Co-preneurs - can they have their cake and eat it too?
by Margaret Heffernan

On the surface, the Rosses and the Williams have it all. Both couples have been married for more than 17 years. Both have large families. Both are copreneurs, working together to run the businesses they own. Lots of people these days want to be just like them, fusing their work and home lives in an apparently ideal integration of values and skills. With 200,000 couples in Britain, and 3.6 million couples in the United States, running their own businesses together, the copreneurial life appears to offer a flexible way to combine what you love with who you love.

But there's a big difference between them. While the Williams' business and marriage are both thriving, the Rosses are undergoing the painful process of breaking up both their family and their company. That's the biggest risk copreneurs take when they combine their marriage with their business: if one fails, the other often goes down with it. Putting all your eggs in one basket may simplify life - or put the whole thing in jeopardy. How can you ever know which it will be?

Experience helps. Seven years ago, when Karen and Gavin Williams founded their telemarketing firm, Carelink International, they were already seasoned business people. Gavin had spent 15 years in the transport industry and Karen had already run her first successful business, Travel Accessories Ltd. "Even before we thought of romance, we both admired each others' business sense. The seeds were sown then because each of us was really good at our own jobs. " Karen eventually sold her company to Revelations, but even with three children and enough money to retire, they were too young to quit. "We'd been married for eight years. Both of us had no illusions about how hard difficult it is." Working together seemed an obvious solution to them. " We just hated being apart - we still do. Our friends all thought it was a terrible idea, but our families thought it was great."

Similarly, when Kieran and Leslie Ross decided to start their own recruitment firm, JKL and Hide Ltd., they had years of experience in all aspects of their business. They were sick of working for other people and it never occurred to them that putting their marriage and their business lives together was risky. "It just didn't cross my mind," says Leslie. (Kieran declined to be interviewed.) "It was more a case of thinking about the mortgage, Kieran needed a job, he knew recruitment and accounts, I had experience as an operator. I was pregnant in February and we planned to open in June. I thought 'well, I've never started a business or a family so let's just run with it.' I never considered it would fail."

It's in the nature of all entrepreneurs to be optimistic, embrace risk, to be excited, rather than intimidated, by the unknown. And it's in the nature of entrepreneurs too to make it up as they go along. "The first year," said Gavin, "we thought we were both the governor. Then we defined our roles and stuck to them. Now we don't interfere with each other; we realized that you each need your own job. There's no point trying to work as Siamese twins."

Kieran and Leslie did pretty much the same - first making the mistake of overlapping areas of responsibility but eventually delineating them clearly, for each other and for their growing staff. "At first, we started with a blank canvas, we all did everything. But this changed. Kieran was excellent at putting together sales proposals, keeping track of legislation, budgeting, forecasting. And I was really focused on sales, on getting the money in." Reporting lines were clear - all but the accounting staff reported to Leslie.

They all learned - as copreneurs must - do deal with disagreement. " We have had robust debates," says Gavin Williams, "but, at the end, one person will see the others' view and be prepared to go with that. You couldn't have a company with directors not talking to each other. Companies fail that way." The same lesson had to be learned at JKL. " Once, we must have been two or three years old, we had a blazing row in the office. I was mortified with myself. And I learned: never never never never never. I will wait until we're in private. It's a good discipline, frankly, whether you're married or not."

Learning these lessons brought both companies considerable success. It has probably been easier for Carelink because it was very well funded with the proceeds from Karen's sale of her first company. That money has bought them time and reduced the day-to-day pressure of meeting mortgage and payroll all from the same source. But JKL too enjoyed some bumper years. "The year 2000 was the best year we had. I take an awful lot of pride in that. It was the product of huge learning - we really had come a long way and built a great reputation."

Success brought Gavin and Karen even closer together. Although their headquarters has plenty of space, they share an office, they share desks, they drive into work together and home together. They even go on business trips together, when time permits. "It saves time and we love bouncing ideas off each other." Like every couple in the world, they wish they had more time with their children - but success has brought them everything they want.

