In building a small business, couples must overcome more than the usual challenges that face entrepreneurs, like raising capital, hiring workers and marketing products. They must also deal with the strains their shared undertaking puts on their personal relationship.“You get the stress of two people living together and the additional stress of trying to run a business and making it grow,” said James Lea, a professor of family medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a consultant on family businesses.
In some cases, the tension threatens to tear the couple apart. If that happens, business specialists said, the wise course is for one of the partners to retreat. People can and do switch employers or careers if they become bogged down in their jobs, but it is harder to leave a family business, Ira Bryck, head of the UMass Family Business Center in Amherst, Mass., said.
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