What Happens to a Family Business When Co-Owners Divorce? (Ep. 33)

Hey everybody, welcome back. Justin Sisemore here with In Your Best Interest we’re going to talk specifically today about family business and how that integrates into the divorce world. Give you some kind of up close and personal about some families that have been in the media. Try to remain neutral. Make sure that we’re very succinct with our facts, not jumping to conclusions, as we always preach. This is Andrea Jones, entrepreneur, awesome awesome lady, been through a ton of experiences, both on business and professional levels. Mary Maloney, you’ll get to know her if you haven’t already, probably one of the most calming presence on the podcast, and keeps us on track. So with that, let’s get rolling. So, Mary, I know you wanted to touch a little bit on specifics of family business, and I want to just kind of touch on when, on who this applies to, and how it can impact people and in general. Why am I listening to the divorce attorney from Fort Worth well, maybe because I have seen probably 55% of Tarrant County, which is about the the ratio, go through a lot of problems, right? So, and when we say 55% that’s that’s pretty close to divorce rate. So what we’re, what we’re getting into, for people, is kind of navigating the waters of formation and getting away from having to go through divorce in in the event that you do creating scenarios that provide some safety, hopefully providing some insight to make it to where you never have to do it right? So the family business aspect of it, it has a lot of facets to it, whether you are whether you own a family business, whether you are working for a family business, a closely held business, whether you’re working for a big company that actually has shareholders that are in family business, but getting down to the brass tacks about how to make that work, really does impact a lot of different scenarios. It may impact whether you have a job tomorrow, or whether you are employing somebody tomorrow, whether they stay. We have a big battery company we sold. So I can talk a little bit about some of those aspects as well, and then the legalities of of what you need to think, think about going forward.

Mary – So yeah, so the the reason why this topic came up for the podcast is because it’s something that I’ve been fascinated about for quite some time. Um, there’s an HVAC business in Dallas Fort Worth, called A Number One Air and they used to air these commercials. I always see them on the morning news with the husband and the wife promoting their business. Then all of a sudden, she was gone. So I’m like, What happened to her? So I, like everybody else on the planet, was googling A Number One Air wife, you know, or A Number One Air, divorce or whatever. So, and I couldn’t really come up with much information on it, so I have to say they’ve kept whatever happened or is happening pretty low key, but we do know that there is an action in going on. So what do you know about this particular case, Justin?

Justin – So I want to preface this with don’t just go on media or on the internet and pull things from Reddit and assume them to be fact. Don’t just go and look at what somebody may be trying to have as click bait and start to narrate someone’s life. Right? I think that the definition of of gossip is, is right there. And the King used to send his men down to the bar and say, Go drink and go sip and listen and report back to what you heard. So I don’t like gossip. I want to, I want to preface that. I do think some of the things that came out in the media are actually really awesome. It’s a testament to when people do things the right way. You know, we’re gonna have many a chance to talk about the dark side of family business and future podcasts, but I do want to talk about when people do things the right way. And to preface this, I also had a business partner who was on a billboard, okay? And so if we rewind back brilliant, brilliant lady thought I was going to lose my life and business practice. And you know, thankfully, I’ve got people like both of you helping pick up the pieces from that. But if you saw that billboard driving down 121 and now all of a sudden she’s not on the Billboard, you go, Oh my gosh. That must have been a big war and a big feud. And I think that gets the click bait and the buzz, but the reality is good business people manage conflict before it happens, and they really think about their employees and the business first. So I that’s kind of a segue into, we’re not just going to jump on A Number One Air because they’re rich people that had a big business and got a divorce, and probably blew up each other’s bedrooms because nobody was in there,

Mary –  Right? So well, you know part of it, you know rumors do happen, and they happen frequently in divorce. So as an attorney, you’ve seen that, obviously, a lot. So how do you keep stuff quiet? How do you help your clients keep stuff quiet?

