Working with your spouse in a family business
Working with your spouse in a family business means the two of you share two relationships at once, a marriage and a working partnership, each with its own rules and often conducted at the same table. Decisions tend to drift to the kitchen table and professional disagreements to turn personal; and as long as roles, pay, ownership and signing powers are not clear and written down, both of you are exposed when a crisis comes. Everything on paper, from the articles of association to a marriage contract, is a matter for your lawyer and notary; what you can clarify yourself is the place you want to hold in each of the two relationships.
In brief
- When your spouse works in the business, two relationships with their own rules share the same people, and the line between them does not draw itself.
- Deciding at the kitchen table is quick, but it leaves others out, leaves no record and brings the business into every hour of the day.
- A disagreement about work is easily heard as a personal one, and tension at home ends up in the office, because neither relationship has an exit of its own.
- Company documents, marriage contracts, employment contracts, powers of attorney and personal security given for company loans are for your lawyer, notary and accountant, and are best reviewed in a calm year rather than mid-crisis.
- What you can clarify yourself is the place you want in the business and in the marriage, knowing that these are two questions, not one.
In this article
- What changes when your spouse works in the business?
- Decisions made at the kitchen table
- Why does a disagreement at work become personal?
- Who decides what: title, pay, powers and ownership
- What happens if the marriage or the business runs into a crisis?
- What your lawyer, notary and accountant should look at
- Who can you talk to when something affects both home and business?
- What you can clarify yourself, with a sheet of paper and no hurry
- Frequently asked questions
What changes when your spouse works in the business?
In many family businesses, the founder’s husband or wife has been there from the first day, keeping the books, signing at the bank and knowing every employee by name. In others, the couple started the company together, in equal shares or not, and each took charge of their own area. Sometimes the spouse joins later, leaving a career of their own to fill a gap nobody else could fill.
In every one of these cases the same thing happens. Between two people there is at once a marriage, built on affection, loyalty and shared history, and a working relationship, built on roles, results and hierarchy. Both are legitimate, but they do not speak the same language. In a marriage, nobody appraises the other’s performance; in a company, somebody has to.
It is worth starting with what this double bond does well, which is a great deal: a trust that cannot be hired, a commitment no salaried director would offer, a shared view of the long term and a natural discretion about sensitive matters. Often it is exactly what carries a family business through its hardest years.
What changes is the boundary. In an ordinary company, the working relationship ends at the office door. Here there is no door: the business comes home, on holiday and to the dinner table, and the marriage comes into the office, into meetings and into the way the staff look at each of you. That boundary almost never draws itself. If nobody draws it, circumstances will.
Decisions made at the kitchen table
Some of the company’s decisions are not made at the office but over dinner, in the car or on a Sunday morning. A new hire, a price rise, a loan, the purchase of a warehouse: discussed at home, decided at home, and announced at work the next day as settled.
It is quick and comfortable: no meeting needs to be called and nothing needs to be minuted. The cost arrives later, from three directions.
First, the people who were not at that table. A minority shareholder, the finance director, a daughter already working in the business: each discovers that what matters is decided in a conversation they cannot join. Nobody has shut them out on purpose, but the effect is the same, and in time they notice.
Second, memory. What was decided in the kitchen leaves no minutes, no email, no note. Years later, when someone needs to work out why personal security was given for a loan or who accepted a condition, each of you remembers a different version, both in good faith.
Third, the marriage itself. When anything can be discussed at any moment, there is no moment without the business. A dinner that begins with the children ends with the quarter’s margin. One of you may experience it as an intrusion while the other barely notices.
Separating the places does not require elaborate structures, only a distinction: what belongs in a meeting with a date, an agenda and a few written lines, and what can still be talked about at home. The two of you draw that line, and it can move over the years. What wears people down is never having drawn it.
Why does a disagreement at work become personal?
Between two directors who never see each other outside the office, a disagreement about a hire is a disagreement about a hire. Between two people who share a home, the same disagreement drags everything else along with it. Behind “I’m not comfortable with that supplier” one may hear “you never trust my judgement”, and behind a silence in a meeting, a reproach that comes from somewhere else.
It works in both directions. Tension at home reaches the office as a closed door, a curt email or a decision put off for no reason. A clash at work comes home and sits down to dinner. What one relationship would have talked through and left behind stays open in the other.
Then there is the question of exits. In an ordinary conflict at work, you can ask for a different role, change employer or, in the end, leave. After an argument at home, you can go for a walk and come back later. When the two relationships coincide, every one of those exits touches the other: resigning becomes a matter for the marriage, and a row at home becomes company business.
The staff notice first. Employees learn to read the couple’s mood the way one checks the sky before going out: they know on which days it is wiser to raise nothing, and which of you to approach when they need a yes. Without anyone deciding it, the company gradually arranges itself around the state of the marriage.
