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Eric's Podcast
Welcome to Eric's Podcast – a journey through faith, life, and the lessons that shape us. Join Eric as he shares personal stories, reflections, shares insights that inspire hope and encourages. Whether you're navigating life's challenges or seeking motivation this podcast offers a blend of authenticity, inspiration, and thought-provoking conversations.
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Eric's Podcast
S2 #7 Crafting Successful Business Partnerships: Mastering Collaboration, Roles, and Decision-Making
Choosing the right business partner can be as complex as navigating a marriage, but what if you could ensure your partnership thrives like a well-tuned orchestra? In our latest episode, we promise to equip you with the essential tools to make this happen. Together, we'll unravel the art of forming a successful business partnership, essential for avoiding common pitfalls such as unequal workload distribution and mismatched expectations. I'll share personal anecdotes from my own journey as a programmer, shedding light on when it might be more strategic to fly solo. Through thoughtful questions and considerations, we aim to prepare you for a seamless collaboration, ensuring mutual respect and effective communication reign supreme.
Defining roles and decision-making in a partnership can feel like walking a tightrope, but mastering this balance is key to success. Our discussion highlights the importance of outlining roles, respecting each other's expertise, and ensuring decisions are rooted in experience rather than mere logic. We'll explore how respecting a CEO's decision-making authority, while valuing all partners' input, can create an environment of cooperation and respect. By the end of this episode, you'll gain a clear understanding of the criteria for selecting a partner who brings valuable skills, experience, and a genuine willingness to contribute. Join us to learn how to navigate the complexities of business partnerships and lay the groundwork for a prosperous collaboration.
Eric's Podcast.
Ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to another episode of the Eric's podcast. I'm your host, eric. Today we're going to be discussing whether or not you should choose a business partner and what are the pros and cons and my own experience and some questions maybe to ask yourself if you are considering bringing someone on or multiple people on to be to share a project, to work with you, to go on a business journey with. There are a lot of things to consider and a lot of things that you should think about and ask yourself. The number, I would say a really big question would be do you get along well with, maybe, the person you're thinking of? Because a business partner is just like in your relationship. It's kind of like a marriage, but the state of well it kind of depends on what type of person you are. But just like any marriage, you have to figure out ways to reconcile, to get along, to respect each other's opinions and figure out way. I mean, it's a two-way street but you have to figure out ways to when you disagree. Is this a business-breaking thing? Or can you see far enough down the road that there will be enough time to pivot back because you respected the person's opinion? You know that it's probably not going to work, based off your own experience. But to prove to the partner that it's not going to work, you decide, ok, sure, we'll try that out and we'll do that anyway. Okay, sure, we'll try that out and we'll do that anyway. And then, of course, it doesn't work a month later and you can come back around and come back to the original, say that you were going for I would say, um, so that's, that's probably your biggest thing. Another huge thing, big thing you want to think about is what are the talent or the experience that you're, that you both are bringing to the table for whatever the project is, because you don't want a partner that is taking 50 of the project of the business, that doesn't know how to do anything related to what the thing is. So, and if you know how to do the whole thing, the question should be well, why don't you just do it yourself, or hire someone that you can, that can do parts of it, instead of going completely into like an equity where you're sharing the whole thing, um, you can just do something else.
Speaker 1:The best partnership is when you both are around, equals in terms of experience, but are also equals in experience for the project itself. Um, an example would be like say you have, so you say you want to write a book. For example, a good partner relation type saying would be if both sides have written and published a book or have written multiple things. Primarily, it would be great if both sides have actually published, because that's an entire process you have to go through and there's a whole business aspect to it. It's not just writing, um. So that would be a great kind of relationship there, because you both can share all the responsibilities of what goes into the entire whole process of publishing a book. Now, a partnership where maybe one of you have written and published a whole book but the other has written a lot of things and has written a book but hasn't published it, that's still decent because that's still more than 50% of the whole project. So both of you will still be able to go off of each other and nobody is necessarily dragging anyone down or lagging behind or not contributing the same and trying to learn as you go along.