Justin – Yeah, the media is a big Issue, mainly because, you know, people that are in business generally want to promote their business and and using the media to do that is, is sometimes to the client’s detriment. We’ve had some really large, high profile case in the last couple years. And, you know, it would have been really easy for young, little, Sisemore to be like, I’m going to be on the news today, right? And so it would have divulged some client experiences. It probably would have the media would have had their opinions and jumped on a client’s position. And specifically, when you’ve got, like, high wage earning sports athlete versus somebody that you know doesn’t really have the same financial situation. It’s really easy to call them the cleat chaser and everything else and and so the biggest thing is making sure you have trust in the professionals around you, not just in law, but in business in general, not to go put your business on the street. They say, keep your circle small in this situation, specifically with very, very detailed facts, you’ve got to be very confident in confidentiality. So in this case, I can’t even imagine how good of a job they did in this but even in, even in the A Number One Air case, and I don’t, I don’t pretend to know whether people wiretapped or whatever, but you google this stuff, and that takes the trump card in the business, and it’s like, wait a minute, these people have been together in a business. They have employees. They have built an empire around good values, good culture. They’re not out there spreading this stuff, necessarily, but, but some clients do that. Mary, I know that’s a shocker, but sometimes they just kind of want to hurt somebody, and when you got a family business, you’re hurting yourself too in a big way. And I just really commend I don’t pretend to know what happened behind closed doors. Don’t really care. What I do care about is that all of these employees, and I read somewhere, they had over 100 employees and grew it, and they still have a job. On Monday they go in. Think about the stress if you’re an employee, you know, I mean, Andrea, you’ve been in lots of small businesses. Think about this stress. You roll in and you know your quote, unquote leader, the gurus that are going to lead you to the promised land now, all of a sudden are in a toxic or a divorce, which in most people’s minds is talking

Andrea – But it’s just like kids. I think it’s just kind of like kids, because you are at their mercy, right? This is maybe your boss, male and female, and you report it to two and all of a sudden, now one of them is gone, or they’re talking trash to each other, or one had an affair with somebody in the company. How do you deal with that? And then I want to ask you to, like, when you say you can keep it quiet. Aren’t divorce proceedings public knowledge. I mean, can I not go to the courthouse and pull it up?

Justin – Yeah, great question. So, so first of all, as far as divorce proceedings, we have, you know, public records. So, you know, we have the ability to go online. It’s called our system in Tarrant County, is called Jim so you can actually pull divorce records. But, you know, generally speaking, pleadings themselves don’t have a lot of content in them, so there’s not like it lay out everybody’s life California, different story. You’ve got to put every single fact in the petition, and that’s why you get the buzzworthy California petitions that that the media latches on to so a lot less content. And when you get people that are strategic about a not wanting their business on the street for their kids sake, alone and then their business and their employees and all that, you know you’re going to get a lot more agreements incident to divorce, a lot more settlements and things where you don’t really know what’s happened from just the motion, looking at the motions and the motion filings in the case,

Andrea – but it’s not, it’s not kept secret. So if we would be able, depending on where they live, we would be able to pull up their pleadings,

Justin – yeah, and just going and accessing it. I mean, they don’t make it super easy. I mean, the clerks have a busy enough job as is so it would, it would really entail, you know, the media jumping on to that kind of case and then wanting to pull those records and then paying to have their copies of the records. A lot of times you’ll see parties wanting to seal their divorce case or seal their child as possible.

Andrea – Oh, yeah, it’s possible okay.

Justin – Now it courts. Don’t love to do that. I candidly don’t love to do it either a lot, because unsealing records, when you’re trying to go and modify custody agreements and whatnot, it’s difficult. So it’s really fact specific, or in this situation, a small business. And let’s be clear, A One may be small to some, you know, it’s uber rich people, but it ain’t that small to most people around here. It’s a pretty large business, right? And so when you’ve got all of these facets that come into that business. You may have enforcements or contracts that are required to do things in the future. And so when you seal a case, sometimes you create hurdles and expenses that are there that aren’t always there unless you unless you have it unsealed.

Mary – Yeah, and I would say just any of the rumors that are out there, they’re not reported by a reputable source, you know. So I think they’re probably, probably, you know, I like my sources.

Justin – Me too. I like that. You like that,

Mary – yes. So I would say people should not believe like you were saying everything they read on the internet, because it’s probably not true if it’s not reported by a reputable source. Because if the rumors that were flying about. With this couple were, in fact, fact true, they would have been reported by a reputable news source. So I’d say those rumors, why do people,

Justin – why don’t they just want to read a bunch of fake stuff?

Mary – Well, yeah, I guess there’s a lot of fake stuff out there these days.

