Scott Makar, 45
Jacksonville
She: Extrovert. Three 1984 Olympic gold medals for swimming, Duke graduate and former Holland & Knight attorney. Today, she teaches torts and sports law full time at the Florida Coastal School of Law. One of the nation's foremost experts on Title IX gender equity in intercollegiate sports. In-demand public speaker.
He: Quiet, reflective. Former Holland & Knight attorney. Now the chief of the appellate division with Jacksonville's Office of General Counsel, which represents all departments of Jacksonville's metro-style government, including the school board and the elections office. This month he becomes chair of a Florida Supreme Court committee that prepares jury instructions for the court's review. He was recently nominated for a state
appellate court position.
Family: Son, Aaron, 4.
The relationship: Married five years. Lots of mutual support. "If I really need to work on the weekend, I can say, 'Honey I need help here' and he's right there. He's a real teammate. He understands where I'm coming from. And the same with him. When he has to pull an all-nighter, I make way. I've been there. I can absolutely respect what he's doing."
Focus: Both adjusted their career paths to build a better family. She gets home at 5 p.m. to change and spend time with Aaron. "We're both still advancing professionally in very significant ways," says Makar. "But we have some of those flexibilities and opportunities to be a family, to have weekend time and take vacations. I didn't take vacation for 15 years."
Sacrifices: Ironically for Hogshead-Makar, it's fitness training. "I'm an Olympic champion, and I don't have time to work out," she says. "You talk to any working mother in the whole world, and they'll tell you there's just not a time when you have a lot of time to yourself. If I have to do extra work, I do it late at night, and it comes out of my sleep time and not out of Aaron's time."
Dori Foster-Morales, 40
Jimmy Morales, 42
Miami-Dade
She: University of Florida law school. Formerly a prosecutor in the career criminal unit of the State Attorney's Office in Miami-Dade, dealing with habitual violent felony offenders. Today, a partner at Elser, Foster-Morales & Kopco, a three-attorney firm that handles high-profile divorce cases.
He: Corporate attorney, Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler Alhadeff & Sitterson. Undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. Eight years as District 7 representative on the Miami-Dade County Commission. He ran unsuccessfully for the Miami-Dade mayor's office last fall and now spearheads efforts to combat poverty in the county.
Family: Daughter, Nora, 11, who is autistic, and son, Peter, 3.
First meeting: She was 15 when they first met at a Miami Beach High School football game. He was 17 and on his way to Harvard, where he studied government.
The relationship: Married for 15 years. The couple re-evaluated their priorities after Nora was diagnosed with autism in 1996. Friday nights are reserved for family and kids. The couple uses Saturday nights to attend community functions and fund-raisers -- and as "date nights." On Sundays, the family often gathers with extended family and friends for barbecues.
Community: She is helping organize Sister to Sister, a first-time event to spread awareness of heart disease in women. She's active in the Florida Bar Association. He's on the board of Neighborhood Lending Partners, which focuses on affordable housing, and active in the National Alliance of Autism Research.
Sacrifices: Traditional family dinners. "If you're going to really accomplish things, you can't be too hard on yourself," Foster-Morales says. "You can't accomplish everything. When you go for these big goals, things like alone time and vacation suffer. There's never any quiet time in our lives."
Mary Scriven, 42
Lansing C. Scriven, 42
Tampa
She: Federal magistrate judge for the Middle District of Florida, U.S. District Court. She's the only African-American woman in the state who holds this position. She has a caseload of 500 to 600 criminal and civil cases at any given time.
He: Operates his own law firm, Lansing C. Scriven, P.A., which focuses on business litigation. Formerly worked as the first African-American attorney at Trenam Kemker Attorneys at Law, where his career spanned 12 years.
Family: Tyler, who's in college, Jessica, 14, Sarah, 11, and Charles, 6.
