>Opportunity or risk?
>Learn as you go
>Dealing with change
>Is it right for you?
>Quiz: Do you have what it takes to be a copreneur?

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Dealing with change

Success brought Gavin and Karen even closer together. Although their headquarters has plenty of space, they share an office, they share desks, and they drive to and from work 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. But he couldn’t.

Differences in style and skills that were tolerable when there was a balance of power between them became intolerable when Leslie was watching from the sidelines. “Within a year or so, I had to come back to save the business. I resented it wholeheartedly.”
Of course, 2001 and 2002 were tough years for a lot of people. But what happened at JKL is a salutary lesson for copreneurs everywhere. Leslie had changed. She’d helped 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 getting out of the marriage too.

Leslie’s not unique. Many copreneurs face the same predicament: How do you leave one without leaving the other? Couples with separate careers don’t face this problem, but copreneurs can’t avoid it.

If you’re lucky—and Gavin and Karen are the first to admit 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 e-mail—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.

Is it right for you?

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 thinks 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.

Successful copreneurs achieve a volatile but essential mixture of independence (separate roles and responsibilities) with a high level of trust, which enables them to make separate contributions to the shared enterprise. If 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.

Ultimately, being a copreneur feels a lot like having an undiversified portfolio: The career, the children, the mortgage, and 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 what she loved about Kieran, it’s hard 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.”

Quiz: Do you have what it takes to be a copreneur?