Andrea – What about social media? So when you, when you’re talking about business in general, so you could see, I could seal on my divorce proceedings if I didn’t want it open. You just said, not necessarily the best choice. What about social media? So is there? Are there sometimes restrictions put on social media business, or in in a business world too? Because, I mean, I have LinkedIn of, if I want to be vicious, I could put all kinds of crap out there about either my employer, or if I’m the whatever person has an affair with the boss, then I’ll put stuff out there, just to get the woman out the way. So, but Are there restrictions too?

Justin – Absolutely. So in our world, you know, when we’re dealing with restricting somebody’s speech, it can be challenging, because the First Amendment, obviously, but when you’re dealing with someone who’s actually maliciously trying to damage or sabotage a business, you have corporate remedies, right? And so I was, I’m always a big proponent of bringing in corporate counsel too because when we’re integrating personal injunctions versus corporate injunctions, and injunctions are basically what happens when you go from a temporary restraining order, which is basically prohibiting certain conduct, so you can’t go on social media and blow up the world and all this. You don’t see courts generally liking this step on the First Amendment very easily, but certainly different types of communication and how they do it. You can make some you can make some headway there. I like to create kind of what I call pitfalls, so scenarios where, if, if a company A, for example, if you know spouse B is over there, just lambasting the company, you want to get out ahead of that in advance, as far as, hey, you know these, this is what the bucket is, as far as the settlement potential, right? If we get to a scenario where you lambast the company and the employees all run off and all that, the entire hole naturally goes down. Sounds really easy to do, right? That’s just common sense. Don’t shoot the golden goose. Insert adultery, insert family violence, insert alcohol, drug use different you know, your family gangs. It’s not that’s where the deal structure. That’s why divorce is hard. I mean, nine times out of 10, we have a freaking house, we have some retirement a few cars. Usually people live on what they make and a little bit of debt, right? If you’re lucky, you got those things. If you’re really lucky, you got some businesses. And if you’re really, really lucky, you’ve got shell corporations and all kinds of fancy stuff, and there’s plenty more lawyers in the room to make all that work, but the majority of people have small businesses. They’ve created them, they’ve built them up. And so the idea that you can just jump on social media and say something, people forget who the freaking friends are on social media, right? I mean, I’ve got friends in on Facebook right now of employees that have done some very bad things in the business, right? And I’m just like, Oh, I forgot that person was on there. So when you’re when you’re just throwing something out there, it’s like, why do you want your personal business on the street number one that way, right? Post, pictures your kids, good. Post, picture trips, fine. But why do you want all that other stuff? When you get the vendetta type, the person that’s going and blasting out on social media. Generally, it’s a continuous pattern. And that’s where you get into some other torts that get involved torts or civil wrongs.

Andrea – So there are you can protect yourself a little bit

Justin – the 100% No, I say 100% nothing is 100% but yes, there are a lot of protections out there in the form of injunctions, in the form of communications, and usually, most importantly, in the form of where they get to go to get the information, right. So if you cut off the spigot, as I say, and the source of information is cut off because somebody has exclusive use and control of a business, for example, which is what happened here. And it was brilliant. I don’t know how that came about between the two of them, but they clearly agreed on one person being in charge. So that’s kind of touches on that issue, and I do think that you need that

Mary – one person has adorable little doggies. Yes, so when you’re talking about these injunctions that you put in place when a family business is at stake, what are some of the other things that are important that people would include what types of injunctions?

