Married with Companies

You think you have trouble managing your company while maintaining some semblance of a healthy family life? Just imagine what a two-company household is like. Here's how some two-CEO couples make it work

Jerome Rafferty is one entrepreneur who is not married to his business. Not that he doesn't feel strongly attached to Rafferty Communications Group International, the consulting company in Torrance, Calif., that he founded in 1975. But he simply can't devote all his entrepreneurial passion to it.

That's because he is, almost literally, married to another business as well.

Actually, the "other business" in Jerome Rafferty's life belongs to his wife, Renata. And it's only natural that he offer a bit of counsel and comfort when her company's growth seems to be hampered by a particularly vexing problem. In 1991, for instance, Renata was convinced that she had hit a wall. After two years of running her company, Rafferty Consulting Group, which provides consulting services to nonprofit organizations, she was ready to give up. The contracts simply weren't coming in. "I thought, 'This is just too hard," recalls Renata, whose company is also based in Torrance. "'I'm going to go work for someone else and come back to this in a couple of years."

But she changed her mind after talking to her husband. "I told her, 'If you quit, you'll never come back. You'll remember how hard it is to get a business going," Jerome recalls saying quietly. "'If you stick with it, it will turn into a real business." Because Jerome was speaking from his own experience as an entrepreneur and not just as a supportive spouse, "I knew he was telling me the truth," says Renata. "I figured, 'If it's not going to get any harder than this, I can do it." After Renata struggled through two more months, the situation started to turn around.

Any day now, such whispered wisdom may replace the romantic sweet nothings that couples once shared. After all, experts say, the Raffertys may soon become the prototypical couple of the 1990s: 2.06 cars, 2.1 televisions, 2.0 companies. Like working mothers during the 1970s and dual-career families in the 1980s, two-company couples are likely to proliferate in the 1990s.

For those who already find it oppressive to manage one company while maintaining some semblance of family unity, the prospect of his-and-her entrepreneurial undertakings may be especially daunting. But Wendy Handler, assistant professor of management at the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College, points to several factors that make the phenomenon increasingly inescapable.

The rate at which women start businesses has begun to outpace the rate at which men do, she notes, and as woman-owned businesses increase, so do the chances of both members of a couple striking out on their own. "There are many reasons why both members of a particular couple would want to start their own business," Handler argues. "The large number of recent corporate layoffs, the increasing number of businesses operating out of the home, a general distaste for large corporations. . . . " Such trends show no sign of abating.

So look around you. Chances are, the person beside you in bed reading the Tom Clancy novel is harboring thoughts of creating a new venture. The day might soon come when you and your spouse have two little bundles of commercial joy to fret and fuss over, along with all the requisite late-night nurturing and round-the-clock trepidation. Just think: two top lines in which to delight, along with two bottom lines about which to brood. How will you manage it? With some difficulty, to be sure. Why would you want to? Believe it or not, there are advantages to having two entrepreneurs under one roof. Here are some of the merits of the two-company lifestyle, as described by couples who are already living it.

One

You don't have to explain why you missed dinner. And breakfast, too
Look at it this way: as a result of reading Deborah Tannen's runaway bestseller, You Just Don't Understand -- or, at the very least, the title -- everyone is only too aware of the pesky communication gap between the genders. But when each member of a couple experiences the travails of running a business on a daily basis, the two can't help having a better understanding of one another. Twenty-four hours a day.

Ron Sacino knows that sometimes his wife, Sherry Sacino, CEO of Sherry Wheatley Sacino Inc., a marketing firm in St. Petersburg, Fla., might have to fly off to Washington, D.C., at a moment's notice for a last-minute press conference. But he has no problem with that. As CEO of Sacino's Formalwear, a 25-store chain of tuxedo shops in St. Petersburg, he genuinely understands last-minute disasters. "If I were married to a 'nine-to-fiver,' the relationship would be totally different," says Ron. "We have empathy for each other. We each know what's necessary for the other to succeed." Ron appreciated that two-way empathy when he recently needed to stay late three nights in a row to train a new group of workers for an incipient telemarketing division. "I know there are certain things that Ron just has to be there for," says Sherry. "If I just worked for somebody else, I might not understand that."

Two

You get free advice, delivered in a timely (and inescapable) manner
Aside from empathy, entrepreneurial couples can also offer each other concrete help. "I've done many things differently because of Sherry's input," says Ron. "She's an exceptional marketer."

Back in 1993, for instance, Ron wanted to find a corporate partner to help underwrite his annual prom-season promotions. Rather than simply paying to print up 10,000 T-shirts and then giving them out free with every tuxedo rental -- as he had typically done -- he wanted to identify a company that would be interested in tapping the same high school demographics, thereby helping defray his costs. Ron knew he should think big. "But I didn't think as big as Sherry did," he concedes.

Having had considerable experience with cross promotions -- from her job as an in-store publicity manager at McDonald's to her current incarnation as CEO of a firm specializing in strategic alliances -- Sherry suggested to Ron that he aim for Coca-Cola or PepsiCo. "I figured they were way out of our league," admits Ron. "But Sherry said, 'How do you know that unless you try?' So we tried."