Looking for ideas on how to help husband with business activities

[Tattered Heart]

My H and I started a farm last year. We raise chickens, pigs, and grow a market garden and sell at a farmer's market and direct sales. I am the main person that handles the financial side of things--marketing, taxes, expenses, budgeting, etc.

My H is very disorganized. Planned thinking is something that he really struggles with. He cannot stay organized to save his life.

I have 2 issues that I've racked my brain trying to come up with a solution to and I'm wondering if you guys could help me come up with a solution.

1. He spends $ for the farm then loses the receipts
2. He insists that we have a planting schedule, then deviates dramatically from the schedule

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Problem 1:

Losing receipts has been an issue for as long as I can remember. He loses them for work, personal expenses, farm expenses. At one point I bought a little basket that he could put his receipts into and I would just collect them at the end of the week when balancing out accounts. It worked for about 4 months, then slowly overtime, he started putting all his receipts in the basket, including work. I would help and sort those out.

The basket system has completely disappeared. I have no idea what he did with the basket. So now he just pulls his receipts out of his pocket and throws them onto his junk shelf.

When I know he has spent money, I ask him for the receipt. He looks at his ever-growing pile of receipts, gets overwhelmed by the thought of searching for it, and says "I'll get it to you later". When I ask him about it later, he gets annoyed and tells me to stop hassling him. I remind him that those receipts are needed as tax write-offs and without them, we cannot claim those expenses. He says he'll get it to me... .and by the time he gets around to it, he can't find it.

Any systems that you guys can think of? I could look through the receipts myself, but we are in this business together and it's important to me that he has some responsibility of handling business matters, such as just handing over receipts.

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Problem 2

This winter when we began to plan our garden for the years, he insisted that we track everything we plant, set dates for it, harvest dates, etc. He asked me to create a spreadsheet with this information so we could put it on a wall calendar. I worked really hard on this spreadsheet. It was tedious and took ALOT of time. I transferred everything over to an easy for him to read calendar with planting and harvest dates.

This week he has started just willy nilly planting things. Some of the things he is planting will be ready weeks before our first farmer's market. He isn't sticking to the quantity, which means for markets later in the season we will be out of products. I deliberately set out what products we would have for the market from May 1 to October 31 to ensure we have a nice blend of food. I feel like all my hard work is just being ignored. He plants things while I am at work so by the time I get home, the damage is done.

This week, I told him "I know you are excited to start planting. We still have 8 weeks before market starts and I'm worried that our market plans will be thrown off if things go in too early. Can you please stick to the schedule? I worked really hard on it." He dismissed my concerns and told me that we would be fine. I knew if I pushed too hard, he would get angry. So I ended with, "Could you at least let me know the dates and quantity of what you plant so I can track that? We talked about being more organized in tracking things this year."

I'm so frustrated and I know I'm at the point that if he deviates from the plan too many more times, I'm going to just let him do whatever he wants and the garden will fail. This is what happened last year. He just planted whatever he felt like planting and we often did not have a enough food on our table at the market. We didn't know where he planted things or when they should be coming up for harvest.

The farm is his dream and is supposed to be his plan to move out of working for someone else. I support him in this and love having the farm, but it's not my career choice, like it is his. If he cannot handling the basics of following a plan, there is no way we can be successful. I know that his inability to plan and organize is truly a disability for him so I want to make things as easy as possible. I just want an little effort on his part to come my way. Any thoughts on how to help him stay on course?

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[Margot Az]

Hello Tattered Heart,
Gardening is indeed an excellent practical approach to deal with time. Respecting schedules is a difficulty that my partner meets too. I am not sure it's a lack of respect in his mind. He merely forgets any plan, or a new idea sprouts in his fertile brain, which is not the same. He is not aware of it after he or we decided a "strategy". Two years ago, we had the idea to feed ourselves with our garden. All the same: he had insisted to track what we seed, etc... And yes, it is a tedious task to write all this down. I did it. I filded up a calendar too, that he could check easily, in order to see what needs to be done... It never worked and surprises grew up everywhere instead of what was expected.
I think  I mistook myself by assuming that I should be the one writing down the garden schedule. It was his idea, after all.  I don't know if I did it consciously or not, but I certainly fulfilled my need of actual doings. For this year, I thought it would be better to adopt another posture and gave him a virgin notebook, so he could define the garden plan and schedule.
Hopefully, he will get the opportunity to start to deal with time by himself, instead of relying on me. As we both garden, we check together what is logged in his notebook. Right, it's not always easy to follow. I want to trust it will work.
I understand your issue is also about the investment you made mostly alone and my idea is risky - although,  perhaps, involving time in the entire process of your project,  and not only in the more gratifying aspects of it, is also important for your husband.
I hope this helps and wish you a good harvest however it goes.
Warmly
 

