For Better or for Work ─ A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families

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.

Meg Hirshberg is a freelance writer, the author of the “Balancing Acts” column for Inc. magazine, a highly regarded speaker, and the wife of Gary Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Yogurt. Although it took nine painful years to become profitable, Stonyfield is now the largest organic yogurt company in the world. Meg has written two yogurt cookbooks and her writing has appeared in Yankee, New Hampshire magazine, and the Boston Globe magazine, among other publications.

Meg and Gary have three children—Danielle, Ethan, and Alex—who have all eaten a lot of yogurt.