Sometimes You’ll Have to Reevaluate the Partnership
We all know the feeling of starting our first business. It’s great! It’s awesome! It’s exciting! Many of us will start a business venture with a partner straight from the beginning. Hopefully our partner is just as enthusiastic about the business as we are. In most cases – during the beginning – our partners will be just as enthusiastic as we are – sometimes even MORE excited!
But I’ve seen it happen time and time again, as the weeks go by and the business starts to mature, your business partner that you once thought was just as excited as you are is now just sitting back and relaxing, enjoying the ride. Piggybacking your success; your ideas; your revenue; your EVERYTHING.
Logically, you’d expect your business partner to lose interest only when the business isn’t doing well. But what if he is losing interest when the business is doing great? I recently spoke with a young entrepreneur who told me that his business partner became less and less motivated about doing any of the work as the business continued to grow and bring in more revenue; at that point, he was just interested in collecting his 50% cut in the venture while not doing much.
Going into business with someone can be a very delicate matter. You need to think long and hard before you sign a contract to go 50/50 on a business with someone, especially if you are the founder and see yourself doing most of the work down the line.
You don’t want to end up in a situation where you are doing 90% of the work and splitting 50% of the revenues – just doesn’t make sense. When you find a situation like that occurring, I think that it’s time to call your lawyer to reconstruct your contract and shift percentages around.
I’m no lawyer, but as the founding entrepreneur you should be wise and make sure that there are provisions in the initial contract that allow for you to modify the contract down the line if your partner isn’t pulling his weight; possibly shifting to a performance-based partnership instead of a binding one.
When your partner isn’t pulling their weight and you find yourself doing the bulk of the work, then you need to articulate that right away, not later. If you wait to express how you’re feeling, then the problem will only grow larger and become harder to rectify down the line as it grows and grows into an even bigger monster.
Never, never, never allow yourself to be carrying the entire weight of the business if you specifically went into a relationship with a partner who would be helping you right down the line. It’s better to cut complete ties with that partner rather than continuing to compensate for his lack of work while he’s still being financially compensated.
If you feel that you can run the business as a solo-entrepreneur, then go off on your own and leave your partner in the dust. However, if you feel that the situation can be corrected and it’s worth the time and effort to continue on with a partner – maybe because he’s the only person that you can trust – then stick it out and do everything in your power to get him back on track.
I have to agree with you on this. I was involved in a partnership that was going absolutely nowhere and really it just was not a good match.
I think of a partnership similar to the idea of marriage. Two people sharing an aspect of life/business together. You wouldn’t marry someone that was lazy and really didn’t care if they screwed you over; you’d want to find that good fit. Its all about give and take.
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Luc