[Calmcollected]

I’m in the same boat, except he’s a farm boy and we’re doing contracting. I keep an ornamental John Deere bucket on the hutch for receipts. To him it’s a collector item and he doesn’t want it wrecked, so it stays put because he values it. I got him in the habit of putting receipts in the truck console too and I empty them out periodically. I still find them in weird places, but less so.
I found the best thing to do is step back. The more you try to save them, the less they will step up to the plate. We had a terrible situation where his 16 year old son assaulted me. I think he’s borderline too. I wasn’t injured, but the police were called. We don’t live together. The more I try keep things organized, the more he feels controlled. I started handing over more to him. Staff scheduling, dealing with the accountant. It made him realize costs and schedules. I still do marketing, emails etc. But I stopped doing the quotes. Only typing them up and sourcing material costs. I make him write it out. We’ll discuss timelines and when payments are due and I make him be responsible for ensuring they are paid. It gives him an understanding more of the business as a whole. Without me he could never do this on his own. Bottom line, get them to write out the planting schedule and when it’s due at market. I find it helps them understand it more. Otherwise all that will be on his mind is getting the seeds in the ground.

[Tattered Heart]

Ugh. You guys are right. It was the option I wasn't hoping for. I have to give the responsibility over to him. But it's better that he handles and understands why it's important to track these things. If not, then it's just me taking care of him. We learn from mistakes and if he fails, then he fails. The only way he can learn is to correct what he gets wrong. I can support him and encourage him, and even help him come up with ideas, but it has to be up to him to implement those things.

I think this evening I will help him sort through his pile of receipts and then let him know that from this point on he will need to come up with a place to put only business receipts and that if he doesn't get them to me, we won't be able to claim the expense. It will be hard for me to give up that control, but it's what needs to be done. I just didn't want to have to accept it.

Tomorrow I'll print out the parts of the calendar that still need to be filled out and hand those over to him too. He actually understands better than me when things need to go in the garden, how long they take, and when they should be ready to harvest.

Thankfully I have the communication skills to talk with him about these things so I expect the conversation will go ok other than the usual balking at change.

[Calmcollected]

It took me 2 years to learn this and when it gets to crunch time, he always surprises me and comes through. I make sure I praise him for this stuff. I constantly reinforce the good he’s doing as much as possible. If something is going wrong, I will use an example of a mistake I made in my business that is similar so he can see that I made it too and I’m not berating him for something but letting him know the mistake I made and how I don’t want him to go through the same thing I did. For big things that happen, I make sure he knows I’m there and go through them with him. For example we have a lawsuit against us for $100,000. 90% of it is baloney. %10 we may be on the hook for. I talk with him before we go to the lawyer and write down questions we may want to ask or things he wants to know so we’re prepared. One thing I do is have staff text both of us with supply requests because he will sometimes miss things and this prevents wasted labour time. Time management of others is not a strong suit. When he’s working, stuff gets done fast.
We are co-dependents most of us in these relationships. We may not be at the beginning, but we can grow into it. I learned I cannot take on that role any longer.
We’re healthier when we allow them to be men. They become healthier too.

[Tattered Heart]

I didn't get the chance to talk about things in depth last night but did briefly talk about both issues. My truck broke down on the way home so I was stressed and frustrated about that (3rd time I've been stuck on the side of the road in a week). He was the one who actually brought up the subject. He had been out working in the yard before I called him to come pick me up and when we got home he showed me what he had been working on.

He started talking about all the things he wanted to start planting and I told him I'm concerned that if we plant too much that many of the things will be ready too early. He was so supportive and said, "OK. I want us to work together on this. It's our project. I don't want you worrying about that." I suggested we look at the calendar and get a plan for next week what goes into the ground and then tomorrow (which is today) we can look at market dates together and see what we want to have available on various dates.

Later while paying bills, I asked him if he had a receipt that I needed. He found it easily enough so I brought up the receipts issue. I asked him what is something that could help him put farm receipts in one place. He said if we could get the office set up (we've been putting that off) then he would use an "inbox" folder for receipts. He said if he had a clipboard that stayed in the same place he could just write down what he plants and I could enter it into our record keeping at my own availability. He's so darn reasonable sometimes... .

[Calmcollected]

Awesome! See! I forgot, I got him one of those contractor metal clipboards they has a closed section to hold extra papers. I find a lot of things I need in there. Kind of feels like a bit of weight off your shoulders that’s he is stepping up. It’s easy when things are super busy and overwhelming to just take over and do it, but in the long run it’s doesnt solve anything.