(FORTUNE Small Business) – A couple of years ago Paul Entin and his wife, Shannon, each started separate companies--his an advertising firm, hers a health and fitness Website--out of an office in their home in Washington, N.J. "All we did was work," recalls Entin. "Then, whoever wasn't working would be with our son, Logan. There was no life outside work or parenting, so we weren't seeing our family or friends, or even each other." The result? Tension between them rose to the point that "it was a struggle to keep from killing each other. Sometimes we would be sitting at our desks back to back, practically touching, but we would e-mail each other to avoid a confrontation."

Does that sound familiar? "Work-life balance" has become a ubiquitous catch phrase in corporate America, but if you're an entrepreneur, leading a sane life can be doubly difficult. Corporate types can leave their work at the office when they're home or on vacation. But for you, the business is your biggest baby, and carving out space in your 24/7 schedule for the diaper-wearing, Barney-watching variety is no small feat. Take an afternoon off for Junior's Little League game and you could miss that make-or-break call from a big client. Go on vacation and there's no corporate Santa to pay you while you play--it's your money. And today's hard times don't help. With the economy in the doldrums, business crises--and the time and energy they sap from family life--tend to multiply.

As if all that weren't enough, psychologists who counsel business owners say that entrepreneurs' own personalities often set them apart from even the most workaholic corporate types when it comes to forming relationships and raising families--a fact you may already have had pointed out to you by someone near and dear. It's not just a matter of working longer hours or being more preoccupied, although those do count. It's that, if you've been compelled to start a business and try to make it fly, you're fundamentally a lone risk taker--meaning that, to form meaningful bonds with any group, including a family, you may have to try harder than the average Joe (or Jolene).

One more unexpected factor is at play. In the wake of the tragedy at the World Trade Center last September, a number of entrepreneurs are beginning to wonder whether spending so many hours away from their loved ones is worth it. It may be time to readjust one's work schedule (and state of mind) to spend more time with friends and family.

WHY ENTREPRENEURS ARE DIFFERENT

Next time you're dealing with a snarky supplier or a cranky customer on the phone, while looking for your 10-year-old's lost sneaker and eyeing your 16-year-old's unauthorized new tattoo all at the same time, it may help to consider this: At least you've managed to have a family. Some entrepreneurs put it off indefinitely, concentrating so doggedly on their work that they barely find time to go out on a date, let alone settle down with Mr. or Ms. Right. "So many of my clients are wealthy, successful business owners who wish they were married and had kids," says Karlin Sloan, a clinical psychologist who founded and runs the Propeller Group, a New York-based consulting group that specializes in advising high-tech startups on workplace issues. One young hotshot encouraged his girlfriend to uproot her life and relocate across the country to the West Coast so that they could be together while he was starting his business. He then kept an engagement ring in his desk drawer for four years while he built his company, and by the time he got around to popping the question, his intended had lost faith in his commitment to the idea and turned him down. Another entrepreneur Sloan is counseling now is a "hugely successful tech inventor who wants to get married and have a family. He was very isolated for many years while building his business. Now he's 55, but developmentally he's more like 20." To help him get out more, "we set goals for his social life, just as for his business, and scheduled social events into his calendar. He took swing-dancing classes. He finally has a girlfriend now"--at an age when some of his peers are already grandparents.

Okay, so starting a business is not exactly conducive to romance. (Look how long it took Bill Gates to get married--and even then it was to an executive in his own company.) Still, most entrepreneurs get it together eventually. "Business owners as a population are very married," says William "Denny" Dennis, research director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses in Washington, D.C. His figures show that of Americans who started businesses of all sizes in 1998, 63% were married, 23% were single, 11% were divorced, 2% were separated, and 0.5% were widowed. "Those numbers are all about the same as for the general population," Dennis notes. "But I can tell you one thing--with all that people go through to start and run a business, well, the experience will either bring you and your spouse a lot closer together or it will make you hate each other."

