They Divorced — But Still Work Together and Grew to $1.4 Million

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.”

BooXkeeping’s beginnings

Max and Elena were both immigrants to the U.S. Max arrived in 1993 from Russia, and Elena came in 1999 from Ukraine. They met in San Diego at a mutual friend’s birthday party, three weeks after Elena arrived in the U.S., started dating two years later and got married two years after that.

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 built BooXkeeping from a garage in San Diego in 2011 with a six‑year‑old and a one‑year‑old at home, Max doing business development while Elena nursed the baby and closed the books. 

When their marriage began to unravel a few years after BooXkeeping launched, their first move was to protect the people around them. They had employees working out of what used to be their children’s nursery; once they chose to separate, they rented an office so no one would have to navigate a domestic breakup in a former family bedroom. “We always prioritize relationships before anything else,” Elena says. “Even if the relationship form changes. The people aspect of this was important for us.”

Max remembers their coworkers wondering whether they needed to call 911 when the discussion got loud. “Sometimes we talk, and we get emotional; it doesn’t mean that we are fighting,” he says. “We’re just arguing, but in a good way.” 

Elena is less diplomatic: “It’s yelling, Max,” she says. “Be honest, and do not put the picture of a perfectly divorced couple. No. We yell at each other… but it’s been many years, and we’re still here doing it. Somehow it works.”

Why this divorce was different

The thing that tethered them through the split was a shared sense of responsibility — to their two sons and to the business they both describe as a third child. Early on, they sat their sons down and promised them their divorce wouldn’t look like the ones they had heard about from other families. “We promised both of them that they will not have to decide who they want to be with, and who is right, who is wrong,” Max says. “To this day, it did not happen.” 

The same logic extended to BooXkeeping: Elena calls it “this third child that we’re growing together.” “When people ask me, what’s your business? I say I have this business that’s one year younger than my second kid,” she says. “Just like with our kids, we made promises that they wouldn’t have to choose. We work it out.”

That commitment has outlasted the marriage itself. Max still lives in San Diego; Elena is based in Barcelona, where she’s a professor and crisis coach. They spend all the holidays together, and Max flies to Spain for milestones — this year, their youngest’s sixteenth birthday. “We start businesses, we end businesses,” Max says. “But we needed each other. We still do, to get to the next level of our lives.”

Professionally, their post-divorce years have coincided with BooXkeeping’s most ambitious chapter yet. The company now manufactures financial statements for freelancers and small to medium‑sized businesses. 

The firm has grown to 16 franchisees across the United States and is the preferred bookkeeping provider for more than 100 franchise brands, from emerging concepts to systems with hundreds or thousands of units.

BooXkeeping’s culture

The culture they talk about often is directly informed by the way they chose to end, and then renegotiate, their marriage. They look for people, whether employees or franchisees, who can exist in tension without blowing things up. Max says he filters every potential franchisee through a simple, personal test: “Do I want to hang out with this person outside of work?” If the answer is no, the deal doesn’t move forward, no matter how much capital is on the table. “Culture is huge for us,” he says.

Internally, that culture looks like long‑tenured staff who started in entry‑level roles and now run operations and accounting, and a leadership team that’s unafraid of conflict but disciplined about coming back from it. 

“For me, relationship first,” Elena says of the guiding principle that let her keep working with her ex‑husband. “We’ve known each other for way too many years, and we’ve been through quite a lot of ups and downs together as a couple… It’s just a different form of relationship.”

It also looks like two very different temperaments that are learning to share a steering wheel. Max is the one who wants to sprint; Elena is the one who worries about how fast the company can actually absorb growth.

None of this is neat, and they don’t pretend otherwise. The arguments still flare up. What remains is an unusual kind of loyalty to the idea that a relationship doesn’t have to end just because a marriage does, and that a company born out of that relationship doesn’t have to be collateral damage. 

The result has been lucrative. BooXkeeping did $1.4 million in revenue last year and is on track to do more than $2 million by the end of this year. The goal is to double the number of franchisees by the end of the year, from 16 locations to 35. 

“I honor my commitments, and I’ve committed to this business, to making it happen,” Elena says. “It was a very clear, conscious decision for me.” 

Max puts it more simply: “I don’t regret it because I don’t think we would be able to get where we are without each other.”

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.”

BooXkeeping’s beginnings

Max and Elena were both immigrants to the U.S. Max arrived in 1993 from Russia, and Elena came in 1999 from Ukraine. They met in San Diego at a mutual friend’s birthday party, three weeks after Elena arrived in the U.S., started dating two years later and got married two years after that.