While his wife stayed home with the kids and the books, Ronnie McGlothlin started the day calling on contractors and builders to subcontract roofing jobs.

By 11 a.m., with the Texas sun high in the sky, he'd join the crew rolling out fiberglass felts on a warehouse roof.

Today, 22 years later, with more than 160 employees and offices in Austin and Memphis, Tenn., Empire Roofing orders Gatorade by the pallet and resurfaces roofs averaging about 30,000 square feet that take up to 21 days to finish.

"The business was our third child, and we didn't want to leave it unattended," Sandra McGlothlin said, adding that they didn't take a vacation together for 10 years.

Theirs is a story about a man who quit his father's business -- and took eight of his workers with him -- and comforted his wife by telling her they were young enough to go broke.

"I'm 22 years old, and we can go broke two or three times before I'm 30," he said he told her. "But I'll get the business down."

In the beginning they worked out of their home, and Sandra volunteered to look after the books and get insurance for each job, along with keeping an eye on the kids, Mark and Cheryl, who weren't old enough for school.

They incorporated, making him president and her secretary-treasurer.

He couldn't pay her much; the 10 guys working on the roof came first.

Of the eight men who followed McGlothlin when he left his dad's company, seven stuck it out. Today they still work at Empire, supervising jobs across the country.

McGlothlin might go hunting occasionally, but Sandra stayed home to run the business. And when she went to visit family, he stayed in Fort Worth.

When their kids were too old for day care, they helped at the office after school.

"Doing real jobs," Sandra said, remembering sending her 13-year-old son outside to help clean the equipment while her daughter stayed in the office and helped file.

"We have always taken it home; there are things we can't possibly get to during the workday," Sandra said.

It is the same for Sue and Robert Johnson, owners of Wahoo Corp., where he manages Ink Well Graphics and she runs Printing Plus.

"We're off doing our own thing during the day, and we don't get time to talk business till we get home," she said. But that's not a problem: "That's when we get a chance to plan and strategize where we want to go."

What was important for the Johnson's and McGlothlin's was making each partner responsible for certain areas and having the final say.

"It's like dealing with kids," Sue Johnson said. The Johnson's back each other up so an employee at Printing Plus can't get out of doing the work by going to her husband.

"We're just respectful of each other," Robert Johnson said.

At Empire, Sandra McGlothlin remembers keeping records on the repair costs for each truck to determine whether it would cost more to keep it running than to invest in new trucks.

"She knows how to take care of the money, and I know how to make it," Ronnie McGlothlin said.

She replied that he knows how to spend it too.

With yearly sales of more than $21 million, it no longer is a mom and pop operation. He is president of Empire Roofing, and she is president of Empire Disposal.

When the 2000 tornado struck Fort Worth, a lot of roofs needed replacing -- and a lot of trash needed hauling. Trash bins were hard to find, and those they could find were renting for twice what they had before the storm.

So they decided it was time to start another business. He concentrates on roofing, and she cleans up after him.

Not that he's messy. He takes pride in being a roofer and requires crews to show up on a job with clean uniforms, clean trucks and clean equipment.

"I always thought it gave me a leg up on the competition," he says of his standards in what is often a dirty business.

Even though the McGlothlin's seemed to live, eat and breathe the roofing, their children didn't feel ignored. And when Dad came home one night saying he had gotten a terrific offer to sell the company, he was surprised by how the kids reacted.

"Our son was upset that we were going to sell it out from under him, without giving him a chance to someday run the operation," Ronnie McGlothlin said.

Today, Mark is a full-time employee, supervising crews in Austin while his sister finishes college. Cheryl plans to join the company when she graduates.