Dr. Ed Hoover, a marriage counselor and consultant to family businesses, has seen many a husband and wife team go into business together only to crash and burn on either or both fronts.
“The classic example is the bed and breakfast couple,” Hoover said. The dream is “you kind of have a perpetual vacation and also make a living.” The reality is “it never works.”
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The same can be said for any couple who “get starry eyed about going into business together,” said Hoover, who along with his wife, Colette Lombard Hoover, is a principal at Crowe Chizek/Lsi Family and Owner Managed Business Group of Oakbrook, Ill.
On the other hand, married couples who do succeed at business make for some of the “most stable situations,” Hoover said.
What follows are a few Rhode Islanders who have managed to get along and get ahead.
Susan and Earl Samson
Sakonnet Vineyards
Ask vintners Susan and Earl Samson what makes a good wine and they’ll tell you just the right balance of yin and yang. They won’t use those exact words. But that’s what they’ll be saying in between talk of body and bouquet, fruit and fermentation.
Susan, a former New York City actress and producer, describes herself alternately as “volatile,” “creative” and “emotional.” Earl, she says, “is silently crazy.” Together the couple own and operate Sakonnet Vineyards in Little Compton – a 12-year-old success story with no end in sight, despite its main characters approaching retirement age.
“Susan and I can’t figure out what we would be doing otherwise,” said Earl, 65, of the prospect of packing it in.
“Oh, I can think of a lot of things I’d be doing,” said Susan, 60.
Truth is, both husband and wife love their respective jobs. Susan markets the “Rhode Island wine” – a job that she said draws on her acting skills. Earl is “the numbers guy.”
Anne Celander, the third of the Samson’s four children and their only daughter runs Sakonnet House, the tasting room that was the previous owners’ home. She also provides perspective on her parents’ working marriage.
“They have very different skills to offer the business,” Anne said. “Especially at the beginning, they were coming from very different places.”
Susan interjected: “It’s worked better for us that way.”
What didn’t work early on was the way “shop talk spilled over into family life,” Anne said.
A couple of years into their business, the Samsons made the decision to separate dining and board room, to the best of their ability.
Today, “they’re a lot better about it,” Anne conceded.
Not surprisingly, Susan had her reservations back in 1986 when her husband proposed dissolving his Manhattan venture capital partnership, buying the estate their friends Jim and Lolly Mitchell founded in 1975 and turning their own summer home into a year-round residence.
“I said, ‘Earl I’ll give you two years’,” Susan recalled. “And now it’s been 12.”
Earl, on the other hand, had no doubts.
“It’s the kind of business you take with you wherever you go,” Earl said. “Susan and I have always loved food and wine. It’s part of our lifestyle so it’s not just the drudgery of work.”
That’s not to say it’s all been fun and games. Sales have grown an average of 10 percent a year since 1987 when the Samsons acquired the estate, according to Earl. However, it wasn’t until 1995 that Sakonnet turned a profit. Last year, the 50-acre vineyard produced about 50,000 cases, he said.
Through it all, the couple’s relationship has also managed to thrive.
“I think our marriage is stronger because of it,” Susan said, adding, ” it’s all about mutual respect.”
That respect is the result of having well-defined and separate roles, Earl said.
“I think you’ve got the have your separate skills and then map out a part of the business that pertains to that and try not to cross the lines.”
And when the business suffers because of one partner’s mistake?
“We don’t point fingers at each other,” Susan said.
“We try not to,” Earl said, adding “there’s not a lot of second guessing because that’s where you get in trouble.”
Jennifer Neuguth and David aRiordan (back row) take OOP! Juice on the road with their kidz Frizz Bizz program for young entrepreneurs.
David Riordan and Jennifer Neuguth OOP!, Inc.
David Riordan and Jennifer Neuguth, both 33, approached their retail business differently than the Samsons. First they formed a company. Then they got married.
The couple, who met as roommates in Boston, were engaged and living with Jennifer’s mother in Foster when they decided to open OOP!, an artsy gift gallery on eclectic Thayer Street in Providence.
They were 23 and felt they could afford to take a chance. Almost a decade later, the couple have a wholesale and Internet soda business through which they sell OOP! Juice, a flavored soda drink (The slogan: “Not a speck of juice in it”) and have signed a lease for a second retail outlet at Providence Place.