Speaker 1:Let's see a bad partnership one that one side is going to feel like they're doing all the work is one where, let's say, both of you want to write a book, and so you get together. One of you has fully published everything, and then the other one has never done anything. Maybe the other one has written some blog posts or something like that, but never has committed to a full book say 20 chapters or so and has no experience in the business side, has no experience in publishing it. That person to partner with that person that's going to be. You're going to find yourself feeling like you're doing most of the work the whole time and there's going to be this measuring type thing. So that's when you really want to consider, um, like you want to consider, the people that you're actually giving up equity for. So in that case, what you want to do is you don to want to give a 50 50 equity because you're going to be doing most of the work the entire time and the other person might contribute. You know, maybe might contribute a quarter of the book, might be the editor, maybe, but there's, those are just some things that you want to ask yourself.
Speaker 1:Another thing, too, is great friends are not always going to be good business partners. That's something that is just the way it goes. You might have a really great relationship with somebody, um, and then you go into business with them and you don't realize how zeroed in they're on this one particular thing and they're not willing to change around that um, because you know best best friends and everything. We don't always we have good experiences with each other, but we don't. We're not living necessarily together and we usually have our own finances. Uh, we're managing that ourselves, whereas with the business and your partners, you're managing those together and you're considering those at the same time. And that's where that relationship aspect, um, can come into play. Um, another thing too is you should ask yourself do I like, how big is this project? Is this a 10 year long thing or is this something I could just do right now, in a year?
Speaker 1:I know for me, being a programmer, um and programming since I was 13, I know that I could create a very you know, not the, not not a video game with a ton of levels, but I could create a one level mobile game in less than a week and have it published on the app store and ready to be downloaded all within a little over a week for the publishing part, depending on the stores. But I know I can do that. I know I can do that because I have done it, but I also know how. I know how the tools work. I know how. I know exactly where to go. I my brain, I got the logic and everything is the programming part of it all mapped out already.
Speaker 1:All I need to do is figure out, come up with an idea that I want to do and then decide is that the time that I want to do? I want to spend a week of my life doing that. Would I hire a? Would I get in a partnership with somebody to do that, when I could just do it myself? No, I wouldn't, because I would see that as being something that would slow me down, unless the person had a design like a mobile app design background or something like that, and they were really excited about it and they wanted to contribute. In that case, what I would do is that goes back to the scenario that person can contribute to the actual project. It's not a partner that maybe came up with the idea, because you can come up with ideas. That doesn't mean you know how to execute them. So you want a partner that can come and help you actually execute the task.
Speaker 1:If your thing is like super high in a in electronical, then you might need you want to bring in people that are very skilled electronics, not somebody who you know makes youtube videos although you do have to have some skill there, I suppose, but anyway. So that's something else you have to consider. If you, let's say, you don't know anything, let's say you're on the opposite side and if you want to start a company, or maybe you want to build a product or something and you don't know how to do it, you need to ask yourself well, first you need to research and find out everything you can about what would it take to actually build it, design it, all of that stuff. Because then you're going to realize the types of people you're going to need to bring in, which is obvious, the people you're going to need to bring in, which is obvious. But you're also going to figure out maybe you do have some area of expertise in that, in being able to move that, or maybe it's just a skill you want you should learn. You know everything is you're people able to learn pretty much anything now on youtube and other places? Um, and if you do want to, let's say, build a video game, well then first thing you do, the first thing I would do would be download the unreal engine. It's free. You can publish a game on there, uh, for free I don't remember their exact commissions, but it's after a certain amount and there are tons of really good Unreal Engine tutorials on how to use the visual scripting that they have in there, and you could probably learn everything you needed if you buckled down in six months At least, that's how long it took me, because I was building a game at the same time as I was learning how to use it. Um, and then at that point, what you could do is you could still go to, you could bring on a partner at that point that maybe knows a bunch of programming like me, but, uh, you have already taken the time to learn a piece of the puzzle so you can actually contribute and be a good partner, to actually be able to contribute and build something together.
Speaker 1:Now, obviously, if you're the ones, if you're paying for it, if you're hiring someone to do it, that's a little different than a partnership. A partnership, to me, is where nobody is getting paid, but everyone's on board and everyone's contributing to try to make whatever the thing is a reality. When you go and pay somebody, that person not is not a partner. That person is someone that you've hired to do a job, to do a task they are, they are working for you, it's not the same, and so, um, they are going to put in how much you pay them to do. That's just the way it is, whereas a partner is going to keep putting in effort and time and work until the project is completed and off the ground and is going, or until you both mutually decide to end the project, maybe, or the person wants to exit and go do something else. They will hopefully give you, be considerate and actually tell you hey, I can't work on this anymore.