Many disagreements, of course, are exactly what they seem: two reasonable views of the same matter. The difficulty is not disagreeing but being unable to disagree without everything else moving too. And if, over the years and under different pretexts, you keep finding yourself in the same place in the same argument, it may no longer be about the matter of the day. Repetition in form rather than content is what our note “When a pattern repeats” examines.
Who decides what: title, pay, powers and ownership
Almost every couple who work together have a division of roles. The question is whether it has been said or merely assumed. Who decides on staff, who signs at the bank, who deals with the largest customers, who has the last word when the two of you disagree: if each of you were asked separately, would the answers match?
The most delicate imbalances are usually the ones nobody has named. There are couples in which one owns the business and the other has worked in it for twenty years without shares, on a modest salary or none, and knows it better than anyone. There are couples with equal shares where only one really decides. And there are couples where the business card says “managing director” and daily practice says something else, or the reverse.
None of this is necessarily unfair. It often rests on sensible decisions from another time: the children were small, the business could not pay two salaries. The difficulty starts when life changes and the arrangement stays as it was.
If you founded the company, the question is uncomfortable because it means looking at someone as an employee, or a co-owner, whom you have never seen that way. If you joined later, it is uncomfortable for another reason: asking for your place to be put in writing can feel like a lack of trust, when it is in fact how your contribution comes to exist outside the memory of two people.
It helps to keep apart four things that everyday life runs together: title, pay, powers and ownership. Someone with a title may hold no shares; someone with shares may have no authority to sign; someone with authority to sign may have no contract. How the pieces fit in your case is for your lawyer and accountant to tell you, but knowing they are separate pieces already brings order to the conversation.
What happens if the marriage or the business runs into a crisis?
While things go well, the fusion of marriage and business costs almost nothing. It is in a crisis that whatever was never written down comes to light. Four are worth looking at squarely, not because they will happen, but because a business ought to be able to come through them without depending on the goodwill of the moment.
If the marriage ends
If the relationship ends, the business carries on, but the two people who must take its decisions are the same two who are separating. The spouse who works in the company without shares may find themselves without a job and without a stake in what they helped to build. The one who owns it may discover that their spouse holds powers of attorney, bank access and a knowledge of the business that nobody else has. What happens to shares, position and assets depends on the rules that govern your marriage, on any marriage contract and on the company’s documents, and only your lawyer can tell you.
If the business has a bad year
In a family business, a poor year often shows that the risk never stayed inside the company. There is personal security you have both given for the company’s borrowing, sometimes a charge on the family home, and there are two salaries that depend on the same company’s results. A bad year then affects not one person but a whole household.
If the person who signs is absent for months
If the person who signs is out of action for a long period, for whatever reason, someone has to go on signing. It is assumed that it will be the spouse, often the person who knows the business best. But assuming is not the same as holding a power of attorney. Without one, the person who knows most may be authorised to do nothing, just when it matters most. Which powers exist and which are missing is a question for your notary and your lawyer.
When succession comes
When one of you dies, what was a matter for the couple becomes a matter of inheritance, with children, sometimes from earlier relationships, and in many countries with rules that do not depend solely on the wishes of whoever made the will. Who receives the shares, who runs the business and what place remains for the spouse who worked in it are questions to prepare with your lawyer and, where there is one, your notary.
In all four, the exposure is not one person’s alone, even if each of you sees it from a different side. And in all four, what weighs most is what was taken for granted without ever being written down.
What your lawyer, notary and accountant should look at
Anything that is a document, a figure or a point of law is a matter for professionals, and they come first, before anyone else, ourselves included. That is the order we always follow; our note “Where the lawyer ends” explains why.
The first step is knowing what exists. Your lawyer will tell you what they need to see, but in a business where both spouses work, the list usually includes:
- the articles of association and, if there is one, a shareholders’ agreement or family charter;
- any marriage contract, prenuptial or postnuptial agreement, and the matrimonial property rules that apply to you;
- each spouse’s employment or service contract, pay and social security position;
- the powers of attorney granted and the authorised signatories at each bank;
- any personal security given for the company’s borrowing, including a charge on your home;
- your wills, if you have made them, and when they were made.
With that list in front of you, three questions are useful in any adviser’s office: what happens to each of us in each of the four crises, what is not covered by any document, and what should be looked at first. If you are not married, ask explicitly which rules apply to your relationship, because they may well differ from those that apply to married couples.
One point deserves separate attention: whom each adviser acts for. The company’s lawyer and accountant act for the company, and the family’s long-standing notary knows you both. While your interests coincide, that raises no difficulty. When they may diverge, in a reorganisation, when the children come in, or in a crisis, ask each adviser plainly whom they act for, and whether each of you should take separate advice.
And a point of timing. These documents are far easier to review in a calm year than in the middle of a storm, and going through them calmly, together if possible, is already a conversation about what each of you brings and expects. Putting in writing what works is a way of looking after it. How our work sits alongside that of these professionals is set out on our page “Do you work with lawyers or advisers?”
Who can you talk to when something affects both home and business?
This situation has a loneliness of its own. The person you talk to about the worries of the business is your spouse, and the person you talk to about the worries at home is your spouse too. When what weighs on you lies exactly where the two meet, the natural confidant is part of the question.
Elsewhere, there is hardly anyone either. Employees depend on you both, friends tend to be shared, children should not have to take sides, and each side of the family has its own loyalties. So you keep quiet, sometimes for years. Our note “No one to talk to” is not about couples, but it describes this way of losing the person you would normally turn to.
Lawyers and notaries are indispensable, but their work concerns the document, not the person living through the situation. That leaves a space they do not fill: thinking aloud about something that touches both a company and a shared life, with someone who belongs to neither.
That is where a private consultation can make sense, once your professionals have done their part, and alongside them, never in their place. It usually comes down to one of these situations: the paperwork is in order and you do not know what place you want from now on; you face a decision, whether to stay on, change role, leave the business or reorganise it, and you have not taken it; or you recognise in what you are going through now something you went through before, at another stage of life or with other people.
What such a conversation looks at is the situation you are in: when it began, what changed just before, what decision you face and what is keeping you from taking it. The decision remains yours.
It begins with a conversation by WhatsApp or telephone, in English, with Tony Alcalá. We listen and consider whether our work has anything to contribute to your situation; if it does not, we tell you there and then, and why. If it does, nothing starts until the scope, the duration and a fixed price have been agreed; our page “What happens before you accept a case?” sets out the steps. What you tell us is known to two people, Tony Alcalá and Patty García, and our page “Who will know about my case?” explains what that means in practice.
What you can clarify yourself, with a sheet of paper and no hurry
Before you speak to anyone, your lawyer or us, there is some work only you can do, with a sheet of paper and a quiet hour. The point is not to decide anything but to know where you stand. There are five questions, to be answered in writing:
- What do I actually do in the business, and how much of it appears in any document?
- Which business decisions are made at home today, and which would I rather see made elsewhere?
- If I had to sign tomorrow without my spouse, would I know what I am allowed to sign and where the documents are?
- What place do I want to hold in five years’ time, in the business and outside it?
- When did this start to weigh on me, and what changed just before?
The first and third are for your lawyer: they show what is missing on paper. The second and fourth are yours and, when the time comes, belong in a conversation between the two of you, away from the office and away from any crisis. Writing down the fourth, some people realise that they want to stay in the marriage and leave the business, or stay in the business in another role, and that they had never separated the two questions.
The fifth says the most. Sometimes the tension put down to the business began with something else: a child joining the company, retirement drawing closer, the death of a parent, an unexpected offer to buy. A date explains nothing on its own, but it shows where to start looking.
None of this calls for an immediate answer. Answers written after an argument say more about the argument than about you; those written in a quiet week come closer to what you really want.
Frequently asked questions
Is it a good idea to work with your spouse in a family business?
It can work very well, provided each relationship has its own rules. What usually goes wrong is not affection or trust but clarity: roles nobody has defined, pay that does not reflect what each person does, decisions taken at home, and a split of ownership nobody has reviewed since the start. Once those points have been discussed and, where appropriate, put in writing with your lawyer, the marriage can be one of the company’s real strengths.
How do you keep marriage and work separate in a family business?
By separating places and times rather than feelings. It helps to decide which matters go to a meeting with a date and a short written note and which can be discussed at home, to set aside time the business does not enter, and to be clear about who decides what, so that a professional disagreement does not have to be settled over dinner. It is not a rule made once: you revisit it when something changes, such as a child joining the business.
What rights does a spouse working in the family business have?
That depends on the specific position, and only a lawyer can answer reliably: whether there is an employment contract and how social security is handled, whether the spouse holds shares, what powers of attorney exist and which matrimonial property rules apply. If you are that spouse, bring a written note of what you do in the business and since when, what you have signed and what you receive. Your lawyer can then explain where you stand today and what would happen in a separation, a company crisis or a death.
Who has the final say when a couple runs a family business together?
On paper, whoever the company’s documents, powers of attorney and contracts give that authority to. In practice, it is often whoever has come to decide at home without anyone saying so, and most tension begins in the gap between the two. It helps to agree, for each kind of decision, who decides, who is consulted first and what happens when you disagree, and to talk it through at a set time rather than across the kitchen table. Whether that arrangement matches the documents is for your lawyer to say.
Who can I talk to about a problem that affects both my marriage and my business?
For anything that is a document, a figure or a point of law, start with your lawyer, notary and accountant. Once they have done their part, if a decision is still open, or you are left carrying it alone, a private consultation can make sense. At Lex Fati, what is examined is the situation you are in and the decision in front of you: we listen, consider whether we can contribute anything, and tell you yes or no, with the reason. Describing your situation to us commits you to nothing.
If your situation requires it, present it.
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