At first, David and Jennifer worked non-stop, wearing whatever hats necessary. As time went on, they reached a consensus about the division of labor based on their skills and preferences. These days, Jennifer does the buying while David oversees store operations. Both remain creative forces, deciding what items to stock and dreaming up new products like the line of “fizzilicious” specialty sodas.
The business remains time-consuming. But David and Jennifer are as enthusiastic about it and each other as ever.
“The pros much outweigh the cons,” Jennifer said of owning a business with her husband. “The key to it is being happily married,” she added.
“If you both have the same vision, it’s such a joyous journey. Every accomplishment we make we make together. Every thing that goes wrong goes wrong for both of us,” she said. “The difficulty is it’s like having children. Can we go away and not talk about the business?”
David agreed it’s hard to separate work and personal life. But he insisted that’s not always a bad thing.
“It’s what we do. It’s not like work. It’s our life,” he said.
That kind of focus also leaves the couple little time or desire for nit picking, both said. We go out with other couples, hear them fighting and realize “this is relationship bickering. We don’t have that,” David said.
David and Jennifer’s arguments are mostly limited to work. And even then there is always an end in sight.
“We may fight over the way of doing it,” David said, “but not about getting it done.”
THE KEIGWINS, Beverly and Jack, owners of the F.H. French Club.
Beverly and Jack Keigwin F.H. French Co.
Jack Keigwin, a self-described “reformed chauvinist,” never liked the idea of going into business with his wife, Beverly. It didn’t matter that the commercial construction business he acquired in 1978 and moved to Providence was Beverly’s father’s; or that his wife was the majority stockholder and could have fired him at any point, as the couple jokes.
“Beverly was trained as a nurse and an educator, and the role she would have taken was financial,” Jack explained. “There was just some question about her training to do that.”
For a long time, Jack’s take on things wasn’t a problem. Beverly “had not loved” the business her father founded in 1953 and ran from his home in Northborough, Mass.
“There was really no peace or dedicated family life,” Beverly recalled, adding that her mother was also involved as the bookkeeper. “So I never really fashioned that I would carry on the family business.”
But in the summer of 1978 both Beverly and Jack experienced a change of attitude. That’s when Beverly, on summer break from her teaching job, filled in for the company CPA who was out on vacation.
“She found some problems I wasn’t aware of. Some sloppiness,” Jack said.
With a small business “absolute trust has to be there since all the money that comes and goes is straight from your pocket,” Beverly said. “You have to put that anxiety aside.”
Beverly proposed stepping in as bookkeeper. Jack agreed, if somewhat reluctantly.
Since then, French has moved its headquarters from Providence to Lincoln and grown design and property management divisions.
And Jack is a changed man.
“I absolutely have no regrets whatsoever. It’s worked marvelously,” he said. “Whatever success we’ve had has been because somebody is minding the store while I’m out there changing the landscape of northern Rhode Island.
“It probably wouldn’t have happened if Beverly wasn’t making sure that the risks that I was taking were calculated risks and not just about massaging my ego,” he said.
For the Keigwins, who have two children now in their 30s, the separation of work and home life has never been a problem. Nor has it been an accident.
“We stay here late and resolve what needs to be resolved. From 5 to 7 is kind of our wind-down period so that when we go home, home is indeed home,” Beverly said.
The approach has worked, according to Jennifer Cookke, the Keigwin’s 32-year-old daughter who took over the property management division two years ago.
“As a child, I couldn’t tell you much about” the company. “When they were home, they were husband and wife,” she said of her parents.
Just the same, Jack and Beverly managed to instill in their children a tremendous work ethic that goes something like “life is work and what you accomplish in life says a lot about you,” Jennifer said. Jennifer learned the lesson so well she’s had to step back and as she put it “have a life.”
“Life isn’t just work and it cannot be all-consuming,” she said.
Jack, 60, and Beverly, 57, agree, although they don’t see themselves retiring for a long time. However, “we are retracting a little,” Beverly said.
Which leads to the ultimate challenge of being spouses in business.
“As a husband and wife team you have to be in harmony in terms of when you back away. I always thought I was more ready to move back than Beverly was,” Jack said. “Now we’re starting to be in synch.”
