$200M Founder Reveals His Controversial Marriage Strategy

0:00Alright Marketing School listeners, this is a 20-30 minute segment of a full interview I've done with a amazing founder, entrepreneur, creative, visionary, visionary, new, you're going to start to know what you're going to do you want to join to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn to learn and learn to learn to learn to learn to learn enjoy the episode. All right, Patrick, how are you doing? I'm doing well, man. How are you? Good. It's good to see you. We're at this retreat still and final day. But Patrick, we've done a couple of these already in person actually at conferences as well.

0:43And I guess for those that don't know you, who are you and why should people listen to you? Who am I? Who am I is the ultimate question, right? No, I'm an entrepreneur. I grew up in the Midwest, went to school in Illinois, then ended up going to Boston. I never wanted to go into business, though. I was not one of those kids that was doing stuff like hustles when they're in high school or college. I wanted to go save the world. So I worked for the US government for a while in the Intel community. And then all of a sudden was like, oh, crap, I really hate the pace of the government. I want to go faster.

1:18I want to go faster. And so the best place to get speed is you know, entrepreneurship. And so started a company. And I didn't know this at the time, this was all a little bit more kind of pushing forward company called ProfitWell. We help subscription companies with their pricing and their retention, worked with everyone from DoorDash and Blue Bottle Coffee, all the way to Autodesk, Notion, Lyft, etc. And then bootstrapped that company for about a decade and then sold it a couple years ago for over 200 million. And then and worked at Paddle, which is the company that bought us as a payments company.

1:51And recently just started working on the next thing. Okay. And whatever you're comfortable revealing here, but it seems like there are a couple of frameworks you've put together with your partner, your wife. Yeah. Are you willing to share some of those frameworks? Yeah, totally. Yeah. So here, here, here's the hook here. So what are the best questions to ask with your partner to have a unbreakable bond? An unbreakable bond. Oh boy. High bar. um here here's here's the premise i most people suck at relationships and it's completely their fault and when you look at all of the research around relationships all of the like studies that have been done etc um there's this researcher named gotman g-o-t-t-m-a-n i believe is how it's spelled um he's you know has researched this for his entire life his entire career a lot of stuff comes down to limiting resentment.

2:41And the way you limit resentment is through communication and alignment. What is a beautiful way to do that, that we've all learned, especially if you're listening to this podcast, all the stuff we learn in business, right? And what I get a lot of crap for when I talk about this is I took many of the things I learned in trying to develop to be a decent, if not a good manager, and I applied it to my marriage. Now there isn't a power dynamic and all this other stuff, everyone who's like clutching their pearls listening to this, you know, I can kind of calm those particular nerves. But what ends up happening is like, my wife and I have weekly one on ones.

3:17Like, why do we have one on ones? Well, there's so much stuff that goes on during the week. Oftentimes, you can be living with your spouse, your girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. And you don't actually have any conversations, or you don't push anything forward for maybe a couple weeks, because you're both busy. You know, you're just watching some Netflix, you're getting dinner, whatever it is. But for us, it was like my wife would ask me to do things right before I went to bed, which is the worst time to ask me. And I would commit to those, which makes this ultimately my fault. But then I would forget about it, right?

3:47Well, now it's like throw those into the one-on-one because now it's like, oh, I need to get all this done. Okay, I'm going to schedule it. I'm going to go figure it out, right? But I've just limited resentment because she's not going to resent me when I don't do it because I'm going to remember to do it at this particular point. But the other thing, and this is the thing that you're getting at that most people mess up is what is the shared vision for your marriage or your relationship? And it doesn't need to be like world domination and revenue and all this other stuff obviously that you do get into in the business world.

4:15But like what's important to you? What do you want out of life? And having those conversations when you're dating. Like on my third date with my wife, I had gotten out of a long relationship that was just terrible for a lot of reasons, my fault, her fault, et cetera. My third date, I was like, listen, this is what's important to me. Like, this is going to change. This is not going to change. Like, if you're on board with that, fantastic. Let's keep going. If you're not, let's not waste each other's time, right? And it was said more sweetly and less cool than I'm giving off right now. What were some of those boundaries?

4:48High integrity. No lying. None. No white lies. No even smells of white lies. No, like, oh, I'm going to go get coffee here and you go somewhere else. Like, just none of that. Because that for me, I'm someone who trust is very difficult, incredibly insecure. And so it doesn't manifest well within me. Like, because it's not like, oh, is she like hooking up with someone else or something like that? It's more of like, it's more of a deeper insidious thing. Like, if I can't trust you, I'm not going to be your partner. I'm going to be someone who just lives with you. Right. And so that's where a lot of arguments that we might have are is like something might happen or I said, hey, we agreed to go do it this way and then she doesn't.

