The Boss of You

I had the indul­gently deli­cious plea­sure of see­ing Valentino the Last Emperor last night for the sec­ond time. Oh the glory of it all. While it is cer­tainly a film about fash­ion and the indus­try, it is equally a film about busi­ness, part­ner­ships and well let’s face it: ego. On my sec­ond view­ing how­ever, I found myself focus­ing more on the business/business partnership/relationship between Valentino and his long time part­ner Giametti than I did on all the pretty clothes (though some gor­geous red silk did make its way into my dreams last night). This may have been due to the fact that my adored busi­ness part­ner was sit­ting next to me, while two seats down sat an equally adored friend and long­time busi­ness asso­ciate. Regard­less, it got me think­ing on the topic of busi­ness part­ner­ships and a blog post I’ve been mean­ing to write for a while on the topic.

Lau­ren and I often get asked for advice on form­ing a busi­ness part­ner­ship, or how we get along as busi­ness part­ners and advice we can lend towards find­ing an equally func­tion­aly and excel­lent pair­ing for oth­ers. While we touched on this in the book — always make sure you have a part­ner­ship agree­ment! in writ­ing! please! — we often answer by kind of shrug­ging our shoul­ders and reply­ing that in many ways we con­sider our­selves to have just lucked out in find­ing each other. A few months ago how­ever, as we were doing some long range plan­ning and took a few moments to just thank each other for being such truly sup­port­ive, trust­wor­thy and excel­lent busi­ness part­ners, I found myself finally able to see a bit of the con­crete steps we took to get here. Steps, that now that I can see them, I can finally share with those who are won­der­ing how to find the per­fect busi­ness part­ner. So with that in mind here you are:

Some tips on find­ing your busi­ness soul mate (a list that is likely to grow):

• How do you feel about your poten­tial busi­ness partner’s approach to work?
  Lau­ren and I really lucked out here. We had been work­ing together when we decided to start our com­pany. We saw each other at work. Were able to observe details like how each of us treated clients, that each of us showed up to work on time, that we both got our work done on time, were pro-active and inter­ested in learn­ing on the job/expanding our hori­zons. Hon­estly, we never really took an inven­tory of these qual­i­ties when we decided to start a com­pany together in any con­scious way, but you can bet your last dime that we had both sub­con­sciously put a big check mark next to each of these qual­i­ties on the list. If things had been oth­er­wise, ie/ if I tended to roll into work 30 min late every sin­gle day, or I saw Lau­ren reg­u­larly miss­ing her dead­lines or scram­bling to cover her ass on things, we prob­a­bly never would have even started the con­ver­sa­tion with one another. Now you’re not always going to have a chance to work with your poten­tial can­di­date for busi­ness part­ner­ing, but you should be able to fairly eas­ily to do some research to help you answer these ques­tions. Don’t be afraid to pro­vide each other with ref­er­ences and check them. Seri­ously. This is a big deal and worth the time, effort and a lit­tle bit of poten­tial awk­ward­ness up front.
• We both wanted to same thing out of our careers/the busi­ness.
  Like pretty much exactly the same thing. And where there were dif­fer­ences, we could see a way to com­fort­ably accom­mo­dat­ing them. This meant things like: we both were aim­ing for the same salary and ben­e­fits ranges. We both wanted to work with the same kinds of clients. We both knew we wanted to work 40 hour weeks. Etc. From there, we were able to list out the dif­fer­ent things each of us wanted to do/wanted out of work and both fit into the pic­ture of one com­mon com­pany.
  
  
• We didn’t have a lot to lose.
  Hon­estly. This is another one I didn’t really think too much about at the time, but it def­i­nitely con­tributed to us tak­ing this risk together. My rent at the time was $350/month (half a shared base­ment suite in East Van). We bought one mid range com­puter and used one Lau­ren already had. As we’ve already described in the book, we “rented” space in the cor­ner of Lauren’s bed­room (she was liv­ing with her mom at the time so her rent was pretty low too). The stakes not being super high in the early days meant we had time and space to fig­ure out how to form a com­fort­able work­ing rela­tion­ship with one another with­out seri­ous pres­sure com­ing from our finan­cial or per­sonal com­mit­ments. Out­side pres­sures placed on a busi­ness rela­tion­ship when both or one party has seri­ous mort­gage pay­ments to meet, a fam­ily to feed or a lifestyle to sup­port that costs more than $1000 a month includ­ing wine and fancy cheese money, well that pres­sure is going to put more strain on a busi­ness rela­tion­ship. Does this mean I don’t think you should get into a busi­ness part­ner­ship if you’ve got seri­ous per­sonal com­mit­ments? No. Not at all. But you do want to make sure you feel really com­fort­able work­ing out the tough stuff with this per­son before you go in and that you both under­stand what each part­ner poten­tially has to lose if things go really sour.
• We planned for the worst. Together.
  And frankly we still do. When we looked at the via­bil­ity of start­ing a busi­ness together it took us about 5 min­utes after the day dream­ing about the fun and excit­ing stuff to start mak­ing a list of the big bad “what ifs.” We both threw in all the worst case sce­nar­ios we could think of. Most of them had to do with money. And really, this is just a tes­ta­ment to both of our per­son­al­ity types, but I think it was a really impor­tant step in estab­lish­ing trust between us. We looked at the worst case scenario(s) head on, and decided we were com­fort­able get­ting there together. We also had an agree­ment in there about when we would get out — again, together — if they came to be. At the time, when it was just the two of us, that was mostly just about look­ing at exactly how long we could go with­out mak­ing any money and at which point we’d need to call “Uncle” and hit the pave­ment look­ing for work else­where, but we knew exactly where each of us stood and shared a com­mon break­ing point.
• We planned for the best.
  It’s not all doom and gloom run­ning a busi­ness. And what you do with hard earned sur­plus cash, fame or for­tune is also some­thing you need to make sure all par­ties agree to. We both knew what we wanted to do with extra money that came in and how we’d pri­or­i­tize spend­ing it. First on salaries, then on hard­ware upgrades, nicer offices even­tu­ally and all the while mak­ing sure money was being invested back into the com­pany. If Lau­ren had had a secret dream to start leas­ing a com­pany Hum­mer with our logo embla­zoned on the hood as soon as we had the extra cash then there may have had to be a throw down. For­tu­nately, we had a plan for what to do when the good times came rolling by as well.
  
  
• My gut told me it was a solid idea.
  Ok so this one is totally airy fairy and frankly that gut of mine has been known to be wrong before on at least one occa­sion. Still, no where in the process of start­ing a busi­ness with Lau­ren did I have a sec­ond thought. Not once. Not twice. Not ever. Because of all the fac­tors I’ve listed above, I really did just roll with it and jumped in with both feet and a huge smile on my face, but it is worth not­ing that I didn’t have any late nights won­der­ing if I was mak­ing the right deci­sion, or wor­ri­some nag­ging feel­ings telling me to maybe put the brakes on things and re-evaluate. While it’s really hard to give solid advice that involves fol­low­ing your gut, I think I’d be remiss if I left this part of it out. This was def­i­nitely one of those instances where my instincts served me well.

Do you have any­thing to add to this list? Cri­te­ria you used to eval­u­ate your busi­ness part­ner before you signed on the dot­ted line? Or things you wish you’d thought of before you jumped into busi­ness together? I’d love to hear’em.