Justin – Well, and not just injunctions, but really, really, getting the whole inventory together, getting the corporate formation and structure together. And, you know, I know that some people are listening, who cares about corporate formation and structure? Well, it does matter. Because if you are going into a job tomorrow, and the formation and the organization that you’re in has no organization, right? They don’t have any of these formalities met. You’re going to see a lot more chaos. So this touches, from everybody to the, you know, the lowest level employee, not that, in my mind, that there is a lowest level employee, because if you’re there, you’re you’re making somebody happy, or you should be at. But, but it goes all the way up the chain. And so that level of organization that goes in is the first thing I look at. So let’s, let’s peel off the layer of what the company and corporate structure looks like in doing that. Is she 51 or he? 51/49we hear about control possessions, nine tenths of the law if you’re in control, and you can sign the checks who has control and access to the bank accounts, credit card statements, all of those things can overnight, really make or break a business, in addition to what they say. So from a standpoint of corporate control, I really like to get those things out in via temporary orders way sooner than later. I don’t like to stoke the fire. I don’t like to create a war where there’s not one, and in fact, I like to create a roadmap. It’s just why we do these temporary orders. And on a corporate level, that’s that’s how you do that. Or on a small business level, you go get temporary orders that really bind and lock down who has access to the accounts, what they can do, whether they can sign on checks. Those are the simple things. That’s that at least put out some of the fires are going to come ahead. So that’s a simple thing. From the injunction level, you’re going to see things like people can live and use their reasonable fees and funds for their reasonable living expenses. They can operate their business in a reasonable manner. But what is that like? Mary, you’re, you’re, let’s call you divorce A lady B over here, and husband’s this guru that has this business not to stereotype, because it would usually be the other way around with people like you, but here we are. So he comes in and says, on day one, you’re cut off from the accounts. You have no access to information. You’ve had your ostrich in the sand because you’ve been or head in the sand because you’ve been the ostrich raising kids and building a family and doing all the things that give him this great reputation that he has now pirated from you, right? So that that scenario happens a lot, both male and female. And so what you do in that scenario is you try to you try to unpack, okay, if he’s got these controls, if he can go put indebtedness on a business, right? Because I’m telling him something different if I’m representing him versus I’m representing you. If he can go encumber that business and pay off some equipment, prepay some taxes, there’s strategic directions that solo, yeah, you can make it not seem that like you’re doing something fraudulent to the business, because it’s a good business practice. I mean, if you’ve got money and you’re paying down debt, any financial advisor will say, pay off your credit cards first. Well, yeah, except for if he went and ran them up on sweet thing in Vegas for two months, right? And so there’s a lot of there’s a lot of these scenarios that happen, and people, specifically in business, they can hide a lot of things in the business.

Andrea – So let me interject there. So if I’m in a if I own a family business with my partner, then I need to think about the potential of divorce, or should think about that way before I pull the plug. Because what you’re just saying is, if the other person is blindsided. They can do stuff, temporary orders, hearing is not the same day that I file. So I kind of like, you have to have my ducks in a row long before whether I’m the person that owns the business or runs the business, or whether we run it together, or whether I’m on the other side, that takes a lot more preparation. Yeah, consultation, right,

Justin – absolutely. And the reality is, the reason for that is a lot of lot of times documents are just floating around a house and you don’t know where accounts are. And you know when people either in business partnership breakups or family breakups, and we’ve represented all of them, I’ve done multiples. On a personal level, when you see people getting into dividing their their entity or their business or their family, people shut down, they lock in, they go grab the accounts, they go for money grabs, they hide documents, and they just really recluse. And so that’s the reason for wanting to get this information up front if you can, if you have that opportunity. By the same token, if you and your husband have or wife have some little bitty mom and pop business that you just started, you don’t need to go down some crazy rabbit trail to find out whether he’s hiding money in the Caymans. If y’all are living month to month. I mean, you know, and I see that, I see the lawyers kind of taking people down that rabbit trail too, and it’s our job to really curb some of that. Let’s look at reality of the situation. Let’s not be oblivious to the possibility that they can be really good at it. But nine times out of 10, it’s, it’s kind of,

Andrea – but God forbid, like, my mother in law is involved in a business, or some other family members then, and I’m on the other side. So I kind of like need to prepare myself, because if, like, there’s more than, let’s say my husband has a business with his family, or we have a business together, and there are other family members involved. Chances are on a divorce, they’re normally so you need to,

Justin – they may gang up again.

Andrea – Yeah. So in any case, consultation is always necessary, or be a good, good advice to before you even go down that path on either side,

