The New American Dream

A story about the highs and lows of running a family business.

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Building a business together

It seems more and more people are trying to figure out how to live their lives in nontraditional ways. Why don't we find a couple who has thought through the issues and decided to run a company together? Let's take a look at how they balance work and family. Do they really have more control over their lives? What are the drawbacks? -- J.A.F.

Family and business milestones have a way of coinciding for the Friberg-Peterson clan. For example, take the August 1975 telephone conversation between Karl Friberg, then an up-and-comer in Citibank's international-banking division, and his wife, Lyn Peterson, an interior designer. "Guess what. We've got a store," Friberg told Peterson, after what had been months of searching for the right location to open a retail wallpaper shop near their suburban home outside New York City. "Guess what. We're pregnant," she responded.

Fourteen years -- and four children -- later, Friberg, 44, and Peterson, 42, preside over what has become a major player in the home-furnishings business, Motif Designs, based in New Rochelle, N.Y. From its beginnings in the tiny shop, the company has grown to a $10-million designer and manufacturer of upscale wallpaper and home fabrics.

Peterson and Friberg are part of a growing breed of company owners -- couples who are launching businesses together because they share not only career and financial ambitions, but also a series of lifestyle goals that are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in the corporate arena. Give them success, yes, but not at the price of time with their kids and flexibility in their work schedules. For cou-ples like Friberg and Peterson, the traditional boundaries between work and home are no longer existent.

By spring 1979 a full three and a half years had passed since the couple used $9,000 in savings from Lyn, her sister, and her cousin to lease and stock their wallpaper store. Friberg, nothing if not financially cautious, had held on to his Citibank job all the while, waiting for a sign that the wallpaper business could generate enough cash flow to support his family of three. He and Lyn had endlessly debated whether their timing, finances, and business concept were finally good enough to take the big gamble, which in their case meant his resignation.

A change was long overdue. Peterson remembers urging her husband to make the break: "I never worried about problems like would we fight every day, or how would we pay the bills? It just seemed as though it would be an idyllic way to live, so romantic to finally be in this business altogether, 100%." That vision was easier for Peterson to imagine than for Friberg to act on -- it was she, after all, who had been immersed in the business for years now, first at the store and then, increasingly, at home drafting patterns for Motif's first designer collection. She also came from a family proud of its entrepreneurial roots: her grandfather started his own sprinkler-installation business 50 years earlier; two of his children had followed him in the business, and another had started a home-furnishings company.

But if Friberg was more conservative by nature than Peterson, he had his own fantasies that involved risks. Since their days in Cambridge, Mass., where Peterson worked as a waitress to put him through Harvard Business School, he had dreamed about chucking the corporate world and gambling his talents on his own venture. "I always used to sit in the back row of any class I took," he recalls of his ambivalence about being there at all, an emotion that lingered during his four years at Citibank.

In the end, straddling the fence between the corporate world and those dreams proved too stressful. Friberg found it frustrating to be no more than a cog in Citibank's correspondent-banking machinery, one of 10 or more people servicing the same foreign accounts. Risk taking was positively frowned on. "I knew I was ready to start taking chances and to help Lyn take them with our business," he recalls.

By 1979 Friberg and Peterson had made some money and had learned the ins and outs of the wallpaper market. And they'd come up with what they hoped would be a successful niche: the design and manufacture of their own brand of wall coverings. "I was working in the store selling the stuff all day," Peterson recalls, "so I was able to realize pretty fast just how limited most of the products on the market were. I kept telling Karl that I knew I could design something better." So for a year Peterson and two other artists had been doing just that in what was once the Friberg-Peterson dining room. That spring, to give it their best shot, the couple decided they needed Friberg's full-time attention -- not just those spare moments he could squeeze in between his Citibank paperwork and transatlantic business trips.

So at long last Friberg left banking to go full-time into the wall-covering business. After such a wait the beginning itself was something less than momentous. Friberg and his father spent the first day knocking around a huge concrete garage-turned-warehouse a few blocks from the couple's 65-year-old clapboard house. The two men patched together desks out of plywood, wallpaper, and some old sawhorses for Friberg and two part-time order clerks. Working from a pile of lumber bought at bargain-basement prices from a local discounter, they also constructed racks for storing rolls of wallpaper.

There wasn't much living space left in the family house, which is one reason Friberg felt positively liberated as he hammered away at those wallpaper racks and sawhorse desks in the drafty warehouse. For the past six months or so he'd been cold calling wall-paper distributors from his kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, wherever he could find a free phone and a quiet moment away from his Citibank job and his demanding toddler. He'd had to fight his way to the bathroom, stepping around college students and other part-time Motif employees. There was now a publicity consultant to be reckoned with, bivouacked in the attic. Meanwhile, the fledgling company was generating so much office garbage that neighbors had begun to complain about it, piled up along the manicured suburban sidewalk awaiting pickup.

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