Entrepreneurs are known for building big ideas. But what happens when the foundation of their personal life begins to crack under the weight of business pressure, relational struggles, or unresolved emotional wounds?
That's the question PowerfuLove founders Dr. Jeni Wahlig and Calvin Osili are answering.
Together, they've created a coaching and education platform that's disrupting how founders, creatives, and changemakers think about their most important relationships. Rooted in their own hard-won journey through relationship breakdown and breakthrough, their work helps entrepreneurs see that the way one leads in relationships deeply affects everything— love, business, and success.
"We're not just here to help couples communicate better," says Dr. Wahlig. "We're here to change lives. To empower people to consciously lead their relationships the same way they would their teams, clients, and missions. Because when love works, everything else flows."
Dr. Wahlig, a PhD-level relationship expert and self-described 'rebel with a PhD,' spent years building a successful therapy practice. But behind the scenes, she was struggling in her personal life.
Before they became partners in business, Dr. Wahlig and Osili were navigating a complex, painful dynamic in their romantic life. "We're currently in Relationship 2.0," says Dr. Wahlig. "Because the first time around, we were toxic. We couldn't communicate. And it cost me everything, my mental health, my finances, my business itself, and even my other relationships."
For Dr. Wahlig, the stress of being in a crumbling relationship while trying to lead a thriving business was overwhelming. "There were days I couldn't focus, days I lost revenue, clients, and confidence," she recalls. "Despite all my education, I still couldn't figure out how to make this relationship work. We were so different, communication made things worse, and Calvin didn't seem to want to get on board, at least not in the way I thought he should."
Osili, meanwhile, was grappling with his own internal battles. A bi-racial son of an immigrant who spent much of his life feeling like an outsider, he rose through the ranks in corporate America, eventually becoming a director at a major healthcare system. But success didn't bring fulfillment.
"I was living a life built on shoulds," he says. "I reached the top, and it felt worse, not better. And it wasn't just in my professional life. In my personal life, too, I wasn't living my truth. I wasn't leading with authenticity. As a result, I wasn't able to be who I needed to be to be successful in any area of my life, including my relationship with Jeni. That's when I knew I had to make a radical change."
From the ashes of their personal and professional collapses, Dr. Wahlig and Osili began rebuilding, not just their relationship, but a new business grounded in everything they had learned the hard way.
The result was PowerfuLove, a relationship coaching company built around a three-pillar framework: Learning, Liberation and Leading with Love. Learning focuses on helping people actually learn the skills of relationships, such as emotional regulation, trauma healing, self-awareness and nervous system understanding, not just communication and conflict management.
Liberation, on the other hand, is about shedding societal, familial, and internal programming around what love and relationships "should" look like. It's deconditioning, healing, and reclaiming agency. The third pillar, Leading with Love, is the heart of their philosophy. "Love is not a feeling. It's an action," Dr. Wahlig says. "Leadership in love means taking radical responsibility. It means going first. Not waiting for your partner to change, but showing them the way."
This framework isn't just theory. It's how the PowerfuLove duo rebuilt their own relationship from unbearable to unbelievable and now teach others to do the same. "We are living proof that relationships don't have to get worse over time," says Osili. "Ours has gotten better. We have four kids, we run a business together, and our connection is deeper and more electric than it was in the beginning. And we are shocked at how easy it has all become."
For entrepreneurs, the connection is direct: a strained marriage or rocky partnership can quietly sabotage business momentum. "We see it all the time," Dr. Wahlig explains. "You can't focus when your heart is in chaos. You don't show up powerfully when you're stuck in resentment, or worse, divorce court. Entrepreneurs build their businesses to support their lives. But if the life part is crumbling, the business eventually will too."
And it's not just romantic relationships. The way founders relate to their partners reflects how they relate to their team, their clients, and themselves. "When you learn to lead with love, it shifts who you are," says Osili. "It raises your leadership everywhere."
PowerfuLove is now expanding beyond one-on-one and group coaching. Dr. Wahlig and Osili are launching a series of immersive retreats, diving deep with couples in curated, high-impact environments. They're also ramping up speaking engagements and corporate workshops, aiming to bring their relationship leadership framework to masterminds, leadership teams, and communities of influence.
"Entrepreneurs are our people," Dr. Wahlig says. "They're the visionaries. The disruptors. The ones who are already changing the world. We want to help them start at home, because when your love life is powerful, it becomes the fuel to the engine of your mission. You become unstoppable."
And their own mission is: to change the world through more conscious and evolved relationships, revolutionizing the way entrepreneurs approach problems, solutions and what it means to love. As Osili puts it: "The world doesn't change through strategy alone. It changes through the quality of our connections. We want to help people create relationships that're not just better but that become catalysts that expand everything."