Andrea – that’s a better way to say it actually Mary like the unpacking the org chart. What I mean by that is, who are the leaders, who are the founders of the company? What are their roles? I. Really understand the human components of that, right? That’s the org chart of a business. Nine times out of 10 you’re gonna say to somebody, well, where’s your org chart? And they’re gonna go, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I hired Joe Blow yesterday because I needed somebody to come in here and do this. They don’t have any of that mapped out, especially in really closely held businesses. So we never overlooked that there’s there’s nobody stupid because they don’t have all this stuff figured out. First of all, lawyers are freaking worst at this crap of doing stuff for themselves. So never feel dumb about that, because you just don’t have all your ducks in a row. But understand the human component of org chart and then really trying to take out kind of the pain points. So if, for example, spouse A that is the control freak that wants to have his control and on every on every aspect of it has been that person, if you’re A Number One Air, to bring it back to them. Clearly, they worked through that by bringing in some third party leader. And that’s oftentimes what I’ll do, is like, even if you think you’re God’s gift to being a CEO or lawyer or anything else, sometimes people have good ideas, and when you’re in the midst of chaos, and divorce can be chaotic, right? When you’re in the midst of that, allowing that third party, even just as the buffer, like the lawyer or the realtor or anybody else, just having that buffer there can be really, really beneficial to getting the messaging out to people so they don’t freak out, right? So that org chart is instrumental in that.

Mary – So that kind of leads me to my next question. So when you’re going through divorce, who gets what in the business? How is that decided?

Justin – Well, again, everything depends. Mary in law, it depends. There’s always two suits, and usually both of them are right and both of them are wrong. Okay, so let me, let me unpack a case that I had about a year and a half ago. And I really, really commend the judge in this case, because she did a badass job. And I want to use the emphasis on that a badass job of really thinking outside the box. In business, we kept tightening and tightening and tightening the screws. And it is a very, very vocal business in Fort Worth, for example, okay? And when I say vocal, I mean, that’s what they do. They are in media, right? And so the scary part for us was like, Oh my gosh. Like, if we get in here and we we uncover something that’s not really there. It’s not really what we thought, what happens to us as a business, a law firm thinks about that. I get calls, you know, well, my husband knows the judge, and everybody knows everybody. I don’t worry about that stuff. These judges, they change hands. I’m not saying it never happens and biases don’t happen. But when you get into businesses where you know, they can blast a social media campaign in overnight and ruin you, truly ruin you and ruin her, ruin us, ruin the people around. And really, you know, shoot the golden goose. You get into a situation where you have to analyze that. And in that situation, there were a lot of, what we were finding is debtors were coming out and, you know, they were coming out of the woodworks, like, oh, we heard so and so’s getting a divorce. Well, hey, they owe me 50 grand for this and 30 grand for this. And so wife was just going, I didn’t even know we had these debts. I didn’t even know what was going on. And it was a lot of false promises hand in the cookie jar. And, you know, trying to live and make your outward appearance be something that it wasn’t. And in that situation. What we saw through hearing after hearing after hearing was tighter and tighter injunctions, going back to what we talked about earlier, which is you tighten up that noose a little bit and make sure that people can’t get outside of the box, that they’ve already kicked the side walls out, and they’re doing whatever they want, right? And so we got to get that very tight. And then courts kind of resort and resolve to taking over. Sometimes they’ll put receivers in place to take over a business. And, you know, there’s a lot of remedies, but you’ve got to be a business person too. You can’t just go, Hey, we can go get a receiver. We can sell this company and order it sold immediately, because there’s, there’s bad doing and whatnot. It may be a bad time. Mary, like, like you look, right?

Andrea – Sometimes it’s also based on the person running the business, right? I mean, like, if you take you out the law firm, that’ll not be the same law firm. Or there’s people the businesses are built on the person at the top. So you can’t just take that person out of the way and just let somebody else run it. That takes away the character,

Justin – well, true. Or maybe you need to build out this or get rid of some of the stickiness to the individual to give value to the other party, right? So that’s where you know, when you really understand how business valuation works, and how things you know get bought and sold and transacted from basically the venture capital level or the corporate level. And not pretending that I know all those things, but I know enough to ask the questions, and I know enough about myself and my own shortcomings to be able to listen to the answers from people that really know the details. And so in that regard, you know, when you’re trying to create value of a company, or you’re trying to establish the value, more importantly, you know, holding that value and holding that line as a course job, they their job in temporary orders, is to make sure that there’s preservation of of the value of the estate. Right? And so if you’re going and blowing and going off to Vegas, and one party is ripping through the bank accounts and putting everything on their personal all their personal expenses through the business, it’s pretty easy to show judge, hey, this is not the way the business should be run. Well, great, Justin, what do we do now? Right? And that’s where you really have to have the plan. And that doesn’t start on day one in a 14 day temporary orders here,