DREAMERS DON'T MAKE GOOD LOVERS

Ah. to hear some experts tell it, the latter is more likely. "It's not uncommon for entrepreneurs to run through three, four, or five spouses," says David Birch, founder and CEO of Cognetics, a business-to-business market research firm in Waltham, Mass. "Entrepreneurs are not normal. I've studied thousands of them, and I never met one I didn't like. But we're weird, because our focus on our businesses dominates everything else"--including, of course, life at home. "Often the business isn't going well, especially at the very beginning when it isn't going well maybe 95% of the time," says Birch. "So you're always exhausted, grouchy, irritable, and preoccupied. Who wants to be married to that?" Birch, who started Cognetics 18 years ago when his marriage was already long established and his kids were in their teens, adds, "Often I think the problem with entrepreneurs is not just that we tend to work long hours but that even when you're physically at home, where is your mind? Even now, after all these years, my wife will be talking to me and then she'll say, 'You didn't hear a word I just said, did you?' And she's right, I didn't."

Tom Culley, a former McKinsey consultant who has advised and been part-owner of dozens of startups and now runs a Website for entrepreneurs (www.businessalone.com), observes that it's very easy for misunderstandings to grow between business owners and their spouses. "When you have a husband and wife and one of them is involved in his or her own company and the other works for someone else--say, in a large corporation--trust is very easily lost." Why is that? Well, one of the consolations of a corporate job is that you have usually got someone else to blame if things go wrong--a bad boss, a hostile colleague, or some other factor that is outside of your control. With your own company, by contrast, hey, you created this. If there's a problem, it is your fault, and your spouse can get very impatient with the turmoil and setbacks.

Relations can get especially tense on the home front as goals and strategies change, as they always do in a startup, often over and over again. The spouse who is listening to the 110th explanation of what happened to cause these changes of direction is apt to lose confidence. "The entrepreneur can begin to look like a dreamer, or a liar," says Culley. "And once that basic trust is lost, it's hard, if not impossible, to get it back."

Yikes. And then there's money. "Any family already has enough financial strains," says Culley. "Now suddenly one partner, instead of bringing in a regular paycheck, starts something that is not only a financial drain but an unpredictable financial drain." Keep that up for six months, or two years, or five years, and it will be a true test of whether a couple can stay together and support each other, or not. Lucy Rosen, head of a marketing and public relations company called the Business Development Group, used to be married to a man who had a nine-to-five job at a huge insurance company. Rosen moved to New York City from Albuquerque to start her business "with $3,000, no clients, no nothing." She recalls being thrilled by the risk, and the competitive challenge: "I love the hunt." Like any other new business, though, hers wasn't profitable for a while--and her husband couldn't see why she didn't chuck it for a regular paycheck: "There I was, running this business from our dining room table and then moving into my first 'real' office space, and I'd be all excited about landing a great new client, and my husband would just look at me. He just didn't get it. He'd say, 'Why do you need to do this?'" They divorced when their daughter, Samantha, was 2.

Of course, if both partners in a marriage are deeply absorbed in the same business, plenty of potential troubles can be averted. A spouse who's also a business partner understands why you won't be home for dinner for the 12th night in a row, because he or she probably won't be either. Still, married co-founders may face other perils. Elaine Hodgson, a biochemist by training who worked for NASA before getting interested in computers in the early '80s, started Incredible Technologies, in Rolling Meadows, Ill., in 1985 with her former husband. The company makes coin-operated videogames, including a hugely popular one called Golden Tee Golf. The business grew nicely, but--starved for time and attention--the romance died. In 1997, Hodgson divorced and, two years later, married Larry Hodgson, who is vice president of product development in her company. Her ex-husband is still co-owner of the company and an executive vice president. They live near each other so their three kids can visit back and forth. "The stress of running the company contributed to my and my ex-husband's problems with each other," says Hodgson. "Ultimately we were just business partners, and not personal partners anymore. Now, in my second marriage, we're trying to avoid that." Since Incredible Technologies has moved beyond the frantic startup stage (revenues last year reached $60 million), Hodgson figures she and her new husband Larry have a better chance of making their new marriage work.

TIME TO DATE YOUR SPOUSE

Not surprisingly, the challenges of trying to combine a happy personal life with building a company have given rise to a mini-industry of coaches and counselors who specialize in helping entrepreneurs get a life. (For a sampling of their best tips, see box called "7 Steps to Sanity.") Let's start with the first one they always mention, dating your spouse, since it is definitely the most fun. "I believe that marriages fall apart because of the lack of free time. Not money, not sex, but time. And time is what companies take away. So we tell all of our married clients to start dating again," says Dan Sullivan, a coach based in Chicago and Toronto (see www.strategiccoach.com), who has counseled more than 5,000 entrepreneurs since 1989 and whose firm runs a conference every spring for entrepreneurial couples. "Get a babysitter. Get dressed up. Go out to dinner. Go to a movie. Have a conversation. If the marriage doesn't get taken care of, neither does the family"--and neither do you. Ultimately, that's bad for the business.

