Couples that work together, stay together?

About six years ago, Ken and Stephanie Wright were looking for a change.

The couple had only been dating a few months at the time, but they knew they were right for each other and were ready to move in together. The problem, though, was that the Ohio River Valley wasn't exactly bustling with attractive job opportunities, especially immediately after 9/11. So the couple decided to move to the Atlanta area, where Stephanie was born and still had family.

Ten days after arriving in Atlanta, Ken landed a job with a Web-hosting company. Not long after, Stephanie took a position with a public relations and event planning business. The money was good and their careers seemed to be on track. But something was suffering as a result: their happiness.

"We really never saw each other — maybe an hour or two in the evenings," Stephanie Wright says. "It got to a point where, six months into great new careers, we decided it wasn't so great."

The Wrights chose to do something about it. They quit their jobs and used Stephanie's experience working in pottery studios during graduate school and Ken's background in retail, and charged $23,000 on credit cards, to open The Painted Potter, a pottery studio in Lawrenceville, an Atlanta suburb.

About a year later, after becoming enamored with the entrepreneurial lifestyle, they started thinking up new ideas and came up with The Dinner A' Fare, a company that sells ready-to-cook gourmet-style meals with all the ingredients proportioned and prepared for cooking. Inspiration for the business came from a late-night TV segment about a similar, but mom-and-pop-style, operation run out of a community center in California. With proceeds from The Painted Potter, which they sold about a year ago, the Wrights were able to launch in The Dinner A' Fare — another business that touched on one of Stephanie's other long-lasting passions.

"With two Southern grandmothers," she says, "I think I learned to cook before I could walk."

More time together
But the work that went into the development of menus, which change monthly at Dinner A' Fare, led the Wrights to the realization that they were only going to be willing to see their idea through if they could pursue it on a larger scale. Franchise inquiries filtered in almost immediately and now Dinner A' Fare has more than 30 franchise locations throughout seven states, with projected sales of $12 million in 2007.

"We realized that we'd rather work harder and work for ourselves and be able to see each other," Stephanie says.

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For many, the notion of working with a spouse sounds, at best, dangerous, and, at worst, like a direct path to marital collapse. But for a growing number of American couples, running a business together offers the best of both worlds: pursuing a professional dream with someone you love and respect, while getting a chance to spend more time with them. According to the National Federation of Independent Business, there were approximately 1.2 million husband- and wife-owned small businesses nationwide in 2003, the most recent year for which the group has data. Anecdotally, family-business experts say that number has only continued to climb.

Kathy Marshack, a psychologist and family-business coach, says the increase in the number of women choosing an entrepreneurial path is playing a role in the growth of husband-wife teams. From 1997 to 2006, the number of women-owned businesses increased 42.3 percent, according to the most recent data from the Census Bureau.

"In the past, men tended to open a business and often a wife is helping, but he doesn't always see her as his partner," Marshack says. "Now, women are more entrepreneurial and recognizing that more in themselves than they used to."

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