I was going to respond to this post in TRP but I felt the message was a bit too important to get lost in the comments.

As a student I was mentored by a man who had an engineering business that was primarily based on consulting (Edit for clarification: their typical customer would pay his company to design then arrange manufacturing for products, but sometimes they would only deliver IP to be integrated by the customer). He had a small office building he rented, a little equipment for prototyping, and 1 or 2 employees. He has a strong reputation and did lots of work for larger companies. Generally he was very successful, and although his income would fluctuate year to year, was able to bring in at least as much as he would have made as an employee at a large company, usually more, but probably not orders of magnitude more.

His story went per usual: He was married, had kids, used the money he earned to buy a nice house and toys for his wife and kids to enjoy while he is working. After 10-15 years the house is fully paid, kids are going off to college, and he has some decent savings. Then, as it goes, he and his stay at home wife divorce (I don't know the details, she may have cheated).

The caution: Because he "owned a business" the lawyers were able to put a "value" on his business ridiculously high. Keep in mind, his business was essentially consulting work, he had few assets, no significant IP, pretty much just his reputation. As you may be aware, there are many ways to determine a company's value. In this case they did some multiplier (probably 3X - 4X if I had to guess) of the revenue. I don't know the exact value (I do know it was well more than $1M, since he said that once), but imagine if his annual revenue was $400k, his company might have been valued at $1.6 Million.

How he got fucked: As you probably have deduced, when all assets were tabulated, cars, boat, house, savings, etc. and his company, they figured out that to do a 50% split, you can't split the company, so the best thing to do was give her EVERY FUCKING THING and he gets....his job. Plus he has to pay for the kids college and alimony.

He got fucked so hard it is really sad. If he just had a regular job (which is pretty close to reality realistically, essentially he was a consultant) he would have still been fucked like all guys are, but in this case it was a nuclear fucking. He slept in his office (literally had a laundry basket in his office) and had to essentially start from scratch plus making payments to his wife.

Lesson: I've been struggling to come up with a lesson beyond don't get married. Probably better lawyers could have helped. Beyond that, it seems like the best approach might be to include specific language regarding how assets like a business are handled/excluded in a prenup.

TLDR: Guy starts a small business, uses it to buy expensive houses and shit, wife gets it all in the divorce and he gets to keep his job so he can make alimony payments.