For Better or For Work
A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Discover how to build a successful business and follow your passions without sacrificing healthy family relationships to the financial and emotional rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship.
How does someone who is obsessed live peacefully with others who are not? That question summarizes the quandary faced by company founders and their families. To answer it, author Meg Cadoux Hirshberg examines the impact—for better and for worse—of entrepreneurial businesses on families and relationships, and vice versa.
Practically, this is a vital guide to navigating the emotional and logistical terrain of business-building while simultaneously enjoying a fulfilling family life. From the trials of co-habiting with a home-based business to the queasy necessity of borrowing money from family and friends to the complexities of intergenerational succession, no topic is taboo.
Psychologically, this book is a reminder that no entrepreneurial family trudges the hard trail of company-building alone. If you have embarked on such an enterprise, you and your spouse will find comfort and guidance in the experiences of others like you. Meg draws on the struggles and triumphs she and husband Gary Hirshberg experienced as he built Stonyfield Yogurt, and also shares powerful stories and insights from other families, gathered through hundreds of interviews.
For Better or For Work will remind you that the long hours and late nights—spent on the business or with the family—are worth the effort and will give you tools for making both endeavors successful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After Cadoux Hirshberg published the article "Hitched to Someone Else's Dream" in Inc. magazine in 2008, which described the challenges of being married to the highly driven entrepreneur Gary Hirshberg, cofounder and CEO of Stonyfield Yogurt, the article yielded such a response that it grew into a regular column about entrepreneurs and family and, finally, this book. When people start businesses, they rarely consider how much the business will take over their lives and sap their time and energy, much less that of their families. Hirshberg shares her story and others', speaking powerfully and emotionally about the trials and tribulations of an entrepreneur marriage. She covers the challenges of relatives investing in the business, layering a professional relationship onto a personal one, keeping romance alive for spouses who work together, caring for and providing attention to children, passing the reins within the family, and surviving the failure of the relationship or the business itself. Along the way, she suggests marriage-saving rules and offers cool-headed advice, making the book an indispensable tool for those living enthusiastically or reluctantly for a spouse's dream.