Mary – right, right? So business owners also need to keep the stability of their business in place, which we kind of talked about with A Number One Air thing. Anything else you want to add on that how to keep the business safe for the employees, make them feel comfortable? Yeah. I mean you because you own businesses,

Justin – and I don’t pretend to know that what that exact conversation was when either one

of either party went in, but I would imagine that they were very transparent. I would imagine that they went in to their employees and said, Hey, listen, you know, we have a job to do. The company is bigger than any individual here, the same thing bosses or employers try to instill, and that’s why I really admire how they handle this, because they’re living and practicing what they preach to their employees, which tells me they’re good people despite their differences. And so when they go in there, and they kind of take the lid off for a second, explain to them, Hey, we’re going through some tough times as a family. We want to keep that private. We don’t want this out everywhere. It’s not going to impact you, and when it starts to impact you, we will remove ourselves from that equation. We have a plan for that. Here’s the here’s the fallback plan, here’s the individual that we’re going to bring in in the event that it gets, you know, chaotic, or just gets more than we can handle. We don’t pretend to know all of the ins and outs, and really just kind of opening themselves up to to how they move through it. But you don’t get to 100 or 200 employees without dealing with a lot of issues, right? They’ve dealt with, probably, I would imagine many, many, many employees, own divorces, people showing up on drugs, high, wrecking, doing criminal acts, everything else. So you start to get thicker skin. I know through our battery company and we got up to 50 or 60 employees at one point, you see all kinds of people from all walks of life, and good owners of businesses know everything that they can about their employees. They try to engage. They try to think about how to help them through that. And I don’t pretend that you know you when you get to 100 people’s level employees, that you know all their kids and grandkids, but, but, but you definitely start to think about you don’t change your mindset, or you don’t get to that level very easily. You know, sometimes venture capital can do add ons and all that. But good, good owner operators. That’s why venture capitalists love them. They love them. I mean, because they’ve got their name on the on the sign, they’ve got their face on the advertising. You don’t take, like you said, you don’t take that away overnight. So that, I think that kind of touches on those issues and creates some of the I guess, I guess, just thought provoking issues that go into these scenarios.

Andrea – So you always talk about preparing yourself. So we don’t want to instill any thoughts in anybody. But if I’m in a family business with my partner, is there anything I can do now, when there’s everything is great to avoid going down a bad path if, God forbid, something happens, or is it just really in a business, you have to wait until it actually happens to put, yeah, safeguards in place.

Justin – Obviously, you know, you there are documents, prenups and postnups, right? That you can, that you can put in place. There are articles of incorporation that think through these issues in the event of death, dissolution, and, you know, it’s like estate planning. Don’t go into your estate planning attorney and say, like, I just want to find the cheapest person. I don’t really want to talk about these issues. And, by the way, I just need a will, because my wife is on my ass about getting a will today, right? Same with, same with, you know, the corporate formation, a lot of times, what you see in lawyers is that there’s, there’s attorneys, just like teachers that may not have a lot of personal experience. And so you can vet that really easy with the who, what, when, where, why, questions. Mary, my favorite direct examination, open questions. If who would deal with this in the event of this? How would how would we get through that? How would we navigate? How do we write that into the document? So that, you know, we’re not going to have everything in there, but, but we can write some things in there, yeah, like, who’s gonna have control the bank accounts? If you’re starting a venture, you know, from scratch, and y’all don’t have, you know, much experience or in the way of resources, you’re not going to be able to roll up into some law firm that has, you know, the financial resources and whatnot to give you, like, really sound, cumulative advice, because they’ve had all the reps, right? You might kind of bootstrap it a little bit, but by the same token, having those conversations up front and at least putting something down on paper so there is a clear plan from both positions before you start the business is a beautiful thing, because you can go have donut shop A and donut shop B all day long. As husband and wife, my wife and I started our battery company. From basically the ground, but we had some humans that were involved and instrumental to that don’t think we didn’t fight. And I mean, she is like, she’s God’s gift to me, and in dealing with my conflict, because I can get fired up and rowdy and all that stuff, and I try to bury that. And over time, I saw like, man, you gotta, you gotta come at this a different way, because you’re very abrasive. You take some of the courtroom aspect of you into this, and business is different from that. By the same token, she was very, very good. And I always thought for a while, like I was, I was the gift to this. I’m the guy, right? And you just learn over time you’re not, or you just start to suck in life. But I think that going into these small business approaches from an open ended good, full on, like you would any business partner, it’s fine, you can do business together now, post Mary, I don’t know if that was your next question, but post divorce, I tell people, it’s very hard to stay married via asset that includes the business. That’s why I like what A Number One Air did here, because they established a leader. They established how wife gets paid out Bezos, same way. Don’t know how that divorce happened so quickly, but I’m pretty sure it was a here’s a check, here’s all the stuff, here’s the stock, no issue. You’ve still got all this over here. You’re going to be fine. And if you want to go down this rabbit trail, it’s going to kill the golden goose. So things, things can get done in that regard, much easier at this at the corporate level, but they can get done in that regard to really preserve the golden goose. I don’t love the idea of, let’s tippy toe around. Let’s both be the leader. Let’s I mean, you don’t see many corporations that I’m aware of with two CEOs for that very reason,

