The New Way To Get Divorced
Posted May 10, 2010 1:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Hell. In a word, that’s how Karen Stewart describes her divorce, which was sealed in 2004. The breakup dragged out over more than four years, exposing the couple’s three kids to the ugliness of the court system and costing Stewart upward of $500,000 in legal fees. What’s more, it created an irreparable rift between two people who still had to raise kids together.
The experience led Stewart, a serial entrepreneur in the financial-services industry, to question whether all the pain, suffering and expense had been truly necessary — and whether others were as frustrated with the traditional system as she was. “I started to wonder, ‘Am I alone here?'” she says. “Am I the only idiot who just dropped a fortune on legal bills?” She hired a market-research company to find out, and its report strongly confirmed her suspicions. In 2006, Stewart launched Calgary-based Fairway Divorce Solutions, with the intent of giving couples in Canada and the U.S. access to a faster, cheaper and less adversarial way to split up.
Stewart began franchising her model in 2008. She has sold 20 franchises in Canada and seven in the U.S., and expects to sell another 40 by the end of 2010. With plans to move into the U.K., Australia and Mexico in 2011, Stewart’s ultimate goal is to replace the traditional system and transform the industry “like Starbucks did for coffee shops.” With an innovative, potentially paradigm-shifting service that fills a burning need in the market and exploits consumers’ growing compulsion to seek alternatives to traditional ways of doing things, her goal just may be in reach.
To read the rest of the Profit magazine article, click here.
