Until death do us part…

Many business partnerships are created with the best of intentions. With the hope that the business will live forever, people will cooperate happily ever after, and their children will take over their business and continue the same fruitful cooperation that their fathers had.

It’s almost a fairy tale, but for some reason people believe in fairy tales. But it’s not. Fairy tales in business end in failure, lost reputation and loss of money.

One of the truths I’ve learned in my consulting career is that any business can grow and that any business can fall apart due to human error.

I myself had several unsuccessful businesses, and as a consultant I have seen it many times that you create a business and think that now everything will go well. The business will develop, it will grow and grow, then the business reaches a certain level, and then the owner becomes uninterested in developing this business. At some point, I myself became not interested in doing a particular business.

I just grew out of this business. I had a case when we created a business with a partner. The business was small, brought, as they say, on bread and butter, but I wanted something even more. And I looked for new opportunities, studied and moved forward. And my partner remained at the same level, the level of self-employment – to himself and the leader and employee and supplier and everything, everything, everything. And at some point I moved on and our paths diverged. Because further partnership would not bring joy to anyone: neither me nor him. Fortunately, we were able to part well and still remain good friends.

And it often happens that people cannot part in a good way, and most often this happens because of money. Because of the inability to look at the situation from the outside, because of the desire to be right and not the desire to look at the situation through the eyes of a partner. Disputes are the wildest, a couple of times it almost came to assault.

And if you look at it, the reason is that at the time of the conflict, the parties have no desire to find common ground and remember what was good.

The problem of parting in business must be solved in the same way as in family life – either to involve intermediaries or to conclude an agreement (almost marriage) at the very beginning.

By concluding an agreement, which spells out the basic conditions for the operation of the business and exit from the business, you can significantly reduce the time of parting (if this happens).

It is imperative to negotiate at the very first moment of creating a business, when you are still in euphoria. Then you can painlessly discuss how you will manage the business and how you will exit the business. And with what money will you exit the business.

At the link you will find 20 points that you need to discuss with your partner in order to draw up a business management agreement yourself.