When Life Throws You a Curveball: Getting Laid Off Abroad and Starting Over Together
Most couples dream of moving to Europe — the slow mornings, the pastel-colored streets, the sense that life might finally slow down enough to enjoy. Ashley and Cody had that dream too. They packed up their lives and relocated to Lisbon, Portugal, ready to embrace a new chapter. What they didn't plan for was both of them losing their jobs within days of each other, thousands of miles from their professional networks, living out of suitcases in a city they were still learning to navigate.
For many couples, that kind of pressure would be a breaking point. For Ashley and Cody, it became a launching pad. Rather than scrambling to find new corporate roles, they made a bold decision: they would build something of their own. Together. As business partners and as spouses — a combination that terrifies even the most seasoned entrepreneurs.
By April 2025, they had filed LLC paperwork with the IRS and officially become the co-founders of their own micro-marketing agency. Ashley brought nearly 15 years of experience in content creation, brand development, and marketing strategy. Cody stepped in as the operational and financial backbone, leveraging his deep expertise in project management. On paper, they were the perfect CMO/COO team. In practice, the story was far messier — and far more instructive.
The Real Risk of Starting a Business With Your Partner
The fear of mixing marriage and business is not unfounded. Experts frequently caution that working with a romantic partner can blur emotional and professional boundaries in ways that are genuinely difficult to manage. When a tough client conversation bleeds into dinner, or a disagreement about strategy turns into something that feels deeply personal, the stakes are entirely different than they would be with a colleague you can simply stop seeing after hours.
Ashley herself admitted to nervousness about exactly this dynamic. At one point — early in the venture, still jet-lagged and overwhelmed — she asked Cody whether they should consider a "work divorce." It was a half-joke born out of genuine stress. The LLC paperwork had barely dried. The business had just begun. And already the pressure was exposing every fault line in their partnership, both professional and personal.
But here's what's worth understanding: the cracks that appear when you start a business together don't necessarily mean the foundation is broken. More often, they reveal something useful. They show you exactly where the work needs to happen — and whether you're both willing to do it.
What Relationship Skills Have to Do With Running a Company
One of the most striking insights from Ashley and Cody's experience is how directly the skills built inside a healthy marriage translated into the skills needed to run a small business. Communication, negotiation, knowing when to push back and when to listen, understanding each other's working styles and stress responses — these are not soft skills. In the context of entrepreneurship, they are strategic assets.
Couples who have invested in their relationship — who have learned how to fight productively, how to divide labor without resentment, how to maintain respect under pressure — often bring a level of trust and fluency to a business partnership that most co-founders spend years trying to develop. You already know how this person operates when things go wrong. That knowledge is genuinely valuable.
For expat couples especially, this dynamic is amplified. When you move abroad together, you rapidly learn to rely on each other in ways that domestic life rarely demands. You navigate bureaucracy in a foreign language, build new social circles from scratch, manage the emotional complexity of missing home while simultaneously building something new. These experiences forge a kind of resilience that, when channeled deliberately, can make a co-founded business surprisingly durable.
Lessons for Anyone Considering Starting a Business With Their Spouse
Ashley and Cody's story offers a number of practical takeaways for couples who are thinking about taking the entrepreneurial leap together — whether they're doing it from Lisbon or from their living room.
- Define your roles clearly and early. The CMO/COO structure that Ashley and Cody established wasn't just a title game — it was a deliberate way of acknowledging that each person had a distinct lane. Overlap is inevitable, but clarity about core responsibilities reduces friction significantly.
- Separate the business argument from the marriage argument. This is harder than it sounds, but it is essential. A disagreement about a client deliverable is not a disagreement about your relationship. Building that mental firewall takes practice, but it protects both the company and the couple.
- Schedule time that has nothing to do with work. When you live together and work together, the default is that every conversation eventually circles back to the business. Protecting time that is purely personal — meals, walks, evenings that are explicitly off-limits to shop talk — is not a luxury. It's maintenance.
- Use your history as a resource. You know how your partner handles stress, what motivates them, and what shuts them down. That knowledge, used generously and not as a weapon, makes you a better collaborator than most people will ever have access to.
- Accept that some days will feel like too much. The "work divorce" comment Ashley made in a moment of frustration is actually a healthy sign — it meant she felt safe enough to voice the stress rather than suppress it. Entrepreneurship is genuinely hard. Doing it alongside your marriage requires honesty about that difficulty.
Portugal as a Backdrop: Why Location Matters More Than You'd Think
There's something worth noting about the choice to build a business while living as expats in Lisbon. Portugal has become one of the most popular destinations in the world for remote workers and digital entrepreneurs, offering a relatively affordable cost of living compared to other Western European capitals, a vibrant international community, and a culture that tends to value quality of life alongside productivity. For a couple launching a micro-marketing agency — one that by definition can operate from anywhere — the location was not incidental. It was part of the vision.
Living in a place that felt adventurous and intentional likely contributed to Ashley and Cody's willingness to take the business risk in the first place. When you've already made one bold leap, another feels less impossible.
The Marriage and the Company Are Still Standing
The headline of Ashley and Cody's story is not that starting a business with your spouse is easy. It is not. The headline is that it can work — and that the same qualities that make a marriage resilient are often the exact ones that make a business resilient too. Commitment, communication, adaptability, and the willingness to say "we can't quit now" even when quitting feels tempting.
For couples considering a similar path, their story is a genuine source of encouragement. Not because it was smooth, but because it was honest — and because they chose to keep going anyway.