Speaker 1:So that's my opinion on a lot of on whether or not you should do you should find a partner or not find a partner. There's pros and cons. At the end of the day, really, you should think of it as kind of a time thing. Having a business partner should make the project time-wise be less in terms of completion, not longer, and it's hard to know how long something's going to be if you've never done it before. I get that. That's why you have to do some research in whatever the thing is and really figure out how am I going to go about this, and the thing is, there's Facebook groups, there are communities. There are a lot of cool places that you can go to just network and ask people questions. What you can do, too, is go to some networking events. There are a lot of free ones. Go to some networking events and just talk to other entrepreneurs, other people maybe they have a business partner, maybe they don't and talk to them about it and ask them hey, how's it working out for you? How do you guys like be specific? Because a lot of the time, you're going to get very broad answers like oh yeah, we, we, we just work things out, which is not very useful.
Speaker 1:Um, you also, when you do form a partnership, you have to make sure you define roles Very important. You need to know who's the one who's running the company, who's running the show, and then your partners should respect the role that you are the CEO. Everyone should respect that. You're the one who's, at the end of the day, calling the shots. If your partner is a CEO, then you need to respect their position. That does not mean that they shouldn't respect your logic or suggestions or anything like that. That's just. I mean that's common sense in the day. Everyone should be respecting each other and what their opinion is. But when it comes to the decision-making, that's important, that that stuff is laid out on paper. So if there's ever any type of dispute or anything, then you can bring it up and be like listen, I'm the CEO, I made the decision. Then you can bring it up and be like listen, I'm the ceo, I made the decision. Um, that's just. You know what happened. And then this also comes down to equity stance too. So if you, if everyone, is equal, then there is going to be a vote, obviously, and the vote can be who is going to be the ceo, who's going to be the one in charge to run, and you can vote and do all that.
Speaker 1:If, say, you hold the majority ownership and the other partners don't, well, there still should be a level of respect, and just because somebody doesn't have as much stake, let's say, into the project as you does not mean that you shouldn't respect them, because they might be bringing something to the table that you might not have as much experience in. And if they don't have experience in what they're giving an opinion of, that is where you have to take into account, okay, has who has the most experience in this thing that we're talking about. Therefore, that person should hold more weight in terms of because they're actually coming from real experience, versus an opinion that's over here that isn't based off of real experience. It's based off of kind of a logical, uh way of thought in a and not grounded in a factual um, this is what I did and this is what worked for me, type of thing. So that's important. That's based off. That's uh, just decision making and that's something that we all need to. Um, as you know, business owners and everything or wherever they're managing a project or not uh, we should all keep that in mind.
Speaker 1:I know, for me, made the mistake many times uh, did not listen to, um, people that did have more experience than me in the actual thing and instead I went with what I logically thought was the right move, turned out not to be and the business failed. In some ways. There were I wouldn't say the entire business failed because of the bad decisions, because I was able to, we were able to come back and reverse. But that's just important, that you need to make sure that you're making your decisions if you can make them off of a factual thing and not necessarily just purely logical, because sometimes, in order to make those logical decisions, you have to have all the information. And all the information usually comes from a factual place where you've already done it before, comes from a factual place where you've already done it before. So if you don't have all that information, it's really hard to make the right decision just because you don't have all the information yet. That's why doing research, that's why reading books, that's why actually going out and doing it, trying to do it, is so much better than listening to people who've never done it before and are not necessarily going after what you're going after anyway.
Speaker 1:Um. So whether you should choose a partner to work with or not as a question that I think summarizing this is based off of one time how long do you think the thing is going to take and do you have the time to commit everything to that? If you don't, then maybe it's worth bringing on a partner. But two, the partner needs to bring something, some skill uh, factual I've done this before to the table, otherwise you're going to end up doing all the work and it's going to be like you don't have a partner anyway. And then I would say three would be um, you have to make sure you can get along with the person. That's just it, because you're going to be sharing that can get along with the person. That's just it, because you're going to be sharing that length of time with that person and you're going to learn a lot about that person in that length of time, unless it's like a week or something, it's just a fun project.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, okay, well, thanks for listening. I hope this was somewhat helpful and if you have any questions and want me to dive into some particular topic even more, let me know and we will talk about that. I know this is a shorter episode, but I wanted to be straight to the point. Didn't want to waste your time. Thanks for listening and you guys have a good one.
