Can Your Life Partner Be as Your Business Partners Too?

Do you dream of a startup made just for two? The rewards, say many couples, can be deep. So can the struggles.Who calls the shots? What about disagreements? Who minds the children? When people consider losing all boundaries between their professional and personal lives, imaginations run overtime.

However, the phenomenon of self-employed couples — sometimes called “co-preneurship” — is the fastest-growing segment of family businesses. Specific data is hard to find because many couple-run companies list only one owner. Many such businesses aren’t counted because the committed partners are of the same sex or aren’t married.

But estimates from late 1990s surveys and the 1997 U.S. Census put the total of couple-owned or couple-managed U.S. businesses at roughly 2 million. And the Internal Revenue Service shows a jump in male/female-owned companies from 433,000 to nearly 750,000 from 1986 to 1997.

The reasons and attractions are clear: Rounds of layoffs and downsizing are forcing dual-career couples to reinvent themselves. Technology and the Web make small businesses competitive and affordable. Work/life relationships give hard-pressed careerists flexibility and family time. Significant-other couples mention the same motivations as husbands and wives.

So, is this your dream? Make no mistake: This is a tough act to pull off, emotionally and financially. Here are some cautionary tales and tactics from co-preneurs who’ve made it work.

Two owners, one boss

Kelly Fleming launched the first Pickles & Ice Cream Maternity Apparel shop in 1997 in the back room of a stationery store. Based in Thomson, Ga., the company’s designer and private-label maternity fashion soon took off. By 1999, Fleming had franchised the concept, opening 13 boutiques across the South and Southwest.

Fleming’s husband, Austin, quit his well-paying stockbroker’s job in 2000 to join Pickles & Ice Cream. “At first I was relieved,” Kelly Fleming says. “I looked forward to teaching him our business and allowing him to carry some of the responsibility.”

That soon changed. “I was mortified when he came in thinking he knew more than he did. He embarrassed us both by making decisions he really wasn’t qualified to make.”

The first year was horrible. “I thought he was somewhat of a male chauvinist, and I never thought that at home,” Kelly Fleming says. “I also realized we had a very different work ethic as well as completely different approaches to management.”

Austin Fleming became depressed — “I think he felt like he lost his identity,” Kelly Fleming says. When asked what he did for a living, he would say he used to be a stockbroker. “I wondered if he was ashamed to say he worked for his wife or if somehow our business seemed less sophisticated than his wine-and-dine career as a stockbroker,” she says.

Kelly Fleming spent most of the year thinking about what would happen to her marriage if she fired her husband of 15 years. “There were times when I felt he didn’t accomplish things at work. If I saw a glass on the coffee table, I would add home resentment to work resentment and explode.”

The couple had “painful arguments and silences” but kept working, at the home business and the marriage. Two years later, the Flemings have learned to be a team. The big lesson, Kelly Fleming says, was that there could be more than one owner, but only one boss.

“Austin found his niche and I allowed him to take over those areas. He likes to talk about work at home and I want to turn it off. So we take turns,” she says.

The couple relies on e-mail and breakfast time to stay tuned in. Each morning, after dropping off their children at school, the two head for a local diner. “We may talk about work, we may talk about kids, but we talk. For 30 minutes every day, we sit across from each other and have a civil, relaxing conversation,” she says.

Nowadays, Kelly Fleming has jettisoned franchising and is building only company-owned shops. She opened six in the past six months and, not counting the franchises, expects to top $5 million in sales in 2003. The team seems to be on track.

Divide to conquer

Melissa Mabon and Brooke Savage met and married in New York City in the late 1980s and basically dated around the idea of starting a business together.

In 1993, after their second child was born, the pair co-founded Pragmatech Software, which sells proprietary sales effectiveness and proposal automation applications. A few years later, they moved to Amherst, N.H. Pragmatech now grosses more than $8 million annually, employs 71 and serves 1,800 customers worldwide.

Savage credits their success to a strict division of skills and responsibilities. Mabon is chief technology officer and the technology guru. She creates the software. Savage is the rainmaker, in charge of sales and marketing. “We don’t often have conflicts,” he says. When they do, the expert calls the shots: Technical decisions go to Mabon, sales to Savage.

The couple’s only real difficulties, Savage says, have come from bad hires and a tendency to ignore personnel problems. In 1999, they hired a senior executive to develop consulting services. The new hire, Savage says, was “big-company oriented and wanted to build a staff organization with lots of structure and reporting relationships. I didn’t mind, but Melissa was very opposed — adamantly. She thought it would turn us into a lumbering company, and we should be nimble.”

It turned out that Mabon was right. But it took months of painful confusion before the couple reversed course. “We did not take aggressive action soon enough,” Savage says.

In the interim, Mabon and Savage have grown wiser, and have insulated themselves from management conflicts by hiring an employee ombudsman. “Employees take advantage of our relationship. Melissa will say ‘no’ and so the employee comes to me. We don’t want to be played that way. We now have enough channeling of decision-making so we don’t run afoul of the process.”

The checklist for success

Blending marriage and work is a very personal mix of temperaments and responsibilities. Nevertheless, experts point to areas of conflict that seem to crop up consistently. Here are five tips to combat the likely tensions:

Decide whether or how you want to separate your work life from family time. Some couples thrive on seamless 24/7. Others want ironclad divisions. Either way can work, just make sure you agree or set compromises.

Make sure you both have keen communications skills and senses of humor. You’ll need them in equal measure.

Set guidelines for who does what and what’s expected. Writing it down helps. Don’t step on each other’s authority, but allow mechanisms for advice and disagreements.

Decide how you’ll handle professional public appearances, especially with clients. One woman tells how her husband reached across a conference table to pick up her can of soda and drink from it. The clients didn’t know they were married and a shocked silence filled the room.

Schedule time alone for outside interests. Savage says it took years, but now he gardens and Mabon rides horses.

It’s probably a good idea to experiment with work-together businesses before making it permanent. If it fits your relationship, you’ll find out in a hurry.

For more marketing and management advice, visit the Web site for Joanna’s company, Muse2Muse Productions.