Capital Gaines: Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff

by Chip Gaines

  * * *

  MY BASIC SYNOPSIS

  THE PRODIGAL SON

  This guy leaves home, takes every penny of his inheritance, and hits the road. He acts like a total punk and then proceeds to quickly blow all of his family’s money and becomes destitute. In complete humiliation, he has to go back home and beg his father for forgiveness. When he gets there, he is welcomed back with open arms and a party to celebrate his return.

  * * *

  Simply put, I did not get what I deserved. It was actually amazing in a miraculous kind of way. They could tell by the look of defeat on my face that I was embarrassed. Instead of the school’s recommended ninety days, I had only made it a few weeks. So as you can imagine, I was far from fluent, which was the only reason I’d gone to Mexico in the first place. And on top of that, now both my family and Joanna’s family knew the extreme shortcomings of my businesses. I was operating on very thin margins, and for the first time that became completely evident to everyone. If everything didn’t fire on all cylinders, this frail machine I had built would implode almost instantly.

  To both my dad and my future father-in-law, paying people on time defined integrity. To them I had just committed a cardinal sin of business—writing checks in hopes that other deposits would come in, robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. They’d also discovered there was no real bookkeeping going on in any of my businesses.

  I had a long way to go in regaining their trust and respect, but the grace these men extended to me reframed the very nature of our relationships. It opened the door for the three of us to collaborate on future endeavors. In the coming years they would become my mentors, partners, and investors in various business opportunities.

  Before Mexico I sure liked to tell people that I was a businessman and an entrepreneur. But there’s a big difference between launching a few businesses and actually building something that’s sustainable. And by that definition, I wasn’t operating even one truly successful business.

  My intentions in going to Mexico to learn Spanish were sincerely admirable. But to be honest, I was also excited about taking a few months off at the beach. I cared about my businesses and my crew big time, but I was still acting like a kid—and they deserved better than that.

  For the first time, while driving that truck home with Shiner by my side, and while feeling the sheer humiliation of being found out, I began to sense the gravity of what it takes to run a business, to glimpse what the life of an entrepreneur actually requires. And it dawned on me that up until then I’d been pretending. An owner of a young business—or in my case three businesses—simply can’t be on a beach two thousand miles away.

  It became very clear to me that I had to grow up and become the leader these businesses needed. Or, I thought, maybe it was time for me to cash out and sell them—just count the whole thing as a learning experience.

  I’ll be honest: cashing out felt like the safest, most logical conclusion. The nice thing about working at some corporation is that you get to go to Mexico as soon as you’ve saved enough money and accrued enough time off. You don’t have to give it a second thought. But when you own a business, all of the responsibility ultimately falls on your shoulders. The buck stops with you, every time.

  Perhaps you have to be crazy to choose the life of an entrepreneur, I realized. But you have to be stupid to choose it without ever counting the cost.

  I look back on that trip as pivotal. I learned some crucial lessons in a short amount of time, and I grew up a lot. After shaking off the doubts, I came back more motivated than ever to dig in and get after it with these businesses of mine. This was the catalyst I needed to create change. If not for that trip, I’m not sure I would have evolved into the businessman I’ve become.

  I also realized I had unintentionally put Jo in a terrible spot. No language acquisition or dream trip was worth that. It became my mission to prove to Jo, my parents, her parents, and myself that I could do this—that I was the real deal, and I wouldn’t stop until I made this entrepreneurial dream of mine a reality.

  Who could’ve guessed there was so much to learn from one misguided, bull-fighting, broken-down trip to Mexico?

  CHAPTER 4

  LEAVE AND CLEAVE

  I was twenty-six when Joanna Stevens and I first met. I’d only had a couple of serious relationships by that point. And to be honest, I wasn’t really the serious-relationship type, mostly because I was managing three businesses simultaneously and didn’t have a ton of extra time. But most of my buddies from various phases of life were already a couple of years into marriage by that point. I think this kind of sped the process along for me, and eventually I started wanting to settle down too. One slight problem, though. I hadn’t quite found anyone I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

  The first time I saw Joanna, I knew for sure that I wanted to date her, but I wouldn’t say I knew for sure that she was “the one.” Several dates in, I still wasn’t plotting to buy the ring. And you’d better believe that Jo wasn’t exactly planning our wedding either—not after I’d showed up hours late to our first date. But what I did know from day one was that I wanted to spend time with her again. She intrigued me. And I’ve never stopped feeling that way.

  When Jo and I finally got married, we knew we wanted to forge a new path for ourselves. The fact that we ended up with four phenomenal parents, people who love us and support us, is rare. They have sacrificed for us in ways that, looking back, still bring tears to our eyes. We understand how uncommon that is, and we do not take our parents or our upbringings for granted. Since beginning life together, we have wanted to take the best of what each of our parents taught us and the best of our own God-given abilities and weave them together into something that feels just like us.

  Jo’s parents could have been John and Yoko look-alikes.

