“Are you stressed about the wedding?”
That’s a question Danielle Deavens said she keeps hearing as she and her fiancé, Doug Spencer, prepare to tie the knot this June. Her answer can take some of the questioners by surprise.
"No," she said. "I’m much more concerned with the business."
That’s because Deavens and Spencer aren’t just a couple. They are also business partners and co-founders of St. Louis-based e-commerce startup Bold Xchange.
Since they met in 2012, entrepreneurship has become a pillar of Deavens' and Spencer’s relationship. They aren’t alone in that experience.
Nationwide, more than 1.2 million couples own small businesses together, according to business mentoring group Score.
While the concept of married couples owning a business together might spark thoughts of a mom-and-pop storefront, the firms owned and operated by St. Louis couples run the gamut from technology to consumer products. Loren Fogelman, for example, has run businesses with her husband for her entire professional career and today owns Menifee, California-based Business Success Solutions, which offers business coaching to married couples.
Business ownership by married couples isn't a well-studied field, and little data exists on whether spousal entrepreneurship is on the rise. In fact, a 2021 article in Management Review Quarterly, an academic journal, noted “a comprehensive review of empirical research on couple businesses is lacking.”
But Fogelman said, at least anecdotally, technology has made it easier for couples to launch businesses together.
“There’s so many more home-based businesses than there ever were before,” Fogelman said.
Yet running a business with your spouse delivers its own unique sets of challenges, and for it to work, St. Louis couples said they've had to work hard to create boundaries between work and home life. That includes things like no-business Saturdays or designating certain rooms inside their homes as business-free zones.
And working with your spouse has some advantages, the biggest of which is sharing a part of their lives with each other that most working couples don't get to see.
“Life can be hard no matter what, but there’s no one I’d rather be doing hard things with than my spouse, the person who I chose to go through hard things with,” said Haley Loyet, who owns and operates Clayton-based Honeymoon Chocolates with her husband Cam. “I love that I can do that in a professional capacity as well. I think it just gives a little bit more depth to the whole experience of entrepreneurship, being able to share it with someone you’re with as intimately as you can be.”
'A richer understanding'
Greg Nichols says there’s a common reaction when he tells people that he runs IT consulting and staffing firm Technology Partners Inc. with his wife, Lisa.
“There’s almost always a raised eyebrow and they go ‘wow, how does that work?,’” said Greg Nichols, president and chief operating officer of the Chesterfield-based company. Lisa is CEO of the company.
The people posing the question usually respond by saying, "I could never do that,” he said.
While local couples in business together aren’t shy about detailing the challenges of melding marriage and business, they say there are often misconceptions about what it entails and the benefits it brings to their companies and relationships.
It also isn’t something that’s necessarily sought out by the couples.
Spencer and Deavens began their entrepreneurial endeavors when Spencer started a blog about his decision to walk away from law school. Deavens, a former writer and editor for Brides Magazine and Brides.com, helped him with the project, which expanded to include profiles of entrepreneurs. They eventually turned it into an e-commerce platform to monetize their efforts. Today, as Bold Xchange, they operate an online marketplace, which sells items from Black-owned businesses, while brands that include Centene Corp. (NYSE: CNC), Home Depot (NYSE: HD) and CarMax (NYSE: KMX) use the platform to buy gifts for employees and events.
“Us becoming business partners was organic. It’s not something we thought we would do,” Spencer said.
MORE: How a married couple, both founders of different startups, navigate love, business
The notion that family businesses, including firms operated by couples, launch organically isn’t uncommon, said Peter Boumgarden, director of Washington University’s Koch Center for Family Business.
“Often there’s this view that family businesses are intentional entities from the very beginning,” he said. “In practice, what oftentimes happens is you start something, you grow it over time and it’s a great thing to have as an asset inside the family in addition to traditional investment approaches.”
The Nichols’ path to being business partners started after Greg Nichols developed his own software as a part-time endeavor and needed someone to help market it. He turned to his wife, who worked in sales.
“I had talked her into leaving that job and coming and selling my product,” he said.
