‘Spreadsheets in the bedsheets’: Couple built and sold a $2-billion brand, says spouses going into business is ‘not for the weak’

In a School of Hard Knocks interview published in March, the couple — who have three children together — went into greater detail on what it takes to run a business with a spouse. Asked whether other couples should follow their lead, Stephen, 38, didn’t hesitate.

“It’s definitely not for the weak,” he said. “I wouldn’t advise against it, ‘cause I mean, look at us, we built and sold a business for nearly $2 billion, and built a family.”

Allison, 38, was more blunt. “There’s no such thing as balance,” she said. “There’s spreadsheets in the bedsheets. We maxed out our credit cards. We did everything we could to survive.”

Bubbling up

Before Poppi took off, the Ellsworths invested roughly US$90,000 of their own savings in the first year, with Stephen working night and weekend gigs as a waiter to cover their mortgage, Fortune previously reported.

Allison, a former oil-and-gas industry professional, started mixing apple cider vinegar with fruit juice and seltzer in her kitchen in 2015 to detoxify and manage her gut health. By 2018, the couple pitched the drink — then called Mother Beverage — on Shark Tank, the American equivalent of Canada’s Dragons’ Den, while Allison was nine months pregnant. They walked away with a US$400,000 (C$547,000) investment from “Brandfather” Rohan Oza for a 25% stake.

A 2020 rebrand to Poppi, paired with a pandemic-era TikTok strategy that Allison fronted herself, sent annual revenue from US$4 million to more than US$500 million in 2024, according to a company spokesperson. PepsiCo, which already owns a massive roster of beverages from Gatorade to Rockstar, announced the deal in March 2025 and closed it that May. Fortune later estimated the Ellsworths walked away with more than US$100 million from the deal. Poppi is currently sold in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom.

More than just a business partner

During their School of Hard Knocks interview, Stephen Ellsworth was candid about how going into business with your significant other isn’t a seamless journey.

“Marriage is not 50/50, a business partnership is not 50/50,” he said. “Each person has to be committed 100%, because at any given time, someone’s gonna be falling short of 100%. Trust and commitment are absolutely critical.”

Co-founding a company with a spouse is more common than you might think. As of 2024, Canada has approximately 1.08 million small businesses, employing 5.8 million people in the private sector. Many of those businesses are family enterprises — some run by couples who are most certainly navigating the same pressures the Ellsworths describe.

Canada has its own high-profile example of what building a company with a romantic partner can look like. Michele Romanow and Andrew D’Souza co-founded Clearco (formerly Clearbanc), a Toronto-based fintech platform that distributed more than US$3 billion in capital to entrepreneurs worldwide. Romanow — best known to Canadian audiences as the youngest Dragon in Dragons’ Den history — and D’Souza built Clearco into a near-unicorn valued at close to US$2 billion before eventually splitting as a romantic couple in 2022; Romanow is the company’s executive chairman while D’Souza has since stepped down from his position.

The Ellsworth story is a useful contrast: Couples who stay the course can achieve extraordinary outcomes. But the risk is very real.

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What Canadian couples need to know about the risks

Canada’s divorce rate has declined to a 50-year low — dropping to 5.6 divorces for every 1,000 married persons in 2020, according to Statistics Canada data cited by the Vanier Institute of the Family. But that figure doesn’t give the full picture: As of 2021, StatCan data shows that more than 22.7% of Canadian couples live in common-law scenarios, the highest rate among G7 countries, and those separations don’t show up in divorce statistics. For entrepreneurs, breaking up a relationship — married or not — can have serious financial consequences when there’s a business involved.

What happens to the business if a couple splits up in Canada?

Canadian law diverges from what many people assume when married business partners split. Property division on divorce isn’t a federal matter — it’s governed by provincial and territorial legislation. In most provinces, the principle applied when couples split is the equalization of net family property: For example, in Ontario as well as many other provinces, the value of assets accumulated during the marriage is divided equally between spouses.