Me And My Partner: Meet Mr and Mrs Smith

Tamara Heber-Percy

James and I, who are partners in the real world, used to love going away for weekends. We were cash rich and time poor, so when we could spare the time, we wanted to go to really nice places. But we had a couple of bad experiences and a particularly disastrous weekend in the Lake District. The hotel wouldn't open the kitchen when we turned up late and the rooms looked nothing like they did in the brochure. We had a Blackberry with us and started typing our perfect guide to our perfect weekend away – including all the insider tips that your best friend would tell you. That Christmas, we sent off for about 1,000 hotel brochures and in January we visited about 150 of them and chose the first few for our book.

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We hadn't worked together before, but that didn't worry us. Both of us had marketing experience and James had already run businesses. This was something we thought we'd be doing in our spare time.

But then it ballooned. It didn't look like it would at first. When we first approached publishers in 2003, they said the market was already saturated with guidebooks, so they wouldn't touch us. We decided to sell the book ourselves because we realised that although there were guidebooks like The Good Hotel Guide and Johansens, they represented the chintzy standard hotel market and the country hotel market. Our idea was a guidebook for naughty weekends to really stylish places, whether that was to a B&B or a mansion. We chose every one personally and then sent reviewers to each place anonymously. Our first book wound up including a pub called the Royal Oak right through to Amberley Castle.

We put all our savings into it, plus some cash from family and friends – totalling £150,000. I stressed about that at the beginning – much more than James. James is more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy, whereas I'm more of a worrier. But we both had some sleepless nights, and sometimes we decided it would just be easier to get up and have a meeting. It put a strain on our relationship because we were working when we should have been relaxing. We decided to put in ground rules about not bringing the problems of the business home. We don't mind travelling together for work – we even reviewed hotels together on our honeymoon last year – and we don't mind deciding on next steps for the business in our own time, but that's the fun stuff.

I think we complement each other at work. I'm more technical; James is more creative. He's also more of a people person. That's why we decided James would be the MD and I would be the online director. He protects me from the day-to-day issues around the running of the company and I don't bother him with technical issues which don't really need to concern him.

The business is expanding rapidly. It's done that from the beginning, really. Our distributor said our first book might hit 10,000 sales if we were lucky. We hit 16,000 within a month and have now sold 200,000 copies and we have 50,000 people on our membership scheme. I can remember bumping into one hotel owner and asking him how our book was affecting his business and he said, "You have no idea, have you? You're 40 per cent of our business". Another said we were 70 per cent of his business. We've published other books since and in 2005, we launched a website where you can book directly online, which has 150,000 visitors a month. We have lots of other things in the pipeline and are even thinking of setting up our own hotel.

Partly because we're expanding – we now have 21 staff – we are moving offices and I'm going to be there full-time, rather than working a lot from home. James and I decided to have our working space as far away from each other as possible. It's not that we won't communicate a lot in the working day, but we think it will be healthier for our relationship.

I don't think we will ever split up, but we have considered what would happen to the business if we did. We each have very clearly separate shares.

James Lohan

I've always been good at spotting gaps in the market and knowing what my peers want. I set up my first business when I was 20. I'd been doing hospital radio and used their mobile disco for a friend's wedding and decided to set up a business in mobile discos. I wound up running my own club and as I got more and more involved in product launches, I became attracted to the idea of events management, so I moved into that. Later, I set up my own private members' club in Clapham. There had never been a members' bar south of the river.

As I got a bit older and had a bit more money, I started to really enjoy going to hotels with Tamara. But we found it impossible to find good ones. Everyone was talking about Babington House, but you couldn't get in. We thought there must be more really good, stylish hotels out there.

Originally, we thought of launching a little black book called "The Dirty Weekend" and although we eventually decided on the name Mr & Mrs Smith, the essence was the same. It was a huge risk. I'd never published anything in my life. Then there was the risk of setting up a business with my partner. But although it was stressful and it did put pressure on our relationship, we both loved working and we knew our book was a good idea. Also, although it sounds like a cliché, we both relish a challenge.

That said, Tamara was a lot more worried about everything than me at the start. I never go into anything thinking that it might fail. Still now, sometimes I'll say, "Let's do this with the business," and her immediate reaction will be, "James, we can't!" She's far brighter than I am – she speaks several languages and went to Oxford University – whereas you could say I've been to the university of life. It means she's more careful and analytical, whereas I'm all for, "Come on, let's do it!" She goes along with my ideas most of the time, though, because she believes in me.

At the beginning, it was quite hard to know which of us should be doing what. Instinct tells you to do what you are best at, but then you can get into disagreements and they get carried into your personal life. Thankfully, we found separate roles soon enough and became very good at supporting each other in them. When we get our new offices, we're going to treat it like we're not in the same building. We're both pretty competent and independent workers, so we need our own space to make decisions.

Probably the biggest difficulty for us at the start was that it was hard to switch off from work and be a romantic couple again. Everything affects your mood when you're in a relationship and if you have tough times at work – which we did a lot at the start – of course it will massively impact on your relationship. Now, we try not to talk about anything to do with work after a certain time at night, especially if it's a business problem, and sometimes we agree that there will be no chat whatsoever about the company.

But even if we go on holiday, after a day or two, my brain starts to need the stimulation of thinking about work again. It's not about making money or wanting world domination, but I like ideas. It's what drives me. For example, we're introducing a loyalty programme and I get a buzz off thinking about how to organise it.

I think my relationship with Tamara is stronger because I work with her. We've been through so much and we understand each other better than ever. If you get a relationship where a couple both do completely different things, there may be a lot more disparity. I'd have thought it would be harder to relate to each other as people.

www.mrandmrssmith.com