I’ve been involved in entrepreneurial endeavors now for many years. Doing pretty much anything I could so that I could make money. The first thing that remember that went well was selling golf balls. As a 7th grader I would go through the hedge-rows of local golf courses finding golf balls with my friend Grant. We would then wash the golfballs, and then sit on the edge of the golf course property (which Grant’s family owned) and we would sell them back to the golfers for $.50 a ball. We did quite well for middle schoolers. We made a lot of money and caught an even greater amount of poison ivy.
I no longer sell golf balls, but I have done general IT consultative services for a lot of small businesses in the Syracuse area. I have recently stepped away from that and about a year and a half ago, I started developing a web service-based business. It was a side project and I just kept it in the back of my head and it never really came to anything. I would stay up night after night trying to program it. But it was difficult trying to do it because I was the only one doing it and I never wanted to speak with anyone about it. I never had the chance to speak with anyone about it because I took it on for myself and was too protective to speak with anyone about it.
Then earlier last semester, I started speaking with a friend about my idea(s). He started to get interested in them, so we then started talking about his ideas. Long story short, we got another friend involved and now we have several of these side projects under development, have 3-4 websites under development (for external clients), and are in the middle of locking in strategic partnerships with major college entreprenurial blogs (e.g. writing for them and making them better). Not bad for a partnership of only 3-4 months. I only wished that I had done this sooner.
You always hear that you should never go into business with a partner. You especially hear that you should never go into business with friends or family. I won’t tell you that it is or is not true. What I will tell you is that it is not true for me. If you do go into business with friends, then it is important to understand a couple of things.
- A red sky in the morning is a sailor’s warning. The same is true early in the development of a partnership. If things do not feel right in the beginning, you might as well just cut your losses before you get in too deep.
- Make sure that all partners have complementary skills. Tim Ferriss says it perfectly in his book, The Four Hour Work Week, that you should stop working on your weaknesses and start working exclusively on your strengths. They are your weaknesses for a reason, you obviously do not care about them that much. So find someone to partner up with whose strengths are your weaknesses, and you want to make sure that your strengths are the person’s weaknesses.
- Discuss every decision together. Again, that is every decision. The last thing that you want is for one of the partners to be unhappy with another early on; see number 1. After you start discussing things several times over, as a group, you will start to decide on what type of decisions can be made by who. This could be set at a certain type of monetary level, etc.
- Understand how each person works. We are all different from one another. I think that this society spends too much time trying to get everyone to be normal rather than celebrating our differences and learning how to work with them to make them your advantage. Be open and understanding with your partners to learn how to work with them.
So I would say again, don’t go at it alone. If you do go at it with some partners then please just put the above into consideration. This topic is going to lead to some future blog posts, but I believe that these above items are a great start.