Nancy Rothbard, a professor of management at Wharton, has researched the extent to which people integrate family into their work lives. She says that successful husband and wife business partnerships tend to be led by couples who “like fluidity,” are “very integrative” and happily blur the lines between work and home.
Rothbard grew up in a family business – her grandparents owned an office products and furniture store that her father and uncle eventually took over.
“People who do this successfully as couples tend to have a very strong base and marriage to begin with,” she notes.
Often these marriages tend to be ultra-traditional, according to Kathy Marshack, a business psychologist who counsels many husband and wife management teams.
She conducted research in the early 1990s involving 30 married business partners, and found that many of these “co-preneur relationships” are less egalitarian than dual-career marriages. For instance, 83% of the co-preneurial wives were entirely in charge of general housework, compared with 49% of wives with their own careers.
Nearly 65% of co-preneur wives handled all the household shopping, versus 36% for the other working wives. At work, co-preneurial women typically performed “chore-like” tasks, such as payroll and billing.
“[Even though this research was conducted 20 years ago], I don’t think things have changed that much,” notes Marshack, who is the author of Entrepreneurial Couples: Making It Work at Work and at Home.
“Couples who are in business together tend to have more rigidly defined roles. The husband is the founder, the CEO and the president. She is a support person.
“Many co-preneurial wives will tell you that this is not the way it is,” Marshack adds. But she says that many of the portrayals of husband and wife partnerships in the popular press feature remarkably egalitarian couples.
These people, she notes, often make incorrect sweeping statements about co-preneurial ventures.
“But then you dig down and find out what she’s getting paid, what her title is, and who people in the company come to for a final decision, and you find that the partnerships are more complicated and less equal than they might seem.”
When a couple’s personalities and skills are well suited and complementary, working together has the potential to add richness and romance to a marriage.
Spouses come to respect and admire each other in new ways, notes Hirshberg, the author. “When it works, it is a beautiful thing. One CEO I interviewed told me she couldn’t imagine building her life’s dream with anyone else. Not only have they created a family, but they get to share a vision in another realm.”
Working together provides spouses with an opportunity to see their significant other do something they’re good at and passionate about. This can enhance and invigorate the relationship.
“There are ways that [these entrepreneurial teams] get to see each other in action … that make them proud of each other, and this makes each one feel better about their spouse,” says Wharton’s Friedman.
“This usually doesn’t happen – at least not in the same direct way – when spouses work in completely separate domains.”
Here are five tips to making sure your business partnership works:
While some fluidity of workflow is necessary in the start-up phase of any business, most successful partners divvy up tasks based on their skills and interests.
Of course, partners may confer on big decisions or seek each other’s opinion when in doubt, but ultimately working together is more seamless when each partner has his or her own domain. Hartz of Eventbrite notes that she and her husband “never work on the same thing at the same time. You get things done a lot faster, and that’s also how you preserve the relationship.”
It can come from business advisors, professional organisations, job coaches, marriage counsellors, friends and mentors.
Perhaps there is even a community of married business partners in a similar field with whom a couple can share war stories and compare notes and ideas. “Running a business with your spouse is a closed system,” says Marshack, the business psychologist.
“Your job [in a marriage] is to be supportive of your spouse. But [if in your professional life] you are only interacting with your spouse, you are only reinforcing each other’s worldview. I always advise people to join separate professional organisations. Get outside blood.”
Married couples have a special knowledge of each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Professionally, this could be helpful, but interpersonally, it’s trickier.
“Because of the importance of the relationship, it is possible that you might hold back on criticism that could hurt the business,” says Matt Allen, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College. “If I talk too much, it may be an annoyance to my wife. But if it ends up hurting sales, that’s a problem.”
It’s a delicate balance, he adds. “You don’t want to put a priority on the relationship over the business, but putting a priority on the business over the relationship is just as disastrous.”
If the working relationship is causing tension at home, the couple should look at ways to shift work responsibilities or change the reporting structure.
“At home, they should look at establishing boundaries that could limit the intrusiveness of work into family life,” says Hirshberg. “Banning phones and laptops from the bedroom and dinner table is a good place to start.”
Natasha and Chris Ashton, a British couple, met in college and attended business school in the US together. They had both set up small businesses in the UK, but were looking for a business to start as a team.
“As life-long pet lovers who had experienced first-hand the financial difficulties that come with unexpected vet bills, pet insurance fit the bill perfectly,” says Natasha.
After graduating in 2003, they rented a tiny apartment in Philadelphia and ran Petplan out of their bathroom. The tub was filled with files. “Our first ‘investors’ were our Visa and our MasterCard,” jokes Chris.
Today, Petplan has 78 employees and has been recognised by Inc. magazine as one of the 500 fastest growing privately held companies in the US. “We really enjoy spending time with each other and solving problems together. We love to work; we don’t see it as work. That’s the joy of it. It’s incredibly fulfilling,” says Natasha.
“There are great highs, and there are very big dips,” she adds. “But there’s no one else I’d rather have at my side than the person I love and trust the most in the world. There is nothing like it. There is nothing better.”
Andrew Sadauskas is a former journalist at SmartCompany and a former editor of TechCompany.
