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Will Your Spouse Be A Good Business Partner?
By GWEN MORAN

Even though Brendan Boyle's wife had been urging him to go off on his own, his decision to launch his commercial landscaping business wasn't exactly the well-planned move she had anticipated.

"He came home from work and said 'Do you really want me to start this business?' " recalls Duanne Boyle. "I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Good, because I gave my notice today.' It was definitely a leap of faith."

But it takes more than a leap of faith to launch a business, particularly a family-owned venture. Couples thinking of going into business together must do some initial homework to protect both their marriage and the future of the business, says Azriela Jaffe, a Yardley, Pa., consultant and coach to entrepreneurial couples.

Indeed, once Ms. Boyle absorbed the news, the two got down to the business of discussing how to bring ExcelLand Inc. to life in their Turnersville, N.J., home. They determined that Ms. Boyle would keep her full-time job, which would provide enough income to support their family of four while the business grew. Mr. Boyle would handle the day-to-day landscaping work and manage employees, and Ms. Boyle would handle the administrative tasks such as bookkeeping.

"She had experience doing books for other companies," explains Mr. Boyle. "It was a big relief for me, because I would probably screw it up. She doesn't let anything slip through the cracks. I'd want her for a business partner even if she wasn't my wife." Four years later, while Ms. Boyle splits her time between her job and the business, the couple is on track for her to join the company full time within the next two years.

There are few statistics on how many couple-owned businesses are in the United States. Estimates of the number of family-owned companies range from 65 to 85% of all U.S. businesses, says Susan Robison who, with her husband, Philip, runs CoupleBiz, an Ellicott City, Md.-based consultancy for entrepreneurial couples. She notes that in many states, marital property laws essentially treat closely held businesses as owned by both spouses, whether or not the couples work together.

Whatever the numbers, when you're looking around for a business partner, why not choose the person you chose to be your partner in life? Not so fast, says Ms. Jaffe. "In a marriage, most of us spend a lifetime trying to resolve issues of power and control. Anecdotally, it's been my experience that about 10% of couples can pull it off. So couples who think they can't go into business together or that it can't work shouldn't be hard on themselves. It doesn't mean that you have a bad marriage. It just means that it's not a good idea to work together."

Becky Gomes never realized the impact the business would have on her marriage to husband and business partner, Bob. Ms. Gomes was six months pregnant when the couple started an insurance restoration company, specializing in home repairs authorized by insurance companies. Both had quit their jobs and moved from Long Island, N.Y., to the Pittsburgh area to dive head first into their Purofirst of Three Rivers franchise. As luck would have it, within a few months of the business launch, an ice storm hit the Pittsburgh area, prompting a surge of business. Ms. Gomes, three-month-old daughter in tow, found herself answering the phone, scheduling appointments and trying to hold down the fort with claims pouring in.

"I had one phone with call waiting," she recalls. "I was trying to schedule [Bob] to go on different claims, and he wasn't that familiar with Pittsburgh yet. The baby was crying, and he was screaming at me about sending him from one side of town to the other. It was very stressful."

Ms. Jaffe says that couples can bring themselves to the brink of divorce if they aren't careful. "One couple who spoke with me had already filed divorce papers." But trying to divide up the business proved to be more complicated than they had expected. "The process actually made them reconsider and go back into marriage counseling," she says. "When I talked to them again, they were doing great. If they hadn't pulled it back from the fire, they would have been another statistic."

Tom Hubler, president of Minneapolis, Minn.-based Hubler Family Business Consultants, a management-consulting firm specializing in family-owed businesses, advises husband-and-wife entrepreneurial teams to establish solid ground rules and identify expectations up front. At the same time, they must commit to maintaining their relationship as a family and as a couple. It's most important, he says, to have these conversations before anything goes wrong, because once negative feelings emerge, it's much more difficult to remain objective. Open communication, he says, is critical to a couple's success.

