EntreLeadership - 15 Minutes of Marriage Advice for Business Leaders (with Dr. John Delony)

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

If your spouse feels like they’re competing with your business, something’s broken.  In this episode, marriage expert Dr. John Delony joins us to talk about how to build a successful business without sacrificing your marriage, set healthy boundaries, and handle conflict before it wrecks your relationship. Next Steps: ·      🎯 Figure out your business’s next steps in a free consult call with an EntreLeadership team member: https://ter.li/cjk4u0 ·      📞 Have a question for the show? Call 844-944-1070 or send us a message: https://ter.li/ask-us ·      📚 Learn about the EntreLeadership System™: https://ter.li/system-p ·      💻 Get EntreLeadership Elite™ for your business: https://ter.li/elite-p ·      ✉️ Sign up to receive tactical tools, advice and resources in your inbox every week: https://ter.li/enl ·      🏢 Attend EntreLeadership Summit: https://ter.li/summit-leadership ·      🎤 Attend EntreLeadership Master Series: https://ter.li/masterseries-conference ·      📖 Order Dave’s book Build a Business You Love: https://ter.li/b4kru2   Connect With Our Sponsors: ·      Go to Belay Solutions or text ENTRE to 55123 for their free resource! ·       Go to Christian Healthcare Ministries and use code ENTRE for a 50% credit toward your first month of membership. ·      Visit NetSuite today to learn more.   Listen to More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💰 George Kamel   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know, when I started this company, I had one goal. Survive. Make payroll on Friday. I was running hard trying to rebuild from a bankruptcy, keep food on the table, and then be a good husband and dad. I'll tell you this, I didn't always get the balance right. Matter of fact, balance is not even a word we would use. I was completely focused on the business, and Sharon was okay with that, and she had the home front covered. But we did talk about it a lot to know that that was a C-East. It's not forever.

Listen, if your spouse feels like they're competing with your business, you've already lost, and no amount of success at work will make up for failure at home. So today, Entree Leadership's head coach, John Falcons, is sitting down with relationship expert, Dr. John Deloney, to talk about how to lead well at work without losing your marriage in the process. Let's get to it. Well, Deloney, thanks for being on the show. Love it, love it. I know on your show, and even when you speak at,

at entree events and us just sitting around talking about stuff, business and marriage. It comes up all the time. I don't know if I've ever told you this story. One time, at one of our events, I'm sitting doing one of those mentoring sessions, and it's a couple, and they're not getting along. It ain't going well.

And I finally say to them, listen, your business is not more important than your marriage. You don't want to get divorced over this thing. and the wife looks at me and she says, oh, we know we've divorced each other before because of this business. Wow. So they were married twice and they're looking at getting divorced twice because of the business. And I'm like, I'm looking in the back of my book, like, where's the instructions for this? I had no idea what to say to them.

But I remember, you know, later on, this is how it always happens to me. I always think of the good lines like after the fact, right? My buddy Deloney says, if you're married and you're in business, you're both in the business, whether you're both in the office or not, right? Why do you say that? And what have you seen that causes you to say that? Because all these divisions are, I call them academic, meaning we've taken the idea of education, of intelligence, and we've divided it up into different buildings.

Biologists over here, chemistry's over here, psychology's over here. And that's not how the human mind works. And we've taken that model and we've dropped it into our daily lives. Kids over here, wife over here, business over here. That's not how it works. You have one nervous system. You have one household. You have one set of emotions, right?

And so if you're not well over here, you will not be well over here. And if you're whole and good here, even when this sucks, you'll be all right. You know what I mean? And you'll have a much clearer head on how to deal with some of this stuff. And so there is no compartmentalization. That's a fantasy. It's everywhere all at the same time. Somebody said to me once, it's not waffles, it's spaghetti.

Yes. Or it's waffles, but like... With spaghetti on top of it? Well, like I do. And it's syrup everywhere, right? I know. Yeah, it's all over the place. I remember one time being in a room with clients, and you were there and they were asking you questions.

And I think the wife was the CEO or the president, and the husband reported to her, and it wasn't going well. Do you remember that situation? Because that's one of the first times I ever was like, I can blow this up, and I put their grenade back in my pocket. And I remember being mad at myself for doing that because it would have made for a great theater, but it would have cost, yeah, it would have been tough. Yeah, but what do you think, you know,

stepping away from it now, what do you wish for them? What do you think they needed to be firing on all cylinders? If you're married and you'll both work in the same business, especially if there's a hierarchy, one of you reports to the other, it's extra, extra important that you practice communicating and handling conflict, making sure home problems are well and good so that you can go enter into these spaces. And you all have entrance strategies into these roles and you have exit strategies out of these roles.