  I have always found Joanna’s parents to be fascinating. They met in Korea back in the 1960s. That’s where her mom was born and where her dad was stationed in the Vietnam War. Jo’s mom was this firecracker, and honestly she’s still that way. She’s the kind of woman you love and respect for a lot of reasons. Her bravery and willingness to leave everything she had ever known for the sole purpose of marrying Jo’s dad, Jerry, was admirable, to say the least. I can’t imagine how scary that must have been, moving to a foreign country and only knowing a handful of words in English.

  The two of them were real rebels, genuine hippies—which if you know them today is actually comical. But once they “grew up” and had their three beautiful daughters, they traded in their free spirits for responsibility, order, and safety. And get this: after owning his own Firestone dealership for ten years and then selling it, Jo’s dad became a safety manager for Bridgestone/Firestone Corporation. Imagine that. I married the daughter of a safety manager.

  My parents—the all-American dream.

  My mom grew up in a traditional hardworking family, and my father was raised by a single mother. He grew up in borderline poverty, his mom working three jobs just to survive. When my mom and dad got married, they made an unwavering commitment to my sister and me that we would always have a loving, safe place to come home to. They were self-made, middle-class Americans who made a conscious decision to be generous with their time and resources, truly always giving of themselves. This mind-set was really what molded me into the daring, confident person that I am.

  They say opposites attract. I don’t know what kind of research has been conducted to back up this theory, but if mine and Jo’s relationship is any sort of testament, that statement couldn’t be any more accurate. During our dating years, it was glaringly obvious how different we were from each other. She’s a quiet, detailed, cautiously safe door locker, and I’m a wild, obnoxious, break-every-rule-in-the-book risk taker.

  Now, I don’t break rules just for the heck of it. I even acknowledge sometimes that they exist for a reason. It’s only when the rules are dumb and need breaking to achieve some greater good that I disregard them.

  My
trip to Mexico really was this make-or-break situation for our relationship. Jo mentioned shortly after that excursion that the time and effort she had invested in my businesses while I was gone was all the convincing she needed to jump in and help out where she knew how. I’m not sure if she just felt sorry for me and my lack of “accounting expertise” or if she was genuinely excited about being a part of the team. Nonetheless, she was in, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

  I felt like I had found my secret weapon. This girl was sharp. And good at everything. And she was hot. Jo had spent the past ten years working for her dad, doing his books in the back office of the tire shop. That type of stuff really geeked her out. She loved doing the kinds of things I just couldn’t stand to do. So this was the beginning of the very best partnership that I could have ever imagined.

  Jo is calculated. She takes into consideration any and all potential collateral damage. I think she must have some big whiteboard in her brain that’s operated by little gnomes or something. They’re in this war room of sorts, tallying up all the pros and cons, literally playing out every possible scenario to ensure that the best, safest decision is made.

  I really do appreciate this trait of hers; I just don’t understand it. The caution she exercises in the midst of every last decision has saved us enormous amounts of time, money, and pain over the years, but I just can’t bring myself to operate like that.

  When it comes to safety and risk, I’m glad that opposites attract. We learned early on in our marriage how to leverage our differences for greater outcomes. I would be out and about purchasing property after property to flip and sell, while Jo was quietly running the numbers, her mind four steps ahead of me. With each potential buy, no matter the risk level or how it could affect our bottom line, Jo always seemed to get behind my half-baked ideas. A few of the times that Jo showed restraint might have cost us something, but mostly her care allowed me to do my thing freely. At the end of the day, we’re both stronger for it.

  Jo has learned when to raise the little white flag and when to let things play out. And this give-and-take sort of mind-set works for us. She allows me to risk and fly, but when she sees a nosedive in our future, she calls for an emergency landing. And I’ve learned to trust those little brain gnomes of hers. I know she only calls Mayday when things are looking pretty dicey, so at that point I’d better listen.

  Jo and I were easily able to identify our strengths and weaknesses early on. Jo’s safe, detail-oriented design eye and my risky, big-picture, get-it-done attitude were the perfect storm of opposites attracting. We are crystal clear on these differences in our strengths, so we know how to run fast in our own lanes and steer clear of each other’s. It’s really refreshing to feel covered in my weak spots, especially by my wife, of all people, who I trust more than anyone else. That is what I would call hitting the jackpot, to say the least.

  That’s not to say we don’t exercise our weaker muscles from time to time. We do. I push Jo toward getting comfortable with big-picture thinking, encouraging her to gain some confidence in her instincts and dreams. And she keeps me focused on small things, because the little details are what keep us on track. But we both walk in authority in the areas of our natural God-given strengths, and that seems to be what makes working together so seamless in our case. As we’ve learned to harness these opposing characteristics and shore up each other’s weaknesses, we’ve managed to make this working-together thing look pretty easy.

