Success of married co-owners begins with respect

When a wife and husband own and run a business and do it well, they work like a pair of hands: not identical, but complementary; not by doing the same actions, but by coordinating their actions in a joint task.
Sharing the roles of married couple along with co-owners of a business requires clear job descriptions, firm business and personal boundaries, and – above all – respect for the other person’s abilities, say three Rhode Island couples who are managing their own businesses together.
Andrew Baer, a builder, and Megan Moynihan, an architect, moved to Rhode Island in 2007 after three decades of work and career-building in New York City. They knocked down Baer’s family cottage in Charlestown; designed and built a new house on the same spot; founded their architectural firm, Oyster Works, in Charlestown; and got married, all within a couple of years.
“It is hard to imagine a better start for a relationship than to build a house together,” Baer said. “You are embodying the image of merging your lives.”
Architects and builders can sometimes find themselves at loggerheads; the architect is creating an artistic vision on paper, while the builder has to put hard material on the ground, within a schedule and a budget. “As a builder, I might be more sensitive to time and urgency,” Baer said, “and Megan is inquisitive and always wants to turn another page and look at something through a different lens.”
However, the two of them make their partnership work, he said, by understanding and honoring each others’ biases. “We have learned to respect each other’s way of seeing things and to yield when it is time to yield,” Baer said. “Also, we don’t really do the same things; we share different responsibilities.” In the world of people who study family-business dynamics, a couple who own and run a business together are individually called “copreneurs.” Dr. Kit Johnson, a family-business consultant in South Florida who is affiliated with the Family Firm Institute, says there are no reliable figures on how many businesses are run by copreneurs, partly because the U.S. Census does not pose the question.
Johnson said for copreneurs to succeed, “It is important to have good role definition. When there is clarity in roles, you know what each person is responsible for.” Also, she said, couples running a business “have got to have boundaries, as in ‘when we pull into the driveway, all business talk stops.’ People need to understand when they are speaking to each other as spouses and when they are speaking as business partners.” A universal quality of successful copreneurs, Johnson said, is their “tremendous amount of respect for each other as people and as businesspeople.”
Tina and Anthony Tomaselli founded their restaurant and catering business in their 20s, with almost no experience. Anthony was a 28-year-old artist and waiter and Tina was a 26-year-old nurse in 1982 when they decided to build a business together that would allow them to mold their future and their time as they saw fit. They bought a tiny variety store on Budlong Road in Cranston and began by simply serving muffins and sandwiches over the counter. Now, almost 30 years later, their T’s Restaurant has gone through three significant expansions in Cranston, spawned a second restaurant in East Greenwich, and employs 70 people. Over the years, Anthony carved out time to build a career as an artist, one of his goals back in the 1980s. “We wanted to create a common destiny, and my husband wanted to own his own time,” Tina Tomaselli said. Success, she added, requires “finding your title with the company and respecting the boundaries of your job description. You have to build your own guidelines and your own foundations and to respect your partner.”
“It is a commitment to something beyond the two of you that drives you together, but it can also drive you apart if you are not careful,” she said.
The drawback of couples working together is that the work can take over their brains, even at home. Paul Block is director of Psychological Centers, which offers mental health services throughout Rhode Island. His wife, Elizabeth Cantor, began working in the fall of 2009 as the company’s director of outpatient services.
“In order for this to work, there has to be trust in each others’ judgment and expertise,” Block said. “Also, we have clear roles in the organization and we are empowered to play those roles.”
“It hasn’t all been easy,” Cantor said. “My work hours increased when I took on this role.” Also, she said, their young son and daughter began “giving us grief about talking about work at dinner.” As a consequence, Block and Cantor hold a weekly meeting at the office to help keep work talk from taking over at home.
Like marriage, co-managing a business well allows partners to learn and grow together, according to those who have done it.
“Running a business has provided us with many opportunities to break new ground and explore together,” said Baer, co-owner of Oyster Works. •