'It's Yelling, Be Honest' - How This Couple Divorced, But Still Grew Their Business to 16 Locations and $1.4 Million In Revenue

"When Max and Elena Emma, the cofounders of BooXkeeping, a bookkeeping franchise, decided to get divorced in 2014, the story could easily have gone the way so many others do: lawyers, custody battles, staff forced to pick sides, a once-promising business gutted by a personal split. But Max, BooXkeeping's CEO, and Elena, the company's CPO, had already decided that, for all the emotion between them, this wasn't going to be that story."

""We decided that we're not going to get lawyers, we're not going to get anything," Elena tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. "It's going to be a very peaceful divorce. We file papers, and everything else is just a verbal agreement.""

"Max marks July 3, 2002 as the last day he ever worked for someone. "The celebration of July 4th being an Independence Day has a double meaning for me, as I celebrate this it as my personal Independence Day as well," Max explained. He started a landscaping business with Elena shortly after that and grew it to 96 employees, only to hit a wall when the 2008 recession started."

""We didn't have a choice but to declare bankruptcy, both business and personal," Max says. That experience gave them a shared conviction: the numbers matter, but the relationships matter more. A couple of years later, they tried again. Max and Elena"

Max and Elena Emma divorced in 2014, three years after starting BooXkeeping. They aimed for a low-conflict process by avoiding lawyers and completing the filing peacefully, with other terms handled through verbal agreements. Their immigration backgrounds shaped their partnership, with Max arriving from Russia in 1993 and Elena arriving from Ukraine in 1999. They met in San Diego, built a life together, and later ran a landscaping business that expanded to 96 employees before the 2008 recession forced bankruptcy. That experience reinforced a belief that numbers matter, but relationships matter more. They later launched BooXkeeping and expanded it into a franchise with 16 locations and $1.4 million in annual revenue.

Read at Entrepreneur