Anne Warfield, founder and head of Impression Management Professionals (www.impression-management.com), an executive-development firm based in Minneapolis, couldn't agree more. "At our house, Saturday nights are date nights. We either go out or have a candlelight dinner at home when the kids are in bed," she says. "And I think it's good for the kids to see us having our own happy times alone, just the two of us, so they know that is something they too can aim for later on in their own lives." Notice that she says "Saturday nights," as in every Saturday night, not just once every six months or so. Dating takes discipline. But you can handle it, right?

While you and your beloved are gazing into each other's eyes, here's something you might ask: "Honey, what do you think our long-term goals should be?" Warfield runs seminars for business owners and their spouses, aimed at helping couples talk about--and, ideally, agree on--where they see themselves five, ten, and 20 years out. "Any entrepreneur will tell you that the foundation of a great business is a strong business plan. But if you ask them whether they also have a life plan, you get a blank stare," says Warfield. By her reckoning, 80% of couples are not working toward the same goals or making the same assumptions about the future. Most don't even realize it. "In our seminars, we start by having couples sit down and rank 16 values--financial, personal, even spiritual--in order of their importance. Then they compare their lists. People get some real surprises. You can hear 'Aha!' all over the room." Often, she notes, "business owners have set long-term goals for themselves that involve, say, reaching a given level of revenues, and they expect to work very hard for a very long time to get there. Meanwhile, because they've never really talked about it, the spouse is assuming that the 'crunch' of getting the business off the ground is a short-term thing and that at some point the pressure will be off. Those differences in perception need to be recognized and reconciled before they start to cause some really damaging stress in the marriage."

HONEY, I LOST THE KIDS

Suppose a discussion of this kind leads you and your sweeter half to conclude that, in the short term, you need to make more time for your kids, or just for yourself, away from the constant, all-consuming demands of the company. There will always be only 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week. But chances are good that, if you get really, really organized, you can fit more life into the time you've got. Barbara Hemphill, a professional organizer based in Raleigh (www.productiveenvironment.com) and author of Taming the Paper Tiger at Work, helps people stop wasting time on boring and unproductive stuff. Many of her clients are business owners. "I read once that the average person spends 150 hours a year looking for misplaced information, and I used to doubt that. But my experience has since shown me it's conservative," says Hemphill. "I just got one new client, an entrepreneur who spent six hours the other day looking for an important document he still hasn't found. Think of what else he could have been doing with six whole hours!"

Hemphill, who raised five children while getting her business up and running, says she kept her cool by organizing her time into three kinds of days, which she calls free days, focus days, and buffer days: "Free days are for family only. Focus days are for work only. And buffer days are the ones where you have to accommodate both work and family. Most of the time, entrepreneurs are pulled in so many directions, they're never free or focused. Try blocking out your calendar to include all three kinds of days. And then stick to it."

Impossibly rigid, you say? What if there's a work crisis on a "free" day, or a family emergency on a "focused" one? The occasional exception may pop up, but you might as well face it: Without some kind of a time-management system, your business will probably just keep running away with you. Paul and Shannon Entin (the hassled couple in the beginning of our story who sent e-mails to each other while sitting back-to-back) are now on speaking terms, thanks to something they invented called an Optimum Time Allocation Report. That is essentially a detailed calendar they make up together each month, spelling out "when we're permitted in the office, when one of us is responsible for solo parenting, and when we get to be together as a family. Every Saturday is a family day. Every night at 6 P.M., work stops for dinner." The household is now "a pretty smooth-running operation," says Paul Entin--and talking beats e-mailing any day.

Every now and then, for the sake of your sanity and your spouse's, you may just have to say no to a customer--easier said than done, of course, especially if your business isn't turning a profit yet. The tradeoff between time and money is a tough one. Take training consultant Brendan Tobin (www.tobingroup.com), for example. He says he "set out to make a name for myself in a crowded field, and did almost too well. I was working seven days a week and traveling 70% of the time, living in hotel rooms." A moment of reckoning came ten months ago, when he and his wife had their first child. "She's home full-time raising our son, so that makes me want to be there more too," says Tobin. "Yet at the same time, I'm the only breadwinner now, so the pressure to make money is even greater than before."

