Starting a business with your spouse. To some, it might sound like trouble; for others, like these six couples who are partners in life and work, it has produced harmony and great returns. If you're considering going down that path, take their advice by protecting clearly defined roles, open lines of communication, and a strongly grounded relationship. "If one person has the capacity to defer, and one person better have the capacity to defer, someone's got to do that," says Mario Del Pero, who founded the fast-casual restaurant chain Mendocino Farms in 2005 with his wife, Ellen Chen.
Also: Don't bring the boardroom into the (proverbial) bedroom. "We've become proponents of not talking about work in downtime," says Andrew Goetz, who founded the skincare line Malin+Goetz with his partner, Matthew Malin, in 2004. "If I see a phone at dinner, I whack it across the room."