And it can be as simple as how Dave does it. The hat comes off when I go home and I'm dad or the hat comes on and I'm dad. Or it can be more complicated like, I need to remind you you're not vice president here, right? you're my wife here, or you're my husband here, or I can't let the fact that you didn't help around the house with the kids last night impact. You go sweep the yard today, right? Like, we have to keep those things, and that's really hard.

Yeah, boundaries is really tough. Oh, geez. What are some other tactical things that come to mind? Like, what's your advice for people in addition to boundaries? Anything come to the top of the list for you for couples working together? I think it's coming up with what parts of my day do you want to know specifics about and what parts of things do you say I can't carry that or I don't want to know So here's a good example in my life I was the Dean of students at a law school and at night

I was working with the local police department doing Crisis interventions and death notifications the first two times I came home the next morning so and it was me getting a text message 2 a.m. Here's an address 1087 which is a code for someone's passed away show up I would show up don't know what you're walking into I was wide I was wild right I'd get home having coffee with my wife who slept all night, six o'clock in the morning we're having coffee together. I'm like, dude, guess what I saw last night? And I would just go, dump it all. She started shutting down.

And what I did, instead of saying, oh, that's too much, let's come up with a way we can talk about this, I just kept quiet. So you just bottled it up. She's not, I don't want to burden her with this. So we ended up like this. And then we established later on, after we were deciding we want to stay married or not, right?

We've established, I'm going to tell you I had a rough night last night. And that's all you need to know. Got you. I don't need to know the gory details. I don't need to know the budget specifics. I don't need to know that this particular employee is still driving you crazy. I need to know I had a rough night or I had a rough afternoon. Or this morning was awesome.

And we have worked through and talked through what that means for each of us and what that means for rallying around and supporting each other. Does that mean that you never get into the detail? Like if you say, hey, it was a rough shift at a rough day or whatever, and she's in a place where she wants to go deeper with, she wants to talk to you about it. Do you go there? Do you say, yeah, I'm willing to talk about it.

I just don't want to burden you with it. If somebody invites me in, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And if somebody invites me in, I'll take that invitation. Yeah. And I'll also honor halfway through that invitation. She's like, okay, good.

Even though mom's story's not finished, I still want, right? And I think a lot of times we think, oh, our spouse doesn't care about us. And we don't recognize that's a separate person. And they're telling us, like the weight on the bar is all I can carry. And we don't love and honor that. Like, thank you for carrying 25 pounds, even though I'm carrying the other hundred. It's my job then to go get a coach, get a counselor, get a gang, some guys, some other business leaders in the community that I can just vomit with and be like, dude. And they'll be like, yeah.

And then I can go home and be fully present, right? Yeah. We get right back to that episode, but first, for a lot of entrepreneurs, health care is one of the most unpredictable line items in the budget. That's why I want you to look at Christian Healthcare Ministries. CHM is not health insurance. It's a budget-friendly, faith-based alternative to insurance. Instead of premiums that keep climbing and coverage that keep shrinking,

CHM gives you a more predictable monthly cost, with programs starting at just $115 a month. Lower monthly costs can free up capital to build your margin, grow your team, and reinvest in your business. And as a faith-based organization, CHM aligns with Christian business owners who want their health care dollars handled in a way that reflects their values. That's stewardship, not just savings. CHM even offers a groups program for small businesses that want to provide a health care sharing option to their teams. And right now, CHM is offering new members a 50% credit towards their first month of membership. go to CH ministries.org slash entre and use promo code entree.

That's CH ministries.org slash entree and use the promo code entree. Now let's get back to our episode. That feels like super good advice on what to do when you get home. But I hear a lot of times it's not what happens when I get home. It's that the husband, the wife is at the office, and they're either being disrespectful to each other in front of everybody or one of their performance is lacking and the other one doesn't know how to handle that on the job.

Fix that. How do you solve for that? It takes an extraordinary amount of emotional maturity and courage. What if you don't have, like if you realize I'm, I've shown up to a gunfight with a butter knife. Yeah. Like, I don't know how to handle this on the job. What are you guiding people to do? Nobody likes my answer.

You're not like my answer. You can control two things on planet Earth, your thoughts and your actions. That's it. And so I have to ask myself, is my marriage worth this? And if it is, cool. I'll sacrifice my marriage at the altar of whatever this business is. And in divorce court, we'll split it up. We're going to divide the business anyway, right?

