We Crossed Lambeau Off the List: A Business Trip to Remember

The Entrepreneur's Life

We Crossed Lambeau Off the List: A Business Trip to Remember

Some background on the Stillson household before I get into the weekend: I am a Chicago Bears fan. Ellen is a Green Bay Packers fan. We have been married long enough that this arrangement has been tested repeatedly across decades of mutual disappointment and the occasional moment of genuine rivalry. We love football. We love each other. We had talked for years about attending a Bears-Packers game together, and we had always landed on the same conclusion: if we were going to do this, we were going to do it at Lambeau Field.

Lambeau is more than a stadium. Anyone who follows professional football knows this, and anyone who has been there confirms it. It is the oldest operating NFL stadium in the country, opened in 1957 and named for the man who founded the franchise. It sits in the middle of Green Bay, Wisconsin in a way that no other professional sports venue sits in its city, as though the city grew up around the stadium rather than the stadium being placed in the city. Walking into Lambeau for the first time, even as a Bears fan, even knowing you are in the other team's building, produces a specific feeling that I did not fully expect. The weight of what has happened there over sixty-plus years of professional football comes through the concrete and the noise in a way that the television broadcast never captures.

We targeted an early fall game deliberately. We had watched enough football in November in the upper Midwest to know what cold game means, and we were not interested in standing in a Green Bay parking lot in twenty-degree weather debating whose idea this was. Early fall meant the leaves were changing in northern Wisconsin and Michigan. It meant we could extend the trip into a four-day weekend and drive through country that was worth looking at while we were driving through it. It meant the game would be played in actual football weather without being a test of endurance. We planned for all of that and the weekend delivered on every count.

What Green Bay Actually Is

Green Bay is a football town in a way that I do not think any other American city is a football town, including cities with more storied franchises. The Packers are the local team in a way that goes far deeper than geography. They are a community-owned nonprofit corporation, the only one of its kind in major professional sports, with approximately five million shares of stock owned by more than 360,000 shareholders. The city's identity and the team's identity are the same identity. When you visit Green Bay as a football fan, you are not visiting a city that happens to have a team. You are visiting a place that organized itself around a team over more than a hundred years.

We spent three days before the game seeing the city at that level. The Packers Hall of Fame inside Lambeau is one of the better sports museums I have been in: genuinely well-curated, more than trophy cases and memorabilia, but an account of what the franchise has meant to the community across its history. The stadium tour before game day gave us the game-day geography in advance, which turned out to matter more than I expected because Lambeau is set up in a way that rewards knowing where you are going. We walked the neighborhoods around the stadium on the morning of the game, watched the city wake up around us with the specific energy that a home game produces in a community that treats home games as civic occasions, and were in our seats an hour before kickoff because we had not spent two months planning a trip to miss anything on the day of.

Green Bay is also genuinely pleasant to spend four days in, which I say as someone who arrived with no particular expectation either way. Good food, a real downtown with enough character to spend time in, and people who are accustomed to visitors coming specifically for the football and who take a civic pride in the whole enterprise that you cannot manufacture. The server who heard I was a Bears fan and spent ten minutes telling me Bears stories that were more generous than I deserved. The parking lot tailgate that absorbed two complete strangers in Bears gear without a moment of genuine hostility, despite the sustained competitive trash talk that went on for ninety minutes before kickoff. This is a football town that loves football, including the football its rivals play.

Related resources

Blog: Building Wealth Means Nothing If You Neglect This

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Free guide: Dare to Dream: Goal-Setting Guide for Physician Entrepreneurs (subscriber free)

The Game

I am not going to tell you who won. It does not matter, and I mean that precisely rather than as a diplomatic gesture. One of the things I have learned across thirty years of watching sports with Ellen is that the outcome of any specific game has very little to do with the quality of the memory the game produces. What I remember about that afternoon at Lambeau is not the score. It is the sound of 81,000 people in the same building doing the same thing at the same moment. It is Ellen in Packers gear next to me in Bears gear, genuinely invested in what was happening on the field, doing the thing that people who love each other and have different rooting interests do at a game like this, which is give each other grief with the specific affection that long marriage makes available for exactly this kind of occasion.

It is the moment in the game that was genuinely close & intense, and both of us stopped talking and just watched, the particular silence of two people fully absorbed in the same thing at the same time. It is walking out of the stadium afterward, in the stream of eighty thousand people dispersing into a Wisconsin evening, talking about what we had just seen with the ease of two people who share a language for it. That conversation, that specific kind of shared attention and shared language that sports creates between people who both care about it, is something I had been looking forward to for years before we sat down in those seats. It was better than I expected.

"The outcome of any specific game has very little to do with the quality of the memory the game produces. What I remember is the sound, the moment in the third quarter when both of us just watched, and the walk out of the stadium talking with the ease of two people who share a language for it."

Ellen's Business Trip Inside Our Weekend

I want to tell you about the other layer of this weekend, because it is the layer that transforms a four-day trip to a football game into something with a different kind of value.

Ellen runs a scrapbooking business called Scrapping in My Sleep, with a YouTube channel where she teaches scrapbooking techniques, shares creative projects, and connects with a community of people who share her passion for the craft. She is genuinely talented at what she does and has built something real around it. She is also an entrepreneur in the full sense, which means she thinks about her business the way entrepreneurs think about their businesses: always, including on weekends, including in Green Bay, Wisconsin at a Bears-Packers game.

