Unlimited partnership: Couples in business

Check out a great article on husbands and wives working together in business:

(FSB Magazine) — Some men and women are meant to be just friends; others inexplicably click, fall in love, and become couples for life..

Among those, a rare few know where their other half is at all times, they’re as likely to have lunch together as dinner, and they shamelessly poke their noses into each other’s business, literally: They’re entrepreneurial couples - partners who share a home and also a company- and they make up one of the most dynamic and unexpected forces in small business today.

While couples have launched businesses together since before the first pioneers peddled farming implements from their wagons, today’s mom and pop shops are different. More often than before, they’re professional instead of retail, global rather than local, and “mom” is likelier to have birthed the business and own most of it.

Gwen Martin at the Center for Women’s Business Research, in Washington, D.C., counts 10.4 million woman-owned companies (defined as at least 50 percent owned by a woman) in 2006; 74 percent of those are majority-owned by women. Of the 26 percent that are equal partnerships, it’s unclear how many are owned by spouses, but related statistics suggest an uptick in couple-run firms.

According to the American Family Business Survey conducted by the MassMutual Financial Group and the Raymond Institute, husband-and-wife CEOs of family businesses increased from 8 percent in 1997 to 14 percent in 2002.

Glenn Muske, an Oklahoma State University professor who has spent the past six years studying the topic, estimates that 3 million of the 22 million U.S. small businesses in 2000 were couple-owned. He doesn’t expect updated figures until late spring, but he and other experts believe that further growth has occured in the past half-decade.

What has triggered this transformation? Turns out that mom and pop shops have changed in large part because Mom now often has as much education as Pop (if not more), and she’s determined to use it.

Women now hold 59 percent of all college degrees, and are moving rapidly into traditionally male-dominated fields, such as engineering and computer science, that prepare them to launch scalable companies, as opposed to the stereotypical home-based catering business.

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