5:34That's one of my things. One of the other boundaries was around or the things I talk about is like constant communication. Like no going to bed unhappy, no going to bed angry, nothing like that. Like if something bothers you, like say it. Let's talk about it. Now, you might not understand it. So let's like have a good environment where we can talk through it. But none of this, like two weeks ago, you did this thing, nothing like that, basically limiting resentment as much as humanly possible. And then the, like the third big category was around like, um, you know, essentially it was very, it was a selfish one, which was me of like, this is really important to me, like building a company, always like pushing for stuff.

6:17I'm never going to be the white picket fence guy. I'm never going to be the nine to five guy. I'm never going to be the big vacation guy. and that has some major benefits and then it's a major trade-offs and so we explored a lot of those over like our first six months but within our first six months we knew like this was it and so yeah we've been together about nine years now and so yeah but the bigger thing that you were getting at we do off sites twice a year I know that sounds you know crazy we have an agenda but it's like we go on vacation and we have an agenda that we talk through at dinners and lunches and stuff as we go forward and sometimes there's a little bit of research that we got to do you know, while we're sitting by a pool or something like that.

6:55But one of the big things that we did early in our relationship, and then very formally, literally, we got married. And then that weekend, we did this was a series of questions just around like, what do we want? And there were questions like, and I can share them if you want to post them in the show notes, but it's like, you know, like, actual physical things, like, what stuff do you want? Emotional things. What do you never want to feel? What do you always want to feel? What is important to you? Service and experience things. What do you want to go do? What's really important to you? Stuff like when you're on your deathbed, what do you want to have done?

7:31What do you want to be remembered for? What do you want to make sure people, when they think of you, they think of X, whatever X is. And it was just a series of introspective questions. And then the process was spend 90 minutes just writing. So we just wrote, spent 90 minutes each. And then oftentimes, Sometimes you sit with it and then we come back to it a day later, spend another 90 minutes. And then what we do is we switch lists. I look at her, she looks at mine, and we just ask questions, not in a judgmental or any way, but literally just to understand. Like seek to understand on, okay, did you mean this?

8:04What did you mean by this? And then we get those notes so we both understand. And then we spend some time literally going through each other's lists together and being like line by line, I agree with this. I support this. I also want to do it. or I don't care, but I support you or I disagree. Like, I don't think this is good or I don't think that's what I want our life to be. And we were together, you know, the last time we did this, we've been together, I think it was seven or eight years at that point. And so it was one of those things where there were very few things where we disagreed. But imagine we were together for that long and we had major disagreements.

8:39Like, that would be insane. But that's how a lot of relationships are because you get into loss aversion and you're like, I guess I should marry this person. and I think those things are really important compared to kids or no kids like stuff like that because those are going to be really easy to figure out but for example like I want to fly private everywhere well if she disagreed with that or disagreed with what it took to get to that it's like that's a major difference right or if she wanted you know basically to have dinner every night with the kids. That's not going to happen. Now, it can happen a lot, but it's not going to happen every night because there's going to be travel, there's going to be stuff going on, etc.

9:20But it's just a lot of really important stuff. And then what's really important is the action that comes from that. Because we then kind of align our life. And then we start to figure out, well, this year, we're going to start doing this because we both agreed that that's really important to us. Or for her, time is a really important thing. So what we've started doing is we align our schedules as close as humanly possible. We wake up at the same time, we go work out, we end up walking the dog for 20 minutes. And then the rest of the day, like, there's no expectation that we're together. And then at 6pm every single night, I'm done.

9:53And between six and eight is hers and family time. And I basically started doing that because when we have kids, I just wanted to be in that rhythm. And then all of a sudden at 8pm, we start our evening routine and go to bed. So I'm literally beginning and ending the day. And that I didn't have to give up much to do that. And she had to give up a little because she had to wake up earlier because I wake up early. But like, I'm she's getting so much she's getting so much of the thing that's really important to her, which is that time and that connection, which you know, I'm more than happy to give.

10:25And so yeah, it's it's all just about alignment. And you can align if you don't know what you want. And so many people just have no freaking idea what they actually want. How many questions is this? It's like six to eight questions, but it's not, again, like the purpose isn't getting exact questions. The purpose is having a prompt to have these conversations, right? Like some stuff came out of this where like Jenny wants, like you'll be surprised too. So like Jenny wants to go hunting. I like hunting. Like I love hunting. I never knew that. Yeah. Right. Because we never really talked about it.

10:56I haven't been able to hunt in a long time because, you know, work and all this other stuff. Now all of a sudden it's like, cool, we're going to go do an elk hunt next year. Right. Like it's just a lot of stuff like that came out of it. That's both surprising. And also there's other things like, um, oh, she really wants to visit her family. Okay. Well, in the clarification, it's like, well, how much do you want to live next to them? Do you want to see them twice a year? Is it matter that we go there? Can they come here? And those, those are amazing questions to have because I don't want three years of resentment building up because we didn't see her mom enough.

