Fortune Small Business: When Marriage is in the Mix

By Jennifer Hopfinger
February 19, 2008 12:02 PM

“Sleeping with the Boss” is a provocative headline to run on a magazine cover, especially for Fortune Small Business. The February issue cover story is not as racy as the headline implies, but mixing work and romance is a big issue for small business owners, as many are partners with their spouses. The magazine asks, “Love is hard. Entrepreneurship is harder. Yet more couples are running businesses together. Are they nuts?”

In the article, “Unlimited Partnership,” reporters Phaedra Hise and Joanne Chen write: “While couples have launched businesses together since before the first pioneers peddled farming implements from their wagons, today's mom and pop shops are different. More often than before, they're professional instead of retail, global rather than local, and ‘mom’ is likelier to have birthed the business and own most of it.”

The writers profiled five couples--and one divorced couple--about how they make their partnerships work. As the profiles reveal, there are pros and cons to the arrangement--they have to work to separate home and office (especially when their offices are in their homes) and create divisions of labor that both partners feel are fair. But they also have flexibility in how they go about balancing work and family. And some of the couples said working together made their relationship stronger, not weaker. But none of those  profiled denied that working together is stressful and disagreements are unavoidable.

Take Kerrie Paige and Jaret Hauge, who started a software business in 2000--and then fell in love. They got married and lived and worked under the same roof with three kids under the age of 12--until they couldn’t stand it anymore and got a separate office space. Or Anamaria Schelling and Carol Peabody, together since 1987, who worked hard to overcome family disapproval of their relationship, but that was nothing compared to running a furniture shop together and getting over the ensuing power struggles. When Cynthia Moxley and Alan Carmichael teamed up on her public relations and marketing firm in 1998, they saw a therapist right away to figure out how to handle their different work styles.

But the best story of the bunch is that of Yvette Betancourt and Martyn Verster. They married in 1988, started a high-end school bus service eight years later, and divorced in 2001 for reasons unrelated to work. They sold the company, but three years later decided to launch a title-and-escrow firm together. "We've been told," Betancourt is quoted in the article as saying, "that if we can manage two companies and an amicable divorce, then tricky real estate issues must be a piece of cake."

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism