Buying a business with your spouse, from someone who did it with his family

The most common reason somebody I talk to doesn't end up buying a business has nothing to do with money, the brand, or the market.

It's that one person in the house was enthusiastic and the other was being polite.

I ask about this on the first call now, directly, because I've watched what happens when nobody asks. And I have some standing to raise it: my wife Tammy and I ran franchises together starting in 2004, and our third business we launched with our two oldest daughters. It was one of the best things we did. It was also not simple, and I'd have done parts of it differently.

Polite is not the same as in

Here's the failure mode. One person spends three months getting interested, reading, taking calls, building a picture. The other hears about it at dinner, doesn't want to be the person who says no to a dream, and says some version of "if you think it's right."

That sounds like agreement. It isn't. It's deference, and deference holds up beautifully right until the first genuinely hard month, at which point it turns into "I never wanted this", and the awful part is that both people are telling the truth.

You can find this before you sign anything. The test is not "are you supportive." Everybody says yes to that. The test is whether they can tell you, unprompted and in their own words, what they think the first year will actually be like. If they can't, they haven't engaged with it yet, and that's the work to do before anything else.

The conversation most couples skip

It isn't about the business. It's about what you're each agreeing to spend.

Money. Not the investment figure. The reserve. How much of what you have is going in, what's left, and at what point does one of you want to stop. Decide the stopping point now, while it's abstract. In the middle of a slow quarter it will not be abstract.

Time. Whose evenings and whose weekends, for how long. A new business takes hours from a household that was already fully committed, and those hours come from somewhere specific. Name it.

The other career. If one of you is keeping a job, that person's job is now the household's financial floor, and that changes what they can risk at work. It also means they'll be doing the business in the hours after their real one. Say that out loud.

What we do if it goes badly. Not the plan for success. The plan for the version where it takes twice as long. What we'd cut, what we'd sell, when we'd stop.

None of that is pessimism. It's the same conversation you'd have with a business partner who wasn't your spouse, and the only reason people skip it at home is that it's awkward to be formal with somebody you love.

Divide the business before you buy it

The single most useful thing we did was decide who owned what, and the most useful thing about it was that it stopped a whole category of argument from ever starting.

Not "we'll figure it out." Specific. Who owns hiring. Who owns the money. Who owns the customer relationships. Who owns the franchisor relationship. Who has the final call when you disagree, and on which subjects, because "we'll decide together" is not a decision-making process, it's a description of a deadlock.

Two people who both think they run the business will spend energy on each other that the business needed. Two people with clear territory will disagree about the business, which is useful, instead of about who gets to decide, which isn't.

What we got right, and what we didn't

Right: we picked something we could both stand to be around, and we were honest that we're different operators. I'll move once I understand something; I'm not the person you want doing the same careful thing for the ninth time. That's a real division of labor and pretending otherwise would have been expensive.

Also right: bringing the daughters in as actual operators with real responsibility rather than as help. They ran things. Watching them get the confidence to build businesses of their own afterward is not something you can put a price on, and it's the part I'd do again first.

Wrong, or at least harder than I expected: the business does not stay at the business. It comes home, because both principals live there. We did not have a rule about that and we should have. Something as simple as no operations talk after nine, or not at the dinner table, sounds trivial and would have given us back a lot of evenings.

Also: I underestimated how much a family business compresses ordinary disagreements. In a normal company, a bad quarter is a problem at work. In a family company it's at breakfast too, and every member of the household is carrying it. That's the cost of the thing that also makes it great.

The children question

People ask whether it's a good idea to involve kids. My answer is that it can be excellent and it depends entirely on whether they're choosing it.

A grown child who wants to build something, given real responsibility and real accountability, gets an education no employer would hand them at that age. A grown child who joined because it was expected gets a job they can't quit without it being a family event. Those are very different situations wearing the same clothes.

And be honest about the exit. Ours wound down as the daughters moved on to their own ventures, which was the right ending, but it was still an ending and it involved untangling a business that several people's lives ran through. Talk about how it ends before it starts.

Three things to put in writing

Even between spouses. Especially between spouses.

Roles and final-call authority, by subject, on one page.

The stopping point. The financial line at which you'd sell or close, agreed in advance.

How ownership works if the relationship changes. Nobody wants to draft this and everybody should. Your own attorney, not a template, and not mine. This is a question for a lawyer who represents both of you or one who represents each.

What I do with couples

I want both of you on the call. Not so I can sell to two people, but because the quiet one is usually the one with the objection that matters, and getting it into the room early saves everybody months.

I'll ask each of you separately what you think the first year looks like, and if the answers are very far apart, we'll deal with that before we look at a single brand. Sometimes the outcome is that this isn't the season for it. That's a real answer and I've never regretted saying it.

A question worth asking

What should couples discuss before buying a franchise together?

Discuss how much money you can put at risk, who will do the day-to-day work, how decisions will be made, and what happens if one person wants to leave. Have your own attorney address the ownership agreement.

No cost for the conversation and no obligation. If there are two of you in this decision, bring both. Let's talk.