Starting a Business with Your Spouse

Tom Evslin, shares his experiences starting a business with his wife:

Mary and I are lucky that our skills are complementary. I invent stuff and implement it; Mary makes me describe sensibly and simply what I�ve invented and then markets it. During the early stage of a business, Mary makes cold calls and opens doors; I negotiate and close. We interview potential employees from two very different points of view. Mary designs offices and creates company cultures that make working fun; that complements my making work challengingly hard and covers my weakness of forgetting to say “thank you”.

It wasn’t all good, though. There were negatives:

There is a risk that something business or not business related will happen to the relationship and damage the business. I found myself (I was the CEO in this business) trying so hard not to appear to favor Mary that her ideas and plans got less support than those of everyone else. Debate is important to a functioning executive team and it is harder on the other execs when the CEO�s spouse is also a team member � not impossible, just harder.

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