How To Split Up Your Business Without Breaking Up Your Marriage

You love your spouse and you’re committed to your marriage, so what could go wrong with going into business together? Short answer: plenty.

Dreams can come true, even for business partnersDerek Lidow

Consider an entrepreneur who was recently referred to me for advice by a mutual friend. Over the previous three years she and her husband had built a burgeoning chain of wine shops. But tensions were rising at work and spilling over into their home, threatening both the business and the family.

Signs of trouble had arisen only recently, just when business was about to really take off. They scouted new locations—he always found something wrong. Revenue dipped slightly at one of the shops—he thought the sky was falling. She asked him to do financial projections for expansion—he kept failing to produce them. She was the de facto CEO; maybe he resented it. Or maybe his passive-aggressive behavior indicated a deeper-seated and growing personal hostility; she didn’t know.

I’m not a family therapist so I was happy to hear that she still loved her husband. But she did want to know how to seek a business divorce without causing a real divorce. I could help her with that—it’s a dilemma I’ve seen countless times over almost 20 years of advising entrepreneurs.

I told her what I told them: Entrepreneurs always have explicit and implicit motivation for starting their companies. Explicit motivations are needs that people consciously recognize in themselves and can usually name: “I want work I enjoy,” “I have a great idea the world needs,” “I want to be my own boss” and so on. Implicit motivations are deep-seated and unconscious, usually derived from fundamental emotional needs like receiving praise from a parent, seeking revenge for being humiliated or needing great achievement to overcome feelings of unworthiness.

Unacknowledged implicit motivations can be trouble enough. With two people, each with largely unexplored implicit motivations for starting a business, the difficulty multiplies, especially if their motivations are incompatible. And because changing one’s deepest motivations is almost impossible, entrepreneurial couples must find a way forward that allows each to fulfill their implicit needs. Here’s the five-step process I recommend:

Find out what those implicit motivations are

You can go to a psychologist who’s trained in administering personality tests that assess unconscious motives--Rorschach, Picture Story Exercise (PSE), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the like. Or you might consult books like Finding Your Own North Star, by Martha Beck. In this case, they both went and visited a psychological testing firm. She discovered that she was driven by the desire to be better at business than her highly successful and sternly disapproving father. Her husband learned that he was haunted by a deep fear of destitution that had made him risk-averse and reluctant to be at the mercy of someone else’s decisions.

Explore your findings with each other

The result can be highly reassuring. Both husband and wife were relieved to find that the conflict in the business stemmed from their misaligned motivations, not their feelings for each other. Her unconscious competition with her father was responsible for her intense desire to expand the business. Her husband’s fear of putting his fate in the hands of others drove him to resist investing in new stores, mortgaging the house to raise capital and bringing more managers on board.

Discuss options that honor each other’s motivations

Try brainstorming, where no idea is a bad idea. If you can’t resist commenting on each other’s ideas, hire a meeting facilitator to lead the session. Once a list of ideas has been generated, each partner should separately spend a few days writing down the pros and cons of each option. If more options come to mind during this period of evaluation, tell your partner to add them to the list. When the evaluations have been completed, rank order them and then compare notes. A few options worth evaluating together will usually pop out from both lists.

Choose as many as three options to analyze further

What is the impact of each in terms of resources, time and dollars? (That includes tax consequences, which may require consultation with an accountant.) To what extent will each option help both individuals satisfy their implicit motivations? To get some objective perspectives, each partner, should ask people they trust to comment on the top options, as this couple did.

Decide

Some outside help may still be required to validate key assumptions, but by this point it’s often pretty clear which options could work for both spouses. The couple I helped carved out one store for the husband to run as a franchise, with no franchising fees. Meanwhile, his wife established her own company and continued to pursue expansion but with sources of financing independent of their personal finances. And she hired her husband as a consultant to assess new wines to carry in her stores.

Why not counsel them to compromise—get her to dial back the ambition a bit and him to move a little way outside his comfort zone and tolerate more risk? First, because implicit motivations are almost impossible to change, a tepid “let’s meet halfway” compromise would do little to address the deep unease that would eventually lead one or both of them to backslide. Second, only the most powerful drives are sufficient to impel entrepreneurs to succeed at the grueling task of starting and running their own businesses, whether it’s high ambition to grow a chain of stores or a sense of security to run a single store. Third, the solution that they settled on is in fact a compromise, but a compromise that is far more likely to let the business and the marriage thrive.

If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to check out my latest book: Building On Bedrock: What Sam Walton, Walt Disney, and Other Great Self-Made Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Building Valuable Companies.

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