Why One of Us Had to Go All-In (And Why It Couldn't Be Both)

Two redundancy emails. Same day. Same trip.

The exhibition queue in Japan suddenly felt like the wrong place to process what just collapsed.

I remember standing there, still processing the townhall call and the email that landed as we got off the bus. Both of us. Made redundant. Overseas.

My partner Shanshan already had something lined up pre-holiday, which helped. But I felt lost. Part of me couldn't fully enjoy the holiday - at night, I was scrolling through job boards with this uncomfortable itch of uncertainty. The other part of me wanted to be present, to appreciate the moments. We even joked about extending the trip since there was no rush to head back now. We had our company farewell call near Mt Fuji.

The redundancy didn't create our ambition. It made the fragility impossible to ignore. Two people in similar industries. Two incomes that could vanish overnight. And a half-formed dream of building something real - property portfolio, business acquisition, actual ownership - that we'd been squeezing into weekends for years without meaningful progress.

It forced a question we'd been avoiding: if we were serious about this, someone had to go all-in. But who?

The Math That Changed Everything

We came back to Australia and both went straight back to full-time work. Shanshan landed at Canva. I was at a company with decent flexibility. On paper, we were fine. Two incomes, stable roles, back on track.

Except we weren't building anything. Calls with brokers got squeezed between meetings. Due diligence happened in fragments on weekends. Every conversation about acquisitions felt rushed. We were still in surface-level mode - looking at deals, not progressing them.

Then when our daughter was born a year later, the math changed completely. Shanshan went back to work after maternity leave but it became immediately clear: this wasn't sustainable. Full-time job, full-time mum, full-time dad, plus trying to build property & a business acquisition strategy? Something had to give.

The conversation happened over a few nights. Not a single dramatic moment, but a slow acknowledgment that we were burning out without building anything meaningful. The fragility we'd felt in Japan - that feeling of everything collapsing - was still there. We were just masking it with two incomes and busy calendars.

So we made a deliberate choice. She left her role at a high-growth tech company and went full-time on acquisition work. I stayed employed to fund the runway.

Why Income Became Strategy, Not Safety

Here's what most people get wrong about this decision. They assume the person who stays employed is playing it safe. That they're the one who wasn't brave enough to jump.

But that's not what this was. My role became deliberate runway funding. Keeping stable income so decisions could be made from clarity, not desperation. So we weren't forced into bad deals just because the clock was ticking. So Shanshan could spend three months building real relationships with business owners instead of rushing to close something - anything - to pay the mortgage.

That fragility from the redundancy? We designed around it. One income removes the pressure to make desperate choices. It creates space to walk away from the wrong deal. To wait for the right one.

"The moment we stopped trying to both do everything halfway and instead chose distinct roles with intention, momentum changed."

Some people might see staying employed as compromise. But when it's tied to a clear strategy and a defined endpoint, it's not fear. It's structure. It's risk management in service of ambition.

And if circumstances change? If it makes more sense for me to go full-time on acquisition and Shanshan to take the income role? We'll switch. The roles aren't fixed by ego. They're designed for what's needed right now.

What Became Possible

Before this shift, we were having surface-level conversations. Looking at businesses online. Reading broker emails. Maybe scheduling a call if we could both make the time.

Now? Shanshan's on the ground daily. Building real relationships with business owners. Having proper due diligence discussions. We've provided letters of intent. We've had deeper dives that simply weren't possible when we were both squeezing this in around full-time jobs.

That level of immersion - waking up every day thinking only about sourcing, evaluating, and progressing opportunities - wasn't possible before. And it's the difference between dabbling and actually building.

We kept our daughter in daycare three days a week - not as a luxury, but as protected work time. Not so Shanshan could have "time off." So she could treat this like the full-time operational role it actually is.

The Takeaway

Going all-in doesn't mean both people have to quit their jobs on the same day. Sometimes the smartest move is designing distinct roles: one person funds the engine, the other builds it without the constraint of desperation.

Most couples try to do everything together, equally, all the time. And they stay stuck in surface-level progress for years. We chose focus over fairness. Strategy over symmetry. And that's when things actually started moving.

If you're sitting on a goal you've been "working towards" for years without real traction, ask yourself: are you both trying to do everything halfway? And what would become possible if one of you went all-in while the other held the foundation steady?