I ran a post earlier this year on the challenges of spouses also being business partners. It was based on a very insightful interview from Inc.com.
StartupJournal offers some additional thoughts into what helps make being marriage partners together with being business partners a positive combination. There are over 13 million married couples in business together in the US, so it can work.
And that is the key word: work. A good marriage takes hard work and a good business partnership takes hard work. Putting the two together and making them both work creates the need for a tremendous amount of effort and planning. It rarely just "happens."
Think it through very carefully. The interview from Inc.com offered this caution:
Though there are no accurate statistics about what happens when spouses try to run a business together, expert estimates are grim: "Only 5% of couples can make all-in partnership work," says Azriela Jaffe, a frequent reporter on the phenomenon of entrepreneurial couples....
The challenges of being both types of partners at once are not just twice as many; the challenges can feel like they go up exponentially. That is why I call it a partnership squared.