We built a business component into this trip before we left. Green Bay and the route we drove through Wisconsin have independent scrapbooking and craft supply stores that Ellen had identified in advance. We visited several of them over the four days: talking to the owners, picking up supplies she could not source at home, getting a read on what the independent craft retail market looks like in that part of the country. Those conversations fed directly into the business development thinking she was doing around her channel. The trip also gave her material: the Lambeau experience, the football town, the changing leaves on the drive north, the tailgate, all of it is content for a scrapbooker whose business is built on documenting and sharing creative projects. The memories we made this weekend will live in her channel as much as they live in our own recollection of the trip.

This is what it looks like when two entrepreneurs plan a trip together. The pleasure is real. The adventure is real. And the business dimension gets woven through both because it fits, not because we are treating our vacation like a tax strategy. We do what we love and we bring the business along because the business is also something we love.

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Resource: Scrapping in My Sleep (Ellen's YouTube channel)

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Free eBook: Tax Deduction Guide for Micro-Business Owners (PEA Explorer)

Is It Deductible? The Honest Answer for This Trip

I want to answer this question directly because I know it is the question some of you are forming right now, and because giving you a vague answer is not useful to anyone.

When a trip has both personal and business components, the IRS allows deductions on the business portions only, with the allocation based on the actual proportion of business to personal activity. The presence of legitimate business activity does not convert the personal components into deductible expenses. It allows the business components to be deducted and requires the personal components to remain personal.

Bears-Packers at Lambeau: What is and is not deductible

• Game tickets and game-day expenses: Not deductible

• Tailgate food and stadium concessions: Not deductible

• Lodging on days with documented business activity: Proportionally deductible

• Mileage or transportation on days with business activity: Proportionally deductible

• Craft store purchases for Ellen's business inventory: Deductible (business expense)

• Business development conversations and documented meetings: Deductible with documentation

• Content creation expenses tied to the YouTube channel: Deductible (business expense)

• Personal meals, personal sightseeing, personal entertainment: Not deductible

The game tickets are not deductible. I want to be emphatic about this because the "business trip" framing can lead physicians to claim deductions that do not hold up to scrutiny, and the entertainment expense deduction that used to cover client events was substantially curtailed by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Attending a professional football game with your spouse is a personal expense, full stop, regardless of how the trip around it is structured. The IRS is familiar with this pattern and the documentation requirements for mixed-purpose travel are specific: the business activity has to be the primary purpose of the trip, it has to be documented with specificity, and the allocation between personal and business days has to be defensible.

What the entrepreneur's advantage actually produces in a situation like this is not a deductible football game. It produces a real business trip, with real business activity and real business expenses, that happens to be scheduled around something personally meaningful. The business components deduct. The personal components do not. And the fact that the whole weekend was more enjoyable because of the football game is not a problem. It is the point.

Work with your CPA on the specific allocation for any mixed-purpose trip. Keep the documentation: receipts for business purchases, notes from business conversations, the names of stores visited and meetings held and what business was conducted. The deduction is available on the business portion and not available on the personal portion, and the difference between those two categories needs to be clear in your records before the trip rather than reconstructed afterward.

The Part That Matters Most

Ellen and I have been adding items to our adventure list for as long as we have been doing the Dare to Dream annual retreat. Lambeau was on the list. It has been on the list for a long time. There is a specific satisfaction in crossing something off that list that I have never found a better word for than done. Not in the dismissive sense. In the sense of a thing that was wanted, planned, executed, and now lived. It belongs to us now in a way it did not before we went.

The memory we came home with is the thing I most want to name in this post, because I think it is the thing that physicians who are building financial wealth sometimes underweight when they are thinking about what the wealth is for. The game was four hours. The drive through the leaves was six hours. The time in the Hall of Fame, the time in the city, the time in the tailgate lot and the restaurant and the hotel room talking about what we were seeing and doing: all of that together made something that has a different kind of value than anything else we spent money on this year. It does not appear on a balance sheet. It does not have a rate of return. It is simply ours, jointly, permanently, and without any of the conditions that financial assets carry.

We are already talking about the next one.

Your adventure list is waiting

If you do not have an adventure list yet, this post is as good a reason to start one as any you will find. The Dare to Dream guide has a dedicated section for exactly this kind of shared experience goal, and the annual retreat is where Ellen and I do the planning that converts the items on the list from intentions into trips on the calendar. The guide is free for every subscriber at simplimd.com/dare-to-dream-guide-for-doctors-2.

Ellen's scrapbooking YouTube channel, Scrapping in My Sleep, is where the creative documentation of adventures like this one lives. If you are a scrapbooker or know one, or if you are just curious about what a physician's wife who is also a genuine creative entrepreneur does with the material that a life like ours produces, go subscribe. She is good at what she does.

For the deductibility questions that come up when you start blending personal adventures with legitimate business activity, the Tax Deduction Guide for Micro-Business Owners is the free eBook to start with, available to PEA Explorer members at simplimd.com/PEAMembership. And for a conversation about how to structure mixed-purpose travel correctly inside your professional corporation, a $500 Business Strategy Session is the right next step. Do the personal adventures. Build the adventure list. Let the entrepreneur's structural advantage fund as much of it as it legitimately can. And bring your spouse along for both.