How to Work with a Chocolatier and Other Useful Pieces of Marriage Advice
Editor’s note: At the Chocolate Professor we are happy to have contributors who are professionals creating artisan, craft and specialty chocolate. Along with her husband, chocolatier Dean Bingham, Kirstin Thalheimer Bingham is a co-owner of Dean’s Sweets, a company we recently profiled.
Dean & Kristin Bignham photo MelissaMullenPhotography
I married an architect who became a chocolatier. Of all the ways he and I might have changed over the years, that was a very lucky development for me.
As for me, I started out in educational publishing and then got an MBA. That turned out to be lucky for my husband, Dean, too. Just after I graduated, Dean and I started a chocolate business together in 2004, called Dean’s Sweets.
There’s some kerfuffle about whether we should have named the business to include both of our names, or chosen something else altogether. Honestly, it doesn’t matter that much to me. It’s fine that Dean’s name is front and center. He is, after all, the chocolatier in the family. I do the business-y stuff. He makes the chocolates. What’s in a name?
Even with a kerfuffle or two, all said and told, we do pretty well, considering our complete lack of work-life separation. At least we do pretty well now. Sixteen years into our marriage and eighteen years into our business, our division of labor has blessedly solidified. He whirls the KitchenAid mixer while I put chocolate in boxes. He tempers the chocolate while I work with our team and customers. He dips 1,000 truffles while I write marketing emails, design labels, and do battle with QuickBooks.
Even saddled with QuickBooks, I consider myself very lucky. Not only is Dean an amazing chocolatier, but he’s also the chef for most of our meals at home, he’s a great dishwasher, and a top-notch general handyman. He comes by the handyman talent in part because of his architecture background, often working with builders. Dean designed and built the floors and ceilings in our two stores and put in the refurbished windows that allow customers to see our chocolate-making kitchen from the retail area. He’s a master at putting up drywall, painting the trim, and fixing almost anything that’s broken.
But, really, what fun would it be if there weren’t also sizeable frustrations as husband-and-wife business partners?
When we first started out, in our tiny retail space, we had “business meetings.” Just as with every professional job I’ve ever had prior to meeting my husband, these business meetings had to-dos and deadlines and small doable tasks. The intent was to move forward on our tangible goals, so that when added and multiplied, we might stay in business for another season. As a linear thinker, this made sense to me. I always got my to-dos done so I could come to the meeting and get a gold star.
Dean's Sweets chocolates Melissa Mullen Photography
Dean was in the kitchen working all week, and as the creative chocolatier in the family, he didn’t always do his to-dos, though he would, occasionally, making other things not on the plan. Week after week, I’d model appropriate task-completion behavior. “See, Honey, that’s how we get to check it off the list. We do the task.” When, a week later, Dean’s agreed-upon task was still not done, I was beside myself. “Wait. What? You said you’d work on the butterscotch caramel we were so excited about. What happened?”
“I made a stout truffle instead.”
“With beer?! That’s not in our business plan.”
“I know, but I felt like trying it.”
This went on for a few years, and I do mean years, as in long stretches of days, weeks, and months all put together. I cajoled, I complained, I cried.
Then, out of the blue, I had a serious aha moment. You’ll have to go with me on this one because it’s not chocolate-related. It was at our home in Portland, Maine, the summer of 2007, three years after we started the business. In front of our house there are five slate steps. One of the steps had a chunk missing in front, like a missing tooth, and the slate was breaking off in thin layers, crumbling more every day. It was dangerous to anyone walking up the steps—the mail carrier, for example, and the couple who lived upstairs. Never having owned a home before, and struggling to pay the mortgage each month, I fretted for a good long while about how to get the step fixed. Where would we find new slate? Will it be too heavy to lift? Can we afford it? For weeks, these questions whirled in my head. And because fretting took on a weird new heft when I combined it with the weight of being-married-to-my-business-partner, I didn’t say anything to Dean. I just fretted.
Until, one day, walking down the front steps on our way to work, awkwardly reaching one leg over, skipping the broken step, I said, “I’m so freaked out by this step! I don’t know what we should do, or how to get a new step. Where do we get slate? Is it expensive?”
And right then, Dean turned around, walked back up to the step, lifted the front edge, and flipped it over, so that the broken side was now facing down and backward. Dean put his weight on the step, pushing it into place, burying all evidence of the chipped edge in the riser of the next step up. Done. Problem solved.
Never, not for one second, had it occurred to me that we could fix the step simply by flipping it over. This was a complete revelation to me. In less than ten seconds, what I had worried about for weeks was fixed.
I had to take stock. I had some learning to do. And what I learned changed my marriage and my work life. Here were my take-aways that day:
1. Business meetings with to-do lists don’t work well for Dean, the creative in the family. Mini-meetings do. We sometimes have ten one-minute meetings in a day. There’s less pressure on Dean and together we can zig-zag in such a way that we both get feedback and we can move forward in incremental steps.
2. While I work linearly, Dean works circularly, sometimes finding solutions to things by working on something else entirely. I need to be patient and have faith he’s working on things in his own way.
3. I like solutions; Dean likes problem solving. I came to respect the way his mind works differently from mine in that instant he flipped the step. Sometimes, I work at things too hard.
I don’t want to sell myself short: I still think linearly, and that has scored us some decent wins. But combining Dean’s circular thinking with my square mind, we’ve grown even more. And I’m happy to say, it’s been with a lot less conflict. I learned to trust our differences, especially in problem solving—which is, by the way, at least fifty percent of what it takes to build a business. It still almost kills me when Dean wants to ponder something and I want an answer, right now. But I stomp away from the mini-meeting knowing it’s probably for the best. Time and contemplation and alternative views will get us better outcomes. Our business is stronger precisely because of our different ways of thinking, even if I resist it half the time.
So yes, I get to struggle with things I care about. I get to eat chocolate whenever I want. And I get to work with my husband who, nowadays, does a little better with his to-dos and thinks in wonderfully, frustratingly circular ways. No question, we’re learning from each other, and no question, I’m lucky because of it.