Home But Not Alone

Some entrepreneurs strike a balance between work and family. Others don't even try.

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Zachary and Laura Durst, ages 13 and 10, know what the red scarf on the doorknob means. It means: "Mom is on the phone. Do not interrupt her unless one of you needs a tourniquet."

Mom, a.k.a. Christine Durst, is cofounder of Staffcentrix, an online network of "virtual assistants," or soloists who provide business-support services. Durst works out of a ground-floor room in her Woodstock, Conn., home. Her office door, which she keeps open most of the time, is a symbol of her philosophy of managing both a family and a start-up. She believes that exposing her children to the business -- letting them run the postage meter, say -- makes them feel like part of the action. Her theory is that they won't resent the company so much if they understand it. And just as she reserved the word no for the strictly verboten when her kids were little, she reserves the red scarf for only the most important business calls.

Closer to the other extreme on the home-office-parenting continuum is Art Berg. Unlike Durst, Berg keeps the door to his office closed at all times -- even when he's not in it, which happens frequently. If he's not on the road traveling, he's usually spending time with his daughter, McKenzie, 10, and his son, Dalton, 7.

Berg runs two companies from his Highland, Utah, home: his motivational-speaking practice, Invictus Communications, and a scheduling Web site for other professionals, eSpeakers.com. Together the two businesses bring in combined revenues of some $3 million. Berg's office teems with technology: seven networked computers, four servers, and a T1 Internet connection. He employs two office-support staffers to help him deal with it all. "It's kind of cramped," he says about his work space, which also serves as a gallery for his numerous trophies. (Berg, who is paralyzed from the chest down, set a world record in a 325-mile wheelchair race in 1993.)

Berg believes in giving his undivided attention to either the business or the kids -- one or the other, one at a time. "It's like Gandhi's philosophy: 'Wherever you are, just be there," he says. He does most of his work when he's on the road -- which is about half the year. "I rarely even eat a meal on a plane," he says. Instead he uses that time to catch up on the 50-plus E-mail messages he receives daily. "I spend my time exclusively with my children when I get home," he says.

Open-door policy, closed-door code -- there's more than one way to grow a family and a company at the same address. Some soloists, like Chris Durst, layer their work and family responsibilities throughout the day like peanut butter and jelly. Other entrepreneurs, like Art Berg, take an oil-and-water approach. The key, experts say, is to make sure your strategy is working for you and your kids. "There is no magic rule," says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute, in New York City, and author of Ask the Children: The Breakthrough Study That Reveals How to Succeed at Work and Parenting.

Galinsky surveyed more than 1,000 children aged 8 to 18 and some 600 parents who worked from home or from traditional offices. What she found was that having a parent who worked from home was not in itself any better, or worse, for kids. "You may think that simply being there is all that matters," Galinsky says, but it's not that easy. For example, kids whose mothers worked at home reported that they spent slightly more time together on weekdays than kids whose moms worked outside the home. But when dads stayed home, kids reported that their time together was often interrupted by work. And both fathers and mothers thought their jobs interfered with their parenting more when they worked from home. Bottom line: whether your office is a cozy breakfast nook or a gray-carpeted skyscraper suite, both your work and your kids need your attention. "It's how you manage it that makes the biggest difference," Galinsky says.

Chris Durst manages the competing demands of her real offspring and her newborn business in classic multitasking mode. She and her business partner, Michael Haaren -- who works from his home, in McLean, Va., and has a baby daughter, Jazz -- do conference calls to conduct mentoring sessions with clients. All the while, Durst and Haaren carry on a subdialogue over Yahoo Messenger. ("Do you have that information? Can you fax it to the client?") As Durst clatters away on her keyboard, headset clamped to her ear, her kids are never far from her mind. Among the piles of invoices and business cards on her desk lie Laura's hairbrush and a note from Zachary's teacher. When she went to Washington, D.C., to speak to people at the U.S. Department of Defense about portable careers for military spouses, she picked up Pentagon pencils for her kids and their classmates. "I've kept them involved, so they feel they are part of something really big," she says.

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