New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

Question

This is a question about men working for women. My wife and I have recently started a home-based virtual personal assistant business where my wife is serving the female clients and I am serving the male clients, since that seems to be the prudent thing to do.  However, the vast majority of our clients are women, which translates into my wife running at full capacity, while I have little utilization.  We would like to regain a balance where I am doing the bulk of the work so my wife has sufficient time to manage our home.  What are other Christian business owners doing in a mixed work world?  This is new territory for us.  Just wondering what you thought of this from a biblical and business stand point and if you had any other advice other than the safe guards (or hedges) we are already putting in place.

Answer

Great question.  No doubt the typical American mixed workplace has led to much of our country's infidelity and divorce problem as work life and emotions get entangled.  A couple of things come to mind in terms of your question.  First of all, I think your strategy of dividing clients by gender and serving them the way you do is a good way of dealing with your concern.  The main issue you face would seem to be one of context in that you've started a business that serves clients one-on-one in a very personal way, so it is hard to switch out which one of you in your family will actually provide the service given your rules of engagement.  Is there any way you can change the context?  In other words, can you take your skills and your services bundle and point them at a new customer target?  Are you able to shift your target market and your marketing message in a way that garners more male clients or a larger, different type of service engagement that takes you out of this very personal context you find yourself in?  For example, if one of your services is typing and word processing, can you use those same skills, but shift from a virtual personal assistant role (which likely has a lot of personal interaction throughout the day) into more of a larger, less personal project such as editing a book?

 

Perhaps other NVL members have some good suggestions as well and can respond by adding a comment.