Laboring together

August 31, 2008 10:39 pm

— By Andra Bryan Stefanoni
news@joplinglobe.com
PITTSBURG, Kan. — Just a few weeks after their recent 40th anniversary, Dennis and Pat Pickering attended a wedding and overheard a guest say, “… just so I’m not working with my spouse.”
“The feedback we’ve heard through the years is that you’re not supposed to do that. It can’t work,” Pat Pickering said.
But the Pickerings, who run their own home-based educational services company in rural Pittsburg, are among a significant portion of the population who are married and are in business together — and find that it does work.
According to statistics gathered in 2003 by the National Federation of Independent Business, there are about 1.2 million husband- and wife-owned small businesses nationwide.
Give and take
In 1983, the Pickerings knew that if they could successfully build a house together with a toddler daughter, they could tackle any project together.
“It is all about give and take,” Dennis Pickering said. “You have to honor the other person’s thoughts. You have to have shared goals, but you have to honor the idea that no two people will have the same idea. You must be willing to put your ideas together to get a greater whole.”
They started their business, which serves school districts across the nation, after the Nation at Risk report in 1983 that outlined problems in American schools.
“We decided to tackle putting together scope, sequence and evaluations for curriculum, and try to stay ahead of where schools are as far as their needs with software and other products,” Dennis Pickering said. “That includes traveling often great distances to put on workshops together. It’s great fun for both of us.”
Their work styles are in contrast. Dennis Pickering has a desk that is neat and tidy, and if there’s a piece of paper on it, he feels compelled to take care of it. Pat Pickering’s desk is “just the opposite, and we’ll leave it at that,” Dennis Pickering said with a smile.
Pat Pickering agreed that her husband doesn’t understand her filing system, but she said she knows how to find what she needs when she needs it using her own methods.
“I think he respects that, and that’s important in working together whether you’re married or not,” she said.
Although they’re together most of the day, Pat Pickering said they really treasure their car time when traveling to workshops.
“We like to get away,” she said. “We visit and visit, and it’s a different outcome than if you were to stay in your seat and contemplate the same issue.”
Pat Pickering said she finds it amusing that her husband asks her out to dinner because, as he says, “I haven’t gotten to see my wife all day.”
“I always laugh because we’re together all day, but we get to working on something and we’ll look up and say, ‘My goodness, it’s 3 p.m. Where does the time go?’” she said.
Even divide
RuthEllen and Michael Simpson, who opened The Finishing Touch in 1981 in Pittsburg, find the same to be true in the framing business.
“People think because we work together, we’re connected at the hip,” RuthEllen Simpson said. “Not true. Tonight over supper is when we’ll actually talk shop, because today he’s been up on second (floor) and I’ve been down here on first (floor).”
They divide their work duties evenly, with Michael Simpson doing most of the molding and his wife doing most of the matting for the business that they opened “on a whim with a $10,000 loan.”
“As newlyweds, we helped my brother at his frame shop in Kansas City,” RuthEllen Simpson said. “We decided to open our own in Pittsburg, and we laid it all on the line together. We even found a house to rent a few blocks away so we could walk to work in the early days to save time and money.”
She said she worked a second job during the first few years to keep “a roof over our head and food on our table.”
These days, business is so good that RuthEllen Simpson couldn’t remember what day it was.
“We are probably one of 10 or 20 top frame producers in the U.S., volume-wise,” Michael Simpson said. In addition to retail customers and a newly developed contract with Miller’s Professional Imaging to frame online photo orders, they hold contracts with numerous conservation organizations across the nation — such as Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever — to frame hundreds, sometimes thousands, of prints for annual fund-raisers.
But the couple said perhaps the best benefit of working together is that they could involve their daughters, Beth and Sara, in their business, from the time they were small and could play at the store on days off school to their teen and early college years, when they could work at the store and learn business and communication skills.
Family affair
Ron and Barbara Rhodes, who opened their first small grocery store in Pittsburg in 1976 and now employ 85 people, expressed similar sentiments.
“It grew from a couple-owned business to a true family-owned business,” Barbara Rhodes said. Two of their children, Drew and Tim, returned to Pittsburg to take an active role in the store, while Matt, who lives in Kansas City, is included in all e-mails and major decisions.
The Rhodeses, who have been married nearly 40 years, began their business partnership with four employees and thus found themselves doing everything from bookkeeping to manning cash registers to sacking groceries to cutting meat.
Ron’s IGA outgrew its first location, then its second, and now is at home in a building that is seeing the final touches being put on a major renovation and expansion, one that will bring the payroll to 100 people.
“We still remember the early days when we had a makeshift desk sectioned off by the meat department, and one of us would end up working off of a box of Charmin,” Ron Rhodes said.
Now, they work from their own offices, separated by a conference room where they frequently are joined by Drew and Tim.
The store has been successful, Ron Rhodes said, because not only do he and his wife bring unique skills and talents to the table, but so do their sons.
“We have always shared everything,” he said. “There’s not any aspect of the business, good, bad or otherwise, that we don’t both know. We also do that with our sons. We’re very communicative with each other. We sit down with our daily planners, and we go over financial things together. We also include our son Matt, who is in Kansas City, on e-mails to keep him in the loop.
“Openness is important. If you know, then whether you agree or disagree, at least you know and you can plan things together.”
For Barbara Rhodes, it was only natural to share the grocery business with her husband. Her parents did the same thing.
“They had a small grocery store called Rex’s Superette here in Pittsburg, so I had an understanding of couples working together,” she said.
Partners 24/7
For Jon and Janelle Prideaux, sharing an 11- by 14-foot office while operating their own business was “really the test of our marriage,” she said. “His desk was on one side; mine was on the other.”
The marriage, now at 29 years and counting, survived, she said. Their desks now are in a larger office and are farther apart, but they still enjoy working together every day in the auction and real-estate business.
“There’s some days I quit the auction, and some days he fires me, because both of us want to be the boss,” Janelle Prideaux joked.
But that independence can be an asset, she said.
“At this point in our life, I know what I have to do, and he knows what he needs to do,” she said. “We both usually go write up the auctions, take the pictures. Then I do the ads, he proofs them, I make the handbills and put them on the Internet, and we both go box up items and set up. Jon is very good at what he does and very knowledgeable, as he studies antique books continually and knows what things are worth. When we get to the sale, that’s where he shines. I deal with people and technology better.”
Janelle Prideaux said they make their partnership work because they “agree to disagree” on some things and are compatible on the things that count.
“We pretty much do everything together outside of work, too,” she said. “When you depend on one another so much and you’re used to being together, well, that’s who you are comfortable spending time with.”

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