Nicole: My girlfriends kept telling me how sweet he was but I just wasn’t interested. So I wouldn’t give him my phone number but I did give him my pager [laughs]. And he paged me and paged me and oh my gosh he wouldn’t stop paging me. He was stalking me [laughs].

Mario: Oh come on I wasn’t stalking you like that [laughs]

Nicole: So he kept asking me out and I kept telling him no because I needed to study. So our joke to this day, which is 17 years later, is his famous line: well, you’ve got to eat.

Mario: Yes you can study all day but at some point you have to eat, so let me just take you to get something to eat.

Nicole: So I finally accepted and let him take me out to eat but I was so cautious about going out with him. And then we go out and…

Mario: Are you seriously going to go that far into the story? She only asked one question [laughs].

Nicole: You want me to leave it alone? [laughs] This will just tie it all together. Okay so the joke is that he took me out and went through all that work, and did not have enough money to pay the bill.

Mario: ALL that courting!

[All laugh]

Nicole: He went to try and get the money, but I volunteered to foot the bill. I think at that moment, that’s when I fell in love with him because he was so embarrassed and horrified. But I told him not to worry about it and that we’d go out again. That whole week, he sent apology cards, stuck money in my purse, bought me flowers and the rest was history.

BMWK: So you got hooked after…

Nicole: I got hooked after he couldn’t pay the bill. Isn’t that the weirdest thing?

[All laugh]

Mario: That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Nicole: I got to see his real, sincere side.

BMWK: So you’ve been together 17 years, how long were you dating before you got married?

Nicole: Two years dating and we just celebrated our 15th anniversary.

BMWK: Wow, well congrats and happy anniversary!

As you know, all marriages go through are their own set of challenges. What was the biggest challenge you’ve ever had to overcome in your marriage?

Nicole: We really hit rock bottom when we launched our company and then the recession hit. That was very tough but we stayed so strong and supportive of each other during that time.

Mario: I had asked her to run the business because she had the startup and operational background as well as the development. I thought she would do a much better job of running the company as CEO than I could do. My skill set was getting us into situations that we could benefit from, in that I was very creative in delivering things for content creation. I was strong at brand building but not business building.

I was always kind of doing this stuff on the side while working full-time. I was hosting TV programs, doing radio shows, public speaking but I wasn’t making any money. It was more like a hobby. Eventually, I said that we needed to take the chance.