11:24And I didn't even know. And then she's like, yeah, we don't see her mom enough. And I'm really frustrated. And now I'm starting to have a conversation from like a very negative place because I can't make up for time that's already passed. Right. And so that was, that's what was really, really powerful is because we could design our life. And then the other things that come out of these off sites are the shared budget, which we talked about a little bit. Um, that budget is really important. Like thankfully, neither of us are like hardcore spenders or anything, but like all of a sudden it was allowing us to be like, no, we should be looser.

11:51Like objectively, we should be looser with certain things. We should totally spend the money to do that, um, that thing or this other thing. Um, and then like our shared calendar, basically like a shared schedule of like what trips are we going to take this year and stuff like that but it's just all about alignment because alignment limits resentment i love it and i mean six to eight questions it sounds like you guys are being very intentional about it's almost like the amazon narrative where it's like a six page narrative it could be three to six pages or whatever like she wrote a lot more like paragraphs and sentences i wrote a lot of bullets right like it's not and like what came from that is you know a shared doc and it's all in notion we have a family notion That's basically like, hey, this is this is what's important to us.

12:29And prior to this, we we have shared values as a family. We have we have a mission as a family. We have we're going to like create a family crest. We're going to do some branding around it. And this is just more around like it's important to us. Like we are a unit. And if you're a unit, you should, you know, be really, really like successful as a unit. But obviously the aims are very different. It's fulfillment and whatever you want. Like if you're hedonistic and you and your partner want to like, you know, go and party all the time, that's okay too. Like it's just making sure that you're aligned to it because that's what limits the resentment.

13:03Love it. Are you happy right now? Yeah. I know. Like right now I'm tired and like ready for more hydration. But like I think that, yeah, I have reached a plane of peace that I never thought was possible. Um, anyone who's listened to me before, I often talk about this when we're talking about more personal stuff. So I grew up in pretty abusive household, like rampant insecurity, um, just as a human. And there's part of that, that I'm never going to get rid of, but there is nothing more, um, peaceful than understanding your personal mission. And we didn't really get into this, but I did a lot of exploration the last couple of years of like, what do I want to do now that I have, you know, this big pile of money?

13:48Do I want to be an investor? Do I want to do a hold co? And it's like, no, I want to go after something big. And I want to like, I'm an operator, and I want to continue to be a bigger and better operator. So I know that. And then there's, when you mix that with just such a level of peace with having a partner that you are perfectly or mostly perfectly aligned, because perfection is probably not possible. Like, holy cow, like what a life. And frankly, like, it's hard to say, because, you know, I do have money now, but I think that I could have had this also prior to money. Um, and so I think it's just, it's, it's one of these things where, yeah, the money does help me sleep at night, but even in the beginning of money, I had more anxiety than I had before because I'd gotten to such an even keel as like an operator and as a founder and like a really even keel.

14:36And then that just threw it all for a loop because it just changed life dramatically. um but I could have had this level of peace before as well happiness is uh you decide if you're happy or not happiness is a choice I think like there are things that make that choice easier and harder but um that's what's really funny about getting money is like or earning money um depending on how you want to look at it and I guess your political affiliations um it it's what was amazing about it is the realization that now none of my excuses are real. None of them like, Oh, I don't want to pay the money to hire a coach, like to lose weight.

15:17Well, you can hire a coach. You can absolutely afford a coach. Like I think money amplifies the best and the worst of you, because like, if you are undisciplined in a certain area of life, now you can really be undisciplined in a certain portion of your life. Right. Um, and so I think that it's like, that's thing that a lot of people don't realize is like i thought oh all these problems are going to be solved i'm going to be fit i'm going to do this i'm gonna do this it's like nope like those are those are emotional problems that no amount of money is actually going to solve so you got to work through that which is something i did i wanted to take a second to talk about today's sponsor hrefs hrefs is my favorite seo tool in fact we use it at my ad agency single brain for internal uses and also for clients and we've been using for years and years and the cool thing is they have a great academy that you can go to if you're looking to just learn seo and they have a free offering if you just search for hrs.com webmaster-tools my favorite feature with hrs it's a sneaky feature here but i'm just looking at zapier.com and what i'm doing is i'm looking at oh wow they got 10 million visits in the last i don't know six months or so compared to the previous six months well okay how are they doing it i can look at their site structure so if i click on site structure i can see that their blog has driven the vast majority of it and it was a five million a plus five million change right so basically what i can do is i can look at the pages that are driving that traffic and now i have a sense for what they're doing in terms of strategy so i can look at competitors i can also look at our own stuff too to figure out how we can optimize our own website so you can just check out hrefs webmaster tools that's completely free or you can go to the hrefs academy that's also free as well to learn more and that being said Back to the video.

16:52So here's another one. When is it the right time to cut loved ones out?

