Survey: Divorce Is Bad for Business

A bad marriage isn’t the only thing that ends with a divorce. Sometimes, a good business can go bust, too. While 580,000 new firms opened in 2004, about 10 percent of existing firms closed. And with the national divorce rate at about 3.5 for every 1,000 people, how many of those closures resulted from divorce? How many of the new firms are at risk?

Despite that risk, most business owners (60%) have no plan in place to “divorce-proof” their companies, according to Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company’s (MassMutual) research study, FamilyPreneurship: What Every Entrepreneur Should Know before Starting a Business with a Family Member, a two-part study conducted by Harris Interactive in 2009 among six focus groups of small business partners and online among 518 business owners.

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