Those humble origins led to the creation of Technology Partners, which was founded in 1994 and in 2021 had revenue of $58.5 million and more than 450 employees. Those figures highlight what Lisa Nichols said has become one of the biggest benefits of running a company with her husband: It's allowed the couple to have an impact on others outside their own family.
“Working toward a common goal and common vision of building this company has just been so much fun and it’s been rewarding because it’s winning together and building together," she said. "Truly, I feel like it’s brought us even closer as a couple."
While sharing career success together is one benefit, Deavens said being in business together has helped her and Spencer better understand each other to a degree that most couples likely never reach. The couple says they still have to communicate and build trust as they navigate the challenges that come with owning a business.
“Most people never work with their spouse or significant other. It’s this whole piece of their day that you don’t experience up close.” she said. “It’s a richer understanding of all of those things I have than if we didn’t work together.”
Building boundaries
It isn’t always the perfect love story.
Couples that run companies together can also encounter challenges that are unique to their situation, perhaps none more difficult than having to balance personal relationships with the demands of their company. It’s easy to blur the lines and even sacrifice life outside of work for the company, said Fogelman, the couples-focused business coach.
"Your business will take as much as you give it,” she said.
There can also be financial pressures, especially if a couple’s income is largely tied to the performance of their company.
“We know that one of the drivers of marital dissatisfaction and even divorce can be financial concerns. If you’re going through that together, a down year for the business doesn't just impact one person — it impacts both people. You can feel that more acutely,” said Boumgarden.
The St. Louis-area couples said they take steps to address issues that might be foreign to typical business partners. One common refrain among them is the necessity of establishing boundaries, both within their companies and in their personal lives.
Greg and Lisa Nichols have offices next door to each at Technology Partners, but Greg Nichols said that doesn’t mean they jointly make decisions. He said a key to their success has been leaning into each other’s strengths, developing trust to “divide and conquer” in operating the business. With a background in sales, Lisa Nichols' focuses on Technology Partners' sales and external relationships, while Greg, whose expertise is in consulting and software development, handles those aspects of the business.
“My advice is to get very clear on your role in the companies and stay in (your) lane,” he said. “It’s about respecting each other’s expertise of the business and leaning into it.”
Outside of the office, the couples said the time-consuming nature of owning and operating a business often can slip into their personal lives. That requires creating their own strategies to remove themselves from the business, which can range from recurring date nights to adhering to specific parameters on where and when they can talk shop.
“It’s definitely a difficult thing to do because we’re thinking about it all the time and it can be all consuming if you allow it to be,” Deavens said.
Deavens and Spencer hired their first employees in the past year, which has helped lessen their load. Still, they've had to find ways to create a better work-life balance. One strategy they've tried, which they learned from another couple, involves establishing a room inside their home where they can’t talk about Bold Xchange. They've had mixed results with that initiative, but have found success in completely unplugging from the business on Saturday evenings.
“That chunk of Saturday is our time to be people and not business owners,” Spencer said.
Entrepreneurship as a cornerstone
The name Honeymoon Chocolates has double meaning for the Loyets and their business. It’s a reference to the couple’s relationship and the raw honey used to sweeten the company’s chocolate.
The business is growing. It received $100,000 in follow-on funding from Arch Grants and last month announced an expansion of its Clayton store to include Chocolate Bar, an in-cafe bar that will serve chocolate-based alcoholic beverages and food products. The Loyets expect the expansion, designed to open in time for Valentine's Day, to increase revenue by 50%.
Haley Loyet has a career outside Honeymoon as a physician completing a residency in pediatrics. But no matter which path she and her husband are pursuing, entrepreneurship is infused into their relationship.
“If we didn’t have a business together right now, I think whatever activity or hobby we ended up picking up would probably become a business anyway,” she said. “We love finding something creative together and then experimenting with that, pushing that further and seeing what else we can do with it."
As for Deavens and Spencer, their path as entrepreneurs has seeped into their nuptials. And it explains why they're not all that stressed about planning the wedding.
“We collaborate all the time," Deavens said. "It doesn’t feel at all foreign to us."
