Excerpted with permission from Family Business Magazine, Winter 2008, www.familybusinessmagazine.com.

The end of a marriage between entrepreneurs doesn’t mean their business must be dissolved, too. But trust is essential in maintaining a business partnership after a marital split.

By Patricia Olsen

When John and Diana Stepleton divorced in 2004, Diana’s friends assumed she’d leave Research Data Design (RDD), the Portland, Ore., research company she and her husband had owned, and return to the corporate world. After all, her last corporate job had been as a national accounts manager at Lucent Technologies, so she could probably pick and choose among high-level marketing and technology positions. Why on earth, they reasoned, would anyone want to continue in business with a former spouse?

Why indeed. While some friends and family members may have a hard time understanding couples who continue to work together after they divorce, there are a number of compelling reasons for doing so. Hefty revenue figures may be the motivation in some cases, but divorced couples who’ve remained business partners name several other reasons, such as the time and effort they have invested in the company and the qualities that made the other party a good businessperson despite their personal differences. When children are involved, continuing the business for the next generation may also be a factor. Although new agreements may have to be forged, couples like the Stepletons demonstrate that when a marriage ends, it doesn’t mean the business partnership must be dissolved, too.

Julie Mannis Hoisington and David Mannis, co-publishers of the San Diego Community Newspaper Group, have also weathered a divorce and stayed in business together. It never occurred to them to do otherwise, they say. “We made better business partners than husband and wife,” Julie says. “We’re good friends.”

“But we’re very different people,” David adds.

The RDD owners and the San Diego newspaper entrepreneurs are not that different from a number of successful divorced “copreneurs,” according to a 2006 study by Patricia Cole, an associate professor of family therapy and family business at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Kit Johnson, a family therapist in the School of Human Services at Capella University in Minneapolis. “The prevailing wisdom had always been that divorce was a business killer,” Cole says. Yet their study of nine now-split couples found that both the business and the partnership can not merely survive a rift in the relationship—they can thrive.

Want to know how these two former couples have continued to work as a team professionally? Read the full article by Patricia Olsen in the Winter 2008 edition of Family Business Magazine. Free article access is available online for subscribers. To learn more, please visit Family Business Magazine online at www.familybusinessmagazine.com.