Community: She's on the boards of the Federal Magistrate Judges Association, the Hillsborough Association for Women Lawyers and the Hillsborough County Bar Foundation, as well as the executive board of the Spring of Tampa Bay, which provides assistance for victims of domestic violence. He's president-elect of the Hillsborough County Bar Association and will become the organization's first African-American president. He also is on the board for Tampa General Hospital, is past president of the Tampa Club, and coaches youth basketball for the YMCA, where their 6-year-old son plays.
The relationship: Married 16 years. They met at Duke University, where they attended undergraduate school together and became best friends. In their co-ed dormitory, his room was on one side of the fire doors and hers was on the other. Her advice for making a "Power Couple" marriage work: "Make your relationship your priority. When we first got married, we did what we called love summits at least once a quarter. We got away from everything, went to a place out of town or to a local hotel and sat down with a detailed plan of what we were going to talk about and what we were trying to accomplish in our relationship and in some degree our professional lives. Now with kids, of course, we can't get away once a quarter, but we try to get away twice a year with the same goal in mind. Once that's solidified, everything else falls into place."
How they cope: "The telephone is probably our single most-often-used electronic device," she says. "We're not very big e-mailers to each other. I like to hear his voice, and I think he likes to hear mine. We'll talk frequently during the day, just touching base with each other."
Nancy Howell, 56
Gary McKechnie, 42
Mount Dora
She: A former TV producer who operates a bed and breakfast -- a 1920s two-story yellow house called the Coconut Cottage Inn -- with her husband.
He: Author, travel writer, former stand-up comic and advertising copywriter.
Community: Howell was named Mount Dora's 2000 Citizen of the Year. She serves on several boards and committees, including the chamber of commerce, the community redevelopment agency marketing committee and the tourist development council. McKechnie produces folk music concerts for "An Evening With" series to benefit the Mount Dora Library Association. He's also involved in an effort to refurbish a 1929 Mediterranean-architecture auditorium downtown.
The relationship: Married for nine years. They stay on the road for three or four weeks at a time during the slow season. They're working on a third edition of his book, "Great American Motorcycle Tours," which they're pitching as a TV travel show, and co-writing USA 101, a guide to 100 things every American should experience.
Family: Howell's grown son and grandchildren live in different parts of the country.
Sacrifices: "We virtually work seven days a week, not necessarily 10-hour days, but we work around the clock," Howell says. "We don't really have set office hours. We just work till the project's done."
Melissa Malaga, 35
Marc Malaga, 38
Boca Raton
She: Co-owns Maxwell's Chophouse, a restaurant she and her mother founded 11 years ago in Boca Raton that employs about 80, was rated 23rd-largest woman-owned business in the state by Florida Trend and was named among the top five steakhouses on the East Coast by Food & Wine magazine. The restaurant is named after her brother, who's a senior in high school. She handles employees and purchasing, while her mother operates the restaurant day to day. "I'm not there as much as I'd like to be because we have two small children who take priority over everything else in our lives."
He: Owns Deerfield Beach-based Giftbaskets.com, which operates giftbaskets.com and flowerstore.com and employs five. Struck out on his own in 2000 after developing the web business while working with his family's chain of retail flower shops. His business has been profiled in several national publications because of its innovations, including a translation of the entire original website in Spanish.
Family: Daughter Isabella, 3 and a half, and son Charles, age 1. The Malagas eat dinner together most nights as a family, and they celebrate the Jewish Sabbath together on Friday nights.
The relationship: Married for 6 and a half years, together 13 years. Met through a friend when Melissa moved to south Florida from New York. He proposed after she left for Pennsylvania to go to school for her master's degree in social work, so she came back and married him after graduation.
Community: Both are involved with The Haven, a group home for neglected and abused boys. He has served on the board for seven years, one year as chairman. They sometimes host the children for dinner or pool parties. "I tend to lean toward the children's charities because I feel that's where we can make our best impact," he says. "That's where we spend our time; that's where we donate a fair amount of our money."