17:04My instinctual answer is immediately. I don't, but obviously with a caveat, like not just cut all loved ones out.

17:15Blood is not an excuse to have terrible people in your life. And that's hard because society, there's probably an element of biology and genetics make it so that you want to care for those people on some particular level. But that does not mean that you have to. Obligation is the enemy of everything. And to me, I cut my parents out really early. And that was really difficult. but it wasn't difficult because it was the wrong decision. It was really difficult because I was like, well, what will society think? Oh, am I going to have an obligation? And then there was an element of like, well, if they died tomorrow and I hadn't talked to them in years, would that be okay?

18:07And I got to a point where the answer was yes. Now, since then, my parents are back in my life. We've repaired some things. We've figured some things out. But I will never like have what you have with your mom. Like I'll never have that. And that's okay. Like, right. And that's not like a good or a bad thing. It just is. And so I think a lot of people, um, they hold on to really crappy relationships that are family members, friendships, et cetera. And if you're listening to this, you are likely in a place, even if you're poor, even if you're struggling, you're likely in a place where you can choose your family.

18:41You can choose your friendships. And a lot of times those, those will be people who you share blood with. but a lot of times they're not. It's very deep. And what does one do after selling their company for$200 million? It's, it's, it's actually a really interesting question because I think that this is the least relatable thing, depending on who's listening to this, but, uh, you go through like selling your company pushes you into an existential crisis because you sit there and And you've had this purpose for a really long time. And then all of a sudden, there's like an end. And not everyone builds their company that way.

19:23We were building our company to scale as big and as quickly as humanly possible. But all of a sudden, there was this end point. And then you as the founder, as an individual, have to go, oh, man, all of a sudden, my life just has dramatically changed. You kind of lost your purpose because you sold the company. And even if you're going to the company that bought you, things change dramatically. And then you have like a giant pile of money in your bank account. And that causes like, again, it's a net benefit. Don't get me wrong. But there's a bunch of little like, well, now I have all these like choices.

19:56And so I went through like a good year of what I call like cocaine energy, where basically I was like, well, I can almost do anything. I can hire this many people. I hired 17 people. I bought 19 gas stations. I did a crazy amount of stuff. Some of those were really smart decisions. Some of those were really dumb decisions. But you have to kind of like learn to have wealth and then learn how to like deploy or, you know, maintain that capital, which, you know, is a problem that not a lot of people talk about because it's, again, not really relatable to talk about. So when you sold, was there a period of time where you do you feel like you were wasting money to a certain point and then you decide you had to stop or were you pretty you're still pretty frugal once you sold?

20:35Yeah, your concept of money, when you get wealth, your anxiety or concept around money doesn't really change. That's a really interesting thing that I learned. Like I have really high anxiety around money because I grew up relatively poor and money was always like an argument or a big issue in my household. So even with a significant amount of money now in the 0.1%, I still am like, oh my God, am I spending too much money? Like we're staying at this hotel. I went to the grocery store and got Stoke coffee the first day that we were here because I was like, I don't want to pay$8 for a coffee. Right.

21:14Which is insane. Like I shouldn't do that. That's so dumb. And so I've had to learn over the last couple of years how to not like be a complete idiot when it came to like my time. But also I also have had to put in things into place because now the sums of money are much, much larger. So the amount you're paying lawyers, the amount you're paying accountants. And the result of that is all of a sudden, like you will have these high anxiety moments where it's not a hundred dollars here, a hundred dollars here. It might be a hundred grand here, a hundred grand there. And so I have a spreadsheet that basically I go to that just like tracks not our budget down to like the dollar, but just our general budget.

21:49And that allows me to like, every time I get this anxiety, I go, oh, there's a lot more coming in than it's going out. And that like calms me down basically. How are you tracking your budget? Are you using like Tiller? Like what are you using? No, I don't use any of the fancy apps. Jenny and I, my wife, we, um, we have a spreadsheet. It's just got, here are the big categories. Um, you know, and we have a big plug in there. Like there's a big category that's just like other, which is just a sum of money. And then what we end up doing is every month an assistant basically like plugs those numbers in.

22:17And as long as we're within, you know, like 10, 15 % one way or the other, we're like fine. Um, but again, it was more around the anxiety of like, I don't need to look at that information like objectively, but because of my anxiety around money, it like calms me down. But it also helps me realize like, oh, we have this much money to deploy for lack of a better word, whether it's in philanthropy or buying stuff for ourselves or experiences for ourselves, or making that money work for us, rather than like miserly just putting it into a bank account and like, you know, just hoarding it basically.

22:50Yep. And you know, one thing, I mean, when you think about people like Elon or even our friends to hit right people. It doesn't matter what level of success you're at. The most successful I've observed in general, entrepreneurs are pretty frugal, right? So why is it valuable for entrepreneurs to be frugal? If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes.

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