Andrea – and I like what you said, because you, even though it’s your partner, you still got to treat them as if they are your business partner. Because any business partner you go into business with, you would have a contract. Yeah, you would do that with anybody else. You and me do business together, we would have a contract. So why is it different when I do a business now with my spouse and all of a sudden say, Oh, I don’t need that because we are bound through marriage decree. No, we’re not, because all the stuff is not,

Justin – especially the ones that are really insecure Andrea, like, if you really want to get sexy and you really want to do some cool so it’s kind of nerd out on this stuff, but, but if you really want to do that, start putting the checks in place. All the things that you want to check and balance, you don’t have to be the owner. You know, I tell people that all the time, divorce. I don’t really want to own this stuff. You give me money, and I don’t have to deal with the headache. You know, a lot of times, unless you’re really, really passionate about your business for a long period of time, which is really rare, despite what people say, put the checks in place. Know who gets to cash the checks? Know who gets to go tell you and report to you? You don’t need 8 million data points. We got so much freaking data in this world now that nobody even looks at we got AI and everything coming out the wazoo. You got 1000 different ways to put checks on this stuff. And that’s where it gets that’s where it gets cool. That’s where it gets cool. That’s where the business comes in. That’s where I’m very passionate about that stuff, even though it’s kind of nerdy.

Mary – Well, it’s okay to be nerdy. It’s good. So any other thoughts, anything that you people should know if they’re thinking about divorce, there’s a family business involved, any other thoughts you’d like to share as we close here,

Justin – the the one thing that people forget, and it’s my best friend. And this is kind of a nugget, but it’s not that intellectual. So here’s your nugget. A lot of people that go and start up businesses get loans, and they like to vomit about how great they are on those loans, and that tells us a lot of what we need to know. And good luck. You’ve lied to the government. You’ve lied into the banking institutions. We’ve seen a little bit of that I heard in our media as of recent about what happens in those regards, true, untrue, rider, political, all that stuff aside, a lot of bank loans tell you a lot of personal information about the business. And so start with the broad strokes. If you’re going around and a client is running around ragged, trying to get a bank statement from 1984 and then trying to figure out your parts and everything else, it’s all over the place. A lot of this reporting is done internally, QuickBooks. Even if you’re disorganized, it’s on a ledger somewhere. That’s the big picture item. So start macro, ie big picture. Go back micro, and we’ll dive into the details. And I crush people with micro details based on macro. So that’s what and you can really get medieval and depositions and stuff like that, because they don’t know where you’re going in business structure and valuation. You have no idea where I’m going in deposition,

Mary – right? And you’ve been there and done that many, many, many times. So as we wrap up today, thanks for listening, everybody. And if you live in Texas and would like to contact the Sisemore Law Firm, you can call at 187 I mean, excuse me, can I rerecordthat? Let’s rerecord that. So if you live in Texas and would like to contact the Sisemore Law Firm, you can reach the firm.At 817-336-4444, or visit www.lawyerdfw.com we encourage people to follow the law firm and Justin on social media, on Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and so on and so forth. Are you on Tiktok yet?

Justin – I don’t have a huge Tiktok presence, which I’m happy about for the now, because I got three daughters. They want to be Tiktok stars. And no but please share and give us feedback. I want feedback. I want to know what you guys want to listen to. I want to know what impacts you, how we can help. I love it. Love these two, and love just kind of sharing what we know from our limited view of experience.

Mary – All right. Well, have a great day, everybody, and thanks for listening.