How they cope: As business owners, they oversee operations but don't hold day-to-day responsibilities at their companies. "The great benefit of this business is it allows me the flexibility to not be there all the time," he says. They also have a nanny who helps out.
Challenge: "Not enough time," she says. "I have no time for myself, and our time together as a couple is minimal."
Wendy Shill Kurtz, 39
Dean Kurtz, 46
Apopka
She: President of Elizabeth Charles & Associates, a business development strategy firm she formed eight years ago that helps executives, authors and professional speakers market themselves and their products. Clients from Florida to California. She's also writing a crime novel.
He: Director of external affairs for Sprint Florida, overseeing a team of 18 statewide who develop relationships in their communities on behalf of service provider Sprint.
Community: The first husband-and-wife team to serve on the Orlando Regional Chamber of Commerce board. She's on the Apopka Chamber of Commerce board, holds a regional leadership position in the Public Relations Society of America and is on the board of the University of Central Florida alumni association; he's in leadership positions at the Metro Orlando Economic Development Commission, the Heart of Florida United Way, the American Red Cross and the blood bank. At one time, his name appeared on the letterheads of 15 or 16 organizations.
The relationship: Tried once to schedule regular "date nights" on their PDAs but had to cancel. Now opt instead for "spontaneous but intentional" alone time. Maintain a second home in Tallahassee, where they spend March and April for the Florida legislative session, and he commutes at least once a week the rest of the year to work and spend time with his children from a previous marriage, who are 21, 20, 18 and 17.
Sacrifices: "One of the things we've had to do over the last couple years, and it's been tough, is to scale back on the number of external commitments," she says. "We both absolutely adore this community -- that's why we are so involved -- but you've got kids, you've got dogs, you've got a spouse, so we've had to really scale back."
Debbie Ritchie, 42
Buzz Ritchie, 57
Pensacola
She: Editor and general manager of the Pensacola Business Journal, a monthly business-to-business publication that shares resources and employees with the Pensacola News Journal, a sister publication of Gannett Co. Inc.
He: CEO of Gulf Coast Community Bank, which opened in July 2003 and now has 32 employees, 13 board members and a 14-member advisory board. His background is in banking, mortgage lending and real estate development.
Community: She was named the community's woman business leader of the year in 2004 after founding Impact 100 Pensacola Bay Area, an all-women's charitable organization. In its first year, the Pensacola group recruited 233 women and raised $233,000. She serves on the board of the Children's Services Center, as a lay member of the Florida Bar's First Judicial Circuit Grievance Committee and as an officer of the Escambia County Council of PTAs. He has agreed to be president of Rebuild Northwest Florida, a group coordinating efforts among private, public, non-profit and faith-based groups to help the area recover from last year's hurricanes. One of his pet projects is United Cerebral Palsy, where he was past board chair and now heads the foundation.
The relationship: Married four years. They met and became friends when they worked at the state Capitol, where both of them served in the Legislature -- he for 10 years and she for four. After they got out of office in 1998, they started dating. He proposed to her on his birthday and then whisked her off to a jewelry store that had agreed to stay open after hours for him so he could take her there to pick out an engagement ring.
Family: She has two girls who live with them, Lindsey, age 16, and Kelsey, who turns 13 this month. His children are all adults. The eldest, Donna, 38, lives in Gainesville, and his three sons are in Pensacola, Alan, 34, Scott, 27, and Chris, 26.
How they cope: "A typical experience for the two of us," she says, "is literally to have to set up a meeting with each other -- I will come into his office or we'll schedule time to sit on the phone -- and talk about our calendars. Sometimes I'm not sure I like that, but it's really necessary." They plot out the next two or three weeks. If she has a meeting that warrants him having to help out with the kids, for example, he has to put it on his calendar. "It's the only way we get it done," he says. "It's probably one of the hardest things about this crazy, busy world we've put each other in."