  I get that a lot of couples couldn’t work together—it’s not for everyone. People just figure they’d wring their spouse’s neck or something. And if we were to choose to zero in on all of our differences, Jo and I could easily drive each other crazy too. But when you recognize what lane you should be operating in and you stay there, the implicated “dangers” of working together start to fall away. It’s when you merge lanes and start telling each other what to do that this whole lifestyle we’ve chosen can start to get complicated.

  It’s just human nature for couples to turn their insecurities and animosities against each other during life’s more challenging seasons. But Jo and I were constantly working on encouraging each other in our harder times because we realized the only way we were going to make it out alive was together.

  Both of our parents worked together at various seasons in their lives, and I think that contributes to how natural it feels to us. Jo’s mom worked diligently for years to keep costs low at her dad’s Firestone dealership. And my mom worked alongside my dad at both their sporting-goods store and flooring company. Having that modeled for us by our parents and seeing how they worked through their differences gave us that much more confidence that this lifestyle could work for us too.

  Juggling being co-workers along with being a married couple can feel like walking a tightrope at times. The hardest part for us is turning off the work side of things and focusing on us. We have to be really intentional to not talk about business all the time. For example, we have to choose not to discuss project lists, payroll, or an upcoming client on date night. When we get home at the end of the day, the business truly needs to be out of sight and out of mind; our babies and our marriage must be the only things in the world that matter. This has proven to be one of our biggest challenges and is definitely easier said than done. Work-life balance is difficult in general, and we are far from perfect, but we will never stop striving for a healthy relationship in all of its various forms.

  We had to get a few good fights under our belt before Jo and I figured out our “big secret” to working together successfully. The key is always giving each other enough slack in the rope to make mistakes. Affording each other a little extra rope has (mostly) equaled smooth sailing for us. So we try to give each other plenty of space. We don’t like to corner each other or demand that we talk our problems out right in the heat of the moment.

  Giving each other room to stretch and spread our wings also makes our marriage feel spacious. There’s room to try things out and change direction. The parameters aren’t so tight that we feel suffocated by our relationship, and there’s room for both of us to continue to grow and thrive and do our work to the best of our abilities.

  The irony here is that while we give each other a lot of emotional and mental space and lots of room relationally to try new things and even to make mistakes, we have much less physical space in our relationship than most. Jo and I wake up together. We go to work together, spend all day side by side, and then go to sleep right next to each other. That’s a lot of togetherness. I wonder if one directly has something to do with the other. Maybe it’s when you are always feeling restricted by your spouse, ordered or micromanaged, that the boundary lines of the relationship feel too confining.

  It could be because Joanna and I give each other the room to be ourselves, encouraging each other to run and grow beyond our perceived limitations every day, that we love spending nearly every waking moment together. Who wouldn’t want to spend all of their time with someone who loves them for who they are and believes the very best about them, who encourages them to fight for their dreams and is the very first one to jump in and fight by their side? And then at the end of that day, they are a safe place to land. (Whoa, writing this out makes me want to spend even more time with Jo.)

  I have to admit it took us awhile to figure all this out. When we did our first flip house together, I was doing the painting, sanding the floors, staining wood, and so forth, and Jo was picking out finishes and paint colors and doing the other design things she does. It was her first time to do anything like this and my first time to ever flip a house with a partner. She wanted to micromanage basically every little detail. She questioned why things weren’t done yet and gave lots of “tips” on how to do things more efficiently. But I wasn’t about to take advice from a first timer on how to do something I’d done for years. We had our first big fight during that job, and I’m pretty sure it took us ten steps backward in our relationship.

  After that “little spat,” Jo and I
realized that we could either pull against each other and create this volatile environment where it would be hard to survive, or we could pull in the same direction. And we’ve learned that when we pull together, we’re a tough team to beat. When Jo and I get into an argument, this tug-of-war concept has often served as a compass of sorts, helping us navigate our way out of our differences. Our “pulling together” mentality helps keep us fighting for the same thing.

  Of course, working with a spouse isn’t right for everyone. I completely get that. It’s a constant fight—fighting for each other, fighting against each other. It seems like it never ends. And on top of that, work can start to become your marriage’s centerpiece if you allow it to. But these same principles don’t just apply to working together full-time. They apply when you’re working together on repainting your house, picking out a new car, or even grocery shopping.

  Whether you work together or not, there are going to be opposing forces pushing against you and your marriage. That’s a fact. But it’s in these sink-or-swim situations that you have the opportunity to be a safe place for your husband or your wife rather than making the struggle even harder. You can fight for each other and with each other instead of against each other. And when the two of you come face-to-face with resistance, you can pull on the same end of the rope so hard that opposition loses its grip and falls face first into the mud.

  Life can be tough, and the world can be cruel and relentless. So far as I can see, the point of marriage is to have a partner, a friend for the long journey ahead. I think by and large people underestimate their spouses. Jo and I have always believed that it is us against the world. It’s not that we think everyone is out to get us. But we know that in all the world there is this one singular human who will be on our team every time. Understanding this and protecting it at all costs has become bedrock for our marriage.