Ecom CFO Notebook - wedding week and partnerships

Ecom CFO Notebook is a (mostly) strategic finance publication for $10M+ ecommerce operators.

What I write comes from the patterns, problems, and decisions from our client work at Ecom CFO - providing brands outsourced CFO, accounting, and financial operations.

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I’m getting married on Saturday (tomorrow).

And no, I’m not turning my wedding into a Claude skill, a framework, or an infographic.

90% of what I write is about DTC finance. That’s my niche, and that’s not changing.

But sometimes it’s appropriate to share a personal reflection, especially when it’s something as big as getting married.

How I think it relates to you, the reader, is partnership - whether it’s your romantic partner or your business partner.

I wanted to share three reflections about partnership from the week leading up to my big day.

My achievement trap

I’ve been a solo founder, and my attention in building EcomCFO has been extremely narrow.

I was only focused on building, growing, and achieving, and if it didn’t relate to EcomCFO, I wasn’t interested in it. That included a lot of life admin and some relationships.

I shrugged off the dentist. I didn’t register my car for a year and a half. Going to the grocery store felt impossibly difficult sometimes.

I ignored my personal space — my apartment wasn’t nice. No woman would have been excited to stay at my place.

I skipped networking events, missed out on opportunities to visit friends. I lived in Portugal and Brazil but still didn’t experience most of those countries all in the name of achievement and growing the business.

In one of my favorite books, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson says you only have so many to give. And I gave them all to the thing that felt most meaningful. Everything else was secondary.

My goal in life is to spend as much time as humanly possible doing the things that give me the most meaning and purpose - creating, building, learning, writing this newsletter, writing in general. Those are at the top of my list.

When Kiara came into my life, I realized that the marginal benefit I was receiving from growing the business wasn’t as great as investing in my relationship(s). And all of those things that seemed trivial to me and were unimportant — they stopped being just about me.

It’s amazing how we usually take better care of someone else than we do ourselves.

Having a true partner gave me the space to not just focus on achievement.

Couples therapy and partner hygiene

Kiara and I have been doing couples therapy roughly once a month for over two years now, and I would not be the partner I am today without it.

Honestly, we probably wouldn’t still be together.

My perception of therapy has changed over time. I think of it more as coaching, facilitation, and partnership hygiene.

I can only see so far inside my own head. And Kiara and I talking between ourselves can only get so far. Our therapist is an unbiased third party that identifies blind spots in ways we can’t do on our own.

One of the biggest takeaways I’ve had is reducing the cycle time for conflicts.

Every partnership has fights. Someone says something, it lands wrong, one person shuts down, there’s some back and forth, and eventually reconciliation. Historically for us, that cycle time took days, sometimes up to a week.

Therapy has compressed that cycle time dramatically.

Instead of it being a full day thing, we can work through it in an hour, sometimes 30 minutes. We don’t always get back to being perfect, but we get close enough that it doesn’t blow the whole thing up.

It has also reduced the extreme peaks and troughs of conflict.

The other biggest takeaway I’ve had is less quantifiable, but nonetheless just as important, and that’s understanding. Understanding myself. Understanding my partner, Kiara. Understanding how Kiara perceives me.

Therapy has given me tools I wouldn’t have built on my own, and we wouldn’t have built them together without someone sitting in those conversations going: hey, did you catch that? Say more about that thing.

Your partner deserves your 3rd draft

There are very few things in my life like wedding vows that have forced me to sit down and write out what someone means to me.

Me writing a birthday card to my mom, for example, is a first draft. Usually fine. Passable. She’s just happy to get a card.

But when you’re standing in front of 130 of your closest family and friends, there’s a different weight. And I want my effort to be equal to the weight.

I’ve been reading Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird about her writing process, and she emphasizes how bad first drafts are.

It’s a shame we don’t build more of these forced moments into our lives — to give the people who mean the most to us our third and fourth drafts.

In writing my vows, I found some writing prompts that helped me think about how to go about them, and the question that inspired me most wasn’t why am I marrying this person? 

It was what excites me about marrying you?

Those are different questions. The first one gets you a list of boxes to check — smart, kind, pretty, shared values, common interests. But that’s a description of a lot of people.

The second one forced me to get specific, to find the thing that makes Kiara irreplaceable and not just acceptable. There are plenty of acceptable partners. What makes her a hell yes?

I can’t wait to deliver my fourth draft to Kiara on Saturday.

Your partner’s partners

When you partner with someone, you’re not just them to your life. You’re entering into a partnership with their partners — their family, their close friends, their network.

I’ve learned that that’s a multiplier in one direction or the other. It can make things better, or it can make things worse. It shouldn’t be the reason you choose a partner, but it’s not nothing.

Kiara’s parents are amazing, capable, grounded people, and a real example of what a solid, long-term partnership looks like.

I didn’t fully appreciate how much that would matter when I was focused on just finding the right person, but it does.

I’ve also written a letter to them, and I’m on my second draft of that letter too.

Thanks for letting me reflect. I’ll be back with hardcore DTC finance stuff next week.

— Sam

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