Working With Your Spouse in Business: What Dubai Taught Me About the Perfect Team

It’s 11pm in Dubai. The event has wrapped, the gear is packed, and Anna and I are sitting on the hotel terrace with a cold drink, laptops still open, reviewing the final edits before they go out to the client in the morning. The kids are five and a half thousand miles away in Edinburgh, safe with Grandma Monica, who has — once again — held the entire household together so we could both be here.

This, in a nutshell, is what working with your spouse in business actually looks like. Not a glossy couple-at-the-laptop stock photo. Not a romantic workation. Real work, real deliverables, real deadlines — and a cold Peroni at the end of it.

Anna and I co-own GLO, an event video production and hybrid event agency based in Edinburgh. She runs a separate photography business but has become our number one freelance photographer — trusted by our clients, brilliant at what she does, and someone who edits a full day’s conference photography and has it back to the client the same evening. Sound familiar? That fast-turnaround discipline is in our DNA.

After years of working alongside each other in this way, here’s what I’ve learned — the honest version.

Play to completely different strengths

The biggest trap couples fall into when working together is trying to do everything jointly. When Anna and I are on a job — like our recent conference in Dubai — the division of labour is clean and clear. She runs the stills. I run the video. We’re often in the same room, but we’re operating independently in our own lanes, doing what each of us does best.

This isn’t by accident. It’s by design. The more overlap there is in roles, the more friction. Respect each other’s craft, trust each other’s judgement, and let each other get on with it. That mutual respect doesn’t just make for better work — it makes for a better relationship.

The logistics only work if someone holds the fort at home

Here’s the part people rarely talk about when they romanticise the idea of working with your partner: if you both leave, someone else has to show up at home.

Our three kids — Euan (16), Cammie (14) and Eilidh (11) — are old enough to be reasonably self-sufficient, but they still need someone in the house, ferrying them to school and rugby training and making sure there’s food in the fridge. That someone is Grandma Monica, who moves into our home every time Anna and I are away on a job together.

Without Monica, none of this works. Full stop. If you’re considering working with your spouse in business, the support infrastructure at home isn’t a footnote — it’s foundational. Plan it properly, communicate it clearly with family, and never take it for granted.

The jet lag and long hours are real — but so is the glass of something at the end of the day

I won’t pretend there’s no cost. International jobs mean jet lag, long days on-site, and the particular mental load of simultaneously managing client deliverables and a business back home. When you’re both tired, patience wears thin faster.

But here’s the thing about travelling and working with your spouse: you get a version of each other that you rarely see at home. Away from the school run, the dishwasher, the never-ending admin of family life — you remember why you work well together. You talk about the job, swap ideas over dinner, and decompress at the end of the day in a way that’s harder to find in the usual domestic rhythm.

That glass of something at the end of a hard day in Dubai? Worth every air mile.

You need trust — but you also need professional boundaries

The reason working with your spouse in business can go wrong is the same reason it can go brilliantly: the relationship is so close that the normal professional guardrails can dissolve. Criticism of the work can feel like criticism of the person. Disagreements about approach can bleed into the evening.

Our solution is simple: when we’re on a job, we’re professionals first. Anna has full autonomy over the photography. I have full autonomy over the video. We don’t second-guess each other in front of clients. Off-site, we debrief, and we’re honest. But there’s a clear line between the professional conversation and the personal one.

That boundary has been one of the most important things we’ve built — not just for the business, but for us.

The business benefits are significant — if you structure it properly

Anna isn’t just a photographer I happen to be married to. She’s our most reliable, most trusted, and most client-loved freelance photographer. Clients in Edinburgh, London, and Dubai have asked for her by name. That’s not sentiment — that’s a genuine commercial asset.

Having a spouse who understands the business from the inside means there’s no onboarding, no explaining the culture, no managing expectations from scratch. She knows what our clients need, she knows what my standards are, and she delivers consistently. For a growing agency like GLO, that reliability is hard to put a price on.

The key is ensuring the commercial relationship is clean and separate from the personal one. Anna works as a freelancer on our jobs — she invoices GLO, she’s booked like any other supplier, and we treat that relationship with the same professionalism we would any other. That clarity protects both of us.

Final thought

If you’re thinking about working with your spouse in business — or you’re already doing it and wondering whether it’s supposed to feel this complicated — here’s my honest take:

It’s worth it. Not every day. Not on every job. But over time, there’s something genuinely powerful about building something alongside the person you chose to build a life with. You see each other differently. You respect each other more. And you end up with stories like a late-night edit session on a Dubai hotel terrace that you’ll still be talking about when the kids are grown.

Just make sure Grandma Monica knows what she’s letting herself in for.