The Speck-of-Dust Theory

"It's important that they don't let the normal sorts of issues that are part of a couple fester and bleed into their business relationship," he explains. "I call it the Speck-of-Dust theory." Often, he says, a spouse who detects a subtle change in the relationship doesn't bring it up "because it will upset things. Then you have another [issue], and another, until there's a big difference of opinion. They have inadvertently created the very problem they're trying to avoid. It's much more effective to work out the normal small differences in a positive way."

Both Dr. Robison and Ms. Jaffe identify division of responsibility as a crucial issue. One spouse may be better at bookkeeping, marketing or managing employees than the other. Those areas should be clearly defined, says Ms. Jaffe, and each spouse needs to know that he or she has the authority to make certain decisions autonomously.

"If the business or the relationship starts disintegrating, the partners will start blaming each other for things going wrong. If it's not really clear who does what, they'll start crossing the line and telling each other what to do," Ms. Jaffe explains. "If they have to get permission for everything they do, self-esteem starts to suffer."

Maintaining separate space is important logistically as well as organizationally, as Angela and Michael Trott discovered when they launched Timeless Message LLC from their Potomac Falls, Va., home. The company creates message-in-a-bottle gifts. The venture's success soon allowed the couple, both of whom had worked for the government for more than a decade, to realize their dream of spending more time together as a family. But that closeness became a mixed blessing that brought some important lessons. "The chemistry is different when your desks are next to each other. That's something we didn't see in the beginning," says Mr. Trott.

Adds Ms. Trott, "We'd been married for 19 years and never had any conflicts to speak of." But things began to get difficult because "he never knew what I was like to work with and I never knew what he was like to work with. I'm very intense, very operational. He's a big-picture kind of guy. He was always thinking forward, how to deal with the future and I'm saying, 'OK, we need to work on this today.' It got kind of tense sometimes."

The Trotts, who have operated their business both inside and outside their home, use rituals to maintain individual space and prevent the business from taking over their lives. Frequent dinners out and trying to ban business conversation after 6 p.m. have worked for them and their son, who gets tired of hearing about the business.

Boundaries are critical, says Ms. Jaffe, who adds that it's important to respect the spouse who has the more sensitive stress threshold. If one spouse can work all the time, while another needs some time for a personal life, the latter's needs must be respected or the partnership won't work, she says. Couples who don't maintain personal time may find that they lose interest in sexual relations and that their relationship becomes more of a business partnership than a marriage.

Further, if money is a difficult subject for married couples in general, it can become more so when a couple is earning the family income together. Providing for children, deciding how much to reinvest in the business, and managing the ups and downs of cash flow can wreak havoc on a relationship if a couple doesn't establish solid guidelines and anticipate difficult situations. The Boyles admit lacking a business approach made for some tense moments early on.

Ms. Boyle says her attitude was: "Take any business that comes along," while her husband's was: "I want to be a commercial company." She says, "It was difficult when he turned away residential business. But in the long run, it turned out to be the best thing."

Ms. Jaffe adds that it's important to discuss how to determine if the business isn't working, and what will happen if one spouse decides that he or she wants out. "Hope for the best; plan for the worst," she advises. Couples need to make it OK for one of them to say, 'It's not working. I love you, but I don't want to do this anymore."

She recalls one couple who launched a furniture business. Although the business was growing, the wife missed her previous position as a social worker. Ms. Jaffe says it took courage for her to announce that she wanted to return to her profession. Fortunately, while her husband was concerned about replacing his wife's expertise, he understood her needs. Together, they turned what could have been a disastrous situation into an agreement for both to pursue their passions.

Couples who are business partners aren't necessarily "happy from Day One," says Ms. Jaffe. But in the best case, "over time, you get to live the American Dream: You're making money, spending time with people that you love, doing work that helps people and is meaningful to you."

-- Ms. Moran is a writer and entrepreneur in Wall, N.J. She can be reached at gwen@boostyourbiz.com.

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