How your Divorce Will Affect your Business

Running a company is a very difficult task and it sometimes takes over most of your time and energy. It’s even harder to accomplish if you’re going through something as personal and emotionally draining as a divorce. Things get even more complicated if you and your spouse used to run the company together.

There are others who have been there before and there are ways to accomplish both ending your marriage in a civilized and amicable manner and dividing your business while keeping it lucrative and productive.

Don’t mix business and personal matters

A lot of the time, divorces bring out the worst in people. That means that the couple looks for ways to hurt one another and to get control over their lives especially now when they are changing so rapidly. It’s an understandable impulse, but it isn’t something that should spill over to your company.

Businesses affect the lives of a lot of people outside your marriage from employees to customers and business partners and you shouldn’t do anything that will hurt them because of your divorce. This means that a business isn’t a bargaining chip in your divorce, but a responsibility to be careful with.

A buy out

Sometimes a couple isn’t able to continue working together after the divorce and it’s best if one of the partners is bought out of the business. There are a few things to figure out when a buyout is necessary. First of all, you need to decide what percentage the spouse gets. It’s easy when the company is split 50/50, but that’s not always the case.

Second of all, you need to structure the buyout in a way that won’t damage the company. The payments should be organized in a manner that leaves the company with enough assets to stay lucrative and organized.

Defining new roles

When a married couple runs a company together, their roles within a business are usually not clearly defined. Everyone pitches in and everyone does what it takes for the company to stay functional and the other one picks up the slack at home when needed.

This isn’t as simple when you’re going through a divorce. In this case, it’s best to clearly define future roles in a form of a legally binding agreement. This should be done with the help of a professional such as a local Parramatta solicitor that understands both your company and your future needs.

Don’t change business practices

A divorce is a momentous event for your family and it will uproot your personal habits and family life. This is traumatic and it may take years to get used to a new setup. However, nothing should change for your company. Business practices should remain as you’ve created them while you were married.

This may be difficult to accomplish, especially while the divorce isn’t yet finalized, but you should rely on management and the employees to keep things moving while you’re distracted with your private life. This goes for both the practices that relate to the public and those in the back end of running a business.

Accept the change

It takes time to accept the change that comes with ending a marriage. In your personal life, that can last for years and everyone needs to deal with it at their own pace. It’s a bit more difficult when it comes to business relationships. There, things must go much quicker so you can get the company back on track and not jeopardize the careers of everyone involved.

One of the ways of doing this is to hire someone who will take over the professional obligations of your former spouse. That process really brings home the fact that now there’s a new setup at the office.

It’s a complicated task to go through a divorce while running a company. It can be done if you make sure that you treat your business relationship as a professional and legal one and keep personal matters at home.