Success for Leslie, however, marked a real turning point; in the year of their greatest achievements, she decided she'd had enough. She was having her fourth child and didn't want to go back to work. She assumed that, since they'd run the business successfully together, Kieran could run the business without her. And he couldn't. "Kieron wasn't paying attention to staff. Why? I don't know. I just don't know. Half would be because we had been successful and he assumed it would just run without thinking about training or management. I don't know that he has ever had to run a situation before where he had to check on people." Differences in style and skills that were tolerable while there was a balance of power between them became intolerable when Leslie was watching from the sidelines. " Within a year of so, I had to come back to save the business. I resented it wholeheartedly."

Of course, 2001/2002 was a pretty tough year for everyone. But what happened at JKL is a salutary lesson for copreneurs everywhere. Because Leslie had changed. She'd run the business for seven years; she was tired, she wanted a break - and she found she couldn't get out of the business without, finally, getting out of the marriage too. And Leslie's not unique. I've talked to lots of copreneurs who face the same predicament: how do you leave one without leaving the other? Couples with separate careers - or even separate businesses - don't face this problem; copreneurs can't avoid it.

If you're lucky - and Gavin and Karen are the first to admit that they have been lucky - you never want to leave either. They're as passionate now about both their businesses, and about each other, as they've ever been. "It's very exciting what we do. If we did ball bearings together, maybe it wouldn't be. But with technology like Vismail, where you can send video by email - well, when we show it to people their jaws hit the deck. And Carelink has just gone phenomenally well. So what we can do is bounded only by our imaginations and the size of globe."

Although their businesses have changed - through growth and investment - Karen and Gavin haven't fundamentally changed: they still want the entrepreneurial life and they want it together. What might happen should one of them change their mind, no one can tell.

Most research shows that family and copreneurial businesses last longer than other start ups. Perhaps this is because they're harder to leave. "It was really the business that kept us together," Leslie concedes. She feels now that the partnership was unequal, that she ended up doing too much at a time when she didn't want to do it at all. She's not quite sure what will happen to the business - whether she and Kieran will manage to sell it or have to close it.

Successful copreneurs achieve a volatile but essential mixture of independence (separate roles and responsibilities) with a high level of trust. That means they can make their separate contributions to the shared enterprise. But once that trust is lost, the business and the marriage are in real trouble. Copreneurial couples stake everything on the assumption that they won't change as people - or, if they do, that they'll somehow manage to do so compatibly. Neither of the Williamses has faced real change in themselves or loss of trust in each other - and they hope they never will. Because, if or when they occur, only heartbreak can ensue, with children and employees caught in the cross fire.

Ultimately, being a copreneur feels a lot like an undiversified portfolio: the career, the children, the mortgage, the cash flow all end up together, dependent on a single, passionate investment called a relationship. As Leslie revisits what she loved about the business, and then what she loved about Kieran, it's hard and it's painful to separate them. Asked what she'll miss more - the marriage or the business - she concludes, "I don't know. I really don't know. I guess I'm about to find out."

Have You Got What It Takes To Be A Copreneur?

1. Would you describe your marriage as
• a - a happy constant
• b - a good compromise
• c - a roller coaster

2. Would you describe your partner as
• a - a superb business brain
• b - smart in parts
• c - charming but unreliable

3. Would you describe your partner as
• a - different from me - but complementary
• b - similar to me but with different areas of expertise
• c - sometimes better, sometimes worse than me

4. Do you resolve differences by
• a - discussion, debate, resolution
• b - ignoring them
• c - knowing how to win

5. When something makes you unhappy, do you
• a - discuss it at once
• b - wait to see what happens
• c - wait for it to go away

6. How would you describe your current financial position?
• a - solid but open to improvement
• b - fragile
• c - perilous

7. In business, is your family
• a - wholeheartedly supportive
• b - puzzled
• c - negative

8. In management, would you say that you are
• a - good at setting boundaries and delegating
• b - not much bothered who does what
• c - good at knowing the right way to do things

9. Being an entrepreneur is important to you because
• a - you love building something from scratch
• b - you like being the boss
• c - you like doing things your own way

10. When you have free time, you most like to
• a - spend it with your partner
• b - spend it with friends
• c - spend it alone reading

11. Do you switch off
• a - regularly
• b - sometimes
• c - never

12. When you have children, you imagine them
• a - running a family business
• b - working in a bank
• c - working freelance

13. I think making money is
• a - unbelievably difficult
• b - largely a matter of luck
• c - easy

14. In business I would describe myself as
• a - experienced, with the scars to prove it
• b - learning
• c - untarnished by past mistakes

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