For the moment, Tobin has opted for more time at home: "I talk to entrepreneurs who are on their second or third wife. It worries me sometimes, because I want to keep this one." Toward that end, he recently turned down a lucrative contract that would have kept him on the road for 100 straight days. He's seeking a business partner to whom he hopes to delegate some travel-intensive accounts.

Of course, because he's the boss, he can choose to say no, however ambivalently. So can you--and that's probably the biggest single advantage that business owners have over the rest of the workaday world. Why not use it once in a while? "I had no idea how many hours were going to be involved in both raising a family and running a business," says Tom Caldwell, co-founder of TDI Products, an engineering and manufacturing company in Jacksonville Beach, Fla "To do it right, I've had to give up golf. But you know, I used to work for GE, and, if I were still there, I'd probably be working just as hard and just as long hours--but with less control over my own schedule." Caldwell frequently works far into the evenings, until long past the hour when his two sons, ages 3 years and 14 months, are asleep. But he almost always goes home at midday to have lunch with them. Or look at Steven Addis, a former Clorox executive who started a branding and package-design company in Berkeley with clients like Pepsi, Intel, Lego, and Gap. To squeeze in more time with his two small children during the day, Addis located his company within five blocks of both his daughter's school and the kids' pediatrician's office. Says he: "So far I haven't missed a doctor's appointment with either kid." How many big-company employees--especially dads--can say that?

Entrepreneurs may have to deal with the fact that what makes them good at business doesn't necessarily make them terrific at parenting. "Many business owners have a high need for control and a low need for social support. And someone who needs to be in control of every situation, doesn't much care what other people think, and is inclined to be stubborn--well, those are not ideal qualities in a parent," says Randel Carlock, co-author with John Ward of Strategic Planning for the Family Business (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, $29.95). Carlock is a former entrepreneur who took his consumer-electronics retailing company public, then sold it and did postgraduate studies in family and marriage therapy, and now teaches at INSEAD in Paris. "The traits that make you a successful entrepreneur are not things you can turn off when you walk in the door at home. But you do want to be aware of how you're dealing with your kids--and of how appropriate, or not, your approach is to the situation." He notes that little kids tend to measure love in terms of time, and quantity is as important as quality, if not more so: "If a parent is working all the time and preoccupied with work at home, in the child's mind the parent loves the business best. He or she starts to see the business as competition, and in time will resent that." And you--and then, look out.

Luckily, there are ways of preventing the sibling rivalry from getting out of hand. A popular stratagem: Get the kids involved in the business, and maybe even excited about it. This works best when they're small, before the jaded teen years when they may balk at being seen with you anywhere, including your own office. Chris McGovern owns a business-to-business marketing company called eMerging Marketing in Columbus, Ohio. "When my kids were 4 and 6," he says, "I had a fulfillment company with a huge warehouse, where we stored clients' products and marketing materials. In the winter, when there was a lot of snow outside, I'd take them in there and they'd ride their bikes around while I was working and have a blast." Now, he says, "I talk to my kids about my business, and they seem to get it. With all the mergers and acquisitions going on in my industry, a lot of people are trying to buy my company. My 8-year-old can give me a list of reasons why I shouldn't sell--and she's right."

Kids also like business trips. Gillian Christie started and built her company, Christie Communications, in Santa Barbara, while raising two daughters on her own--one of whom once dressed up and danced around in a six-foot-tall light bulb costume to promote a client's product at a trade show in Chicago. "The client loved it, and she loved it," says Christie. "Of course, she didn't mind the shopping trip to Neiman Marcus afterward either."

Nobody with any sense thinks there's a magic formula for making two 24-hour-a-day obsessions--the Big Baby and the human kind--co-exist easily. But there's no doubt it can be done. In 1996, the same year--in fact, the same week--that his first daughter was born, Mark Patricof started <kpe>, a Manhattan interactive-media company that has launched Websites for Six Flags, Princess Cruises, ABC/Disney, and Oprah Winfrey, among others. He and his wife, Martha, have since had another daughter, Nina, who is 4. "I can't always do such a hot job of being there for them, but in my mind, they come first," Patricof says. He does make breakfast every day at 6:30, and last Memorial Day weekend, the whole family went to Florida for three days. "It turned out my cell phone didn't work there," he recalls, "so it was the first time in six years that we had three whole days of peace." Peace is not only nice but, every now and then, necessary. If all else fails, you can always turn the cell phone off and just pretend you're out of range.