What do you mean we're going to divide it anyway? If one of you is an exec and the other one's an exact or the other one works for the other one, and you all both started this business and you decide, I want the business more than my marriage, you're gonna divide it up. It's ending at some point. One of y'all's involvement is ending, right?

Or you say, I care about my marriage more than this business. Marriage comes first to me, that's what my anchor point is. And I simply cannot tell my husband who works for me that his performance is lacking, I'm gonna step down as CEO. And I know that sounds dramatic. That's all you can control. And hopefully, spouse would be like, what are you doing?

Your performance isn't up to what we expect of every other employee here, but I value our marriage more than my job title. So I'm going to put it on the table as a sacrifice. And hopefully your spouse would be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm like, right. Hopefully, they might not. Right. And so, but you can only control you.

And that feels powerless, and hopefully it also is empowering too. Yeah. And I'm sitting here listening to that, and I'm thinking about the team watching all of that play out. And I want to yell in the ear of the leader. You have to do something. Because if you let the spouse, you know, live out what we call sanctioned incompetence, you are setting the bar this low for everybody. For everybody.

Yes. If it's okay here, it's okay for that guy. It's okay for us. Yeah. Or maybe you don't want to continue a fight, but I'll throw the grenade in the room and walk out. You're fired. You can't work here anymore.

I'm the CEO, and I value our marriage more. You can't work here anymore. And we're going to deal with that, right? We'll deal with it. But I'm going to make the call here, right? And then this work fight is over. Our home fight just started. Just getting warmed up.

John, probably the most common question I get is, how do I have this hard conversation, and then it's followed with in a gentle way, without hurting their feelings, without making them mad. You can't control their response to your right action. You can't control somebody's response to your emotionally mature,

here's the way this is gonna be. And so trying to own that from them, trying to take their anger, their rage, they're pissed, all that, trying to take that and control it, you can't. That's probably why your marriage is in trouble too. Yeah, right? Yeah, and when you say that,

I'm thinking of the book, Crucial conversations, talks about the fool's choice. The fool's choice is, I'm either going to let them have it, or I'm going to keep my mouth shut. And both of those options are a bad deal. That's right. And then that makes me think of, and I want your response to this. In counseling, we call that leakage. It will find a way out. Okay. Usually at the most inopportune time. And so recognizing this incompetence emerges somewhere. Yeah. It emerges in the marketplace. It emerges in our home. It emerges when our employees quit because they are being held to a different standard or it emerges when they all stop working so hard because that's what the new bar is.

Yeah. It will come out. Yeah, I've heard what doesn't get talked out gets acted out. Yeah. Or I think it was Dr. Peterson who said conflict deferred is conflict amplified. If you see a problem now and you don't deal with it, you decide to keep your mouth shut, bury it, it will return and it will return a monster of its original size. Right. So if you keep your mouth shut or you can let them have it, It comes back way bigger. What would your buddy Jefferson Fisher say to do? Jefferson would say, know where you want this thing to end,

and be very quick and very clear and concise with what is going to be true now, and be quiet. That's the hardest part. That's the hardest part for me. It's the hardest part for me. All right, so this is a heavy subject, but I got a little game that I want us to play.

I have a little more fun, okay? I'm going to start a sentence, and then you're going to finish it. Oh, we're going to get canceled. This will be fun. Okay. One boundary, every business owner that's married needs is. Keep work at work and what's in the bedroom in the bedroom.

You can tell that someone is winning in their marriage if. Their spouse celebrates when they win. If you want your marriage to last, you should. should stop? This is for the men trying to fix your wife. She's not broken. Listen. One thing every business owner should tell their spouse.

I want to love you better. Will you give me a roadmap on how I can best love you today? The biggest mistake I ever made in my marriage is. Just kidding. Just kidding. Thanks for being here, Deloney. I can tell you about those. No, no, no.

There's a lot of them. We're done. Thanks, man. If you're not careful, you'll end up winning at work and ruining your marriage in the process. Or you can be intentional and protect what matters most. So if today's conversation hit home for you, don't just nod your head. Do something about it. Schedule a free consultation with one of our entree leadership coaches. They'll help you get clear on where your business is, where you're headed,

and how to build a plan that doesn't wreck your marriage in the process. Just click the link in the description. And if you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, share, and subscribe for more great leadership content. I'm your host Dave Ramsey, and this is Andre Leadership.