer. So our big hairy, audacious goal is to [00:36:00] end divorce within the church.

And I know that is, that's one of those that will. Never take place never really happen. It's like our sanctification process of becoming more, like more and more like Christ. We're never going to become like Christ, but that's our goal. So we have these big, lofty goals and so looking back on my life, I would like to see marriages that were saved.

Lives that were impact and generational impact where not just that not just that one even though one is super important, not just that one relationship, but how that impacts that couple's children and grandchildren and down through the ages.

Scott Maderer: So what's coming next on your journey as you continue on this journey?

Sue Pruett: So we are working right now in groups of [00:37:00] couples with leading them through what we call the two, two four pathway. And we're helping them to find their purpose, develop their their family mission statement, as well as then pursue exactly doing exactly what God has made them to do.

And that's really where we're at right now. It's it that kind of was born out of. Seeing couples in business together and seeing how the pressures of the business affected their relationship with each other, and we want to help them thrive in both business and marriage.

Larry Pruett: And so our real goal is to develop community.

Yeah. With entrepreneurs we're a little bit crazy, we're a little bit unique. The average person out there doesn't really get us and understand us and how could they, right? So we wanna build this community of married entrepreneurs who. Who build into each other's [00:38:00] lives as well as us leading them through our pathway as Sue said.

And we do that in a group coaching experience to create that mastermind community type of a field to things. And then an ongoing community for long-term encouragement and.

Scott Maderer: And you can find out more about Larry and Sue over at side by side business.com. Of course, I'll have a link to that over in the show notes as well, so it's easy for you to find Larry and Sue.

Anything else you'd like to share with the listener?

Sue Pruett: We'd also like to offer your listeners, if it's okay at gift. If they go to side-by-side business.com/connect, they can get a hold of our connect cards, which is really just a tool that you can use to, to make sure that you get connected at least once a day.

Where you're just having a conversation maybe outside of the normal day-to-day [00:39:00] business stuff. Some of 'em are just fun and light. Some of 'em get a little deep. Some of 'em are more business oriented, some of 'em are more family oriented. But we would love to, to give your listeners that and just.

The deeper you connect, the more likely you are to find success in both your marriage and your business. And that's our thing. We say we wanna help married entrepreneurs build the business of their dreams side by side. So you're staying shoulder to shoulder as you make your way in the world.

Larry Pruett: Awesome. And I would just add to that guys these questions and the answer time are really short. You can do this. All right. The ladies are much more willing to jump into these type of things. And us, us guys sometimes we're like, I'm tired. I don't feel like talking literally two minutes, five minutes, something like that.

And just that short term commitment will make a huge difference. And in the connection between you is. As a [00:40:00] couple,

Scott Maderer: and again I'll put a link to that as well over in the show notes. So if anyone that didn't get that, it's gonna be found at side-by-side business.com/connect and of course I'll put that in the show notes as well.

Thanks so much for being here today.

Sue Pruett: Thanks so much, Scott. We really enjoyed it. Thanks

Scott Maderer: so much for having us on.[00:41:00] [00:42:00]

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