Business Partnership, Setting Boundaries, Splitting 50/50, What If We Broke Up?

A-Team (Alex & Andra)

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ABOUT THE EPISODE 🤔
↳ I WILL NEVER get another business partner! 🤬
(An unwavering decision that Alex made 6–7 years ago after 2 failed partnerships)

I learned that even with the best intentions from all parties, resentment can (and will) build—it's almost guaranteed. 🫱❌🫲

This happens for a myriad of reasons:
↳ 🥇 If you have an “ideas person” vs “executer”, the executor will quickly feel like workload is falling solely on them (unless there's no sales coming in, then the reverse happens).
↳ 🥈 You can have different visions for the business—do you scale at all costs or keep it a lean lifestyle business?
↳ 🥉 One person becomes obsessed with work—working 24/7—while the other may want more work-life balance, especially if they have a family.

This happen with bands all the time, they make amazing music while together, but someone always feels like they are the cog to success, so they break it off (due to resentment), only to learn that maybe it was the group. Heck, it even happened to Ben & Jerry's!

The reason is, there's just so many opportunities for disagreements to arise, and rarely does it make sense to truly put in the time and work to flesh out every single disagreement as it goes directly against moving quickly.

What might seem fair at the start (a 50/50 partnership), will be the first point of resentment to grow as how does one assign such expectations and value before ever working together. Not to mention, 50/50 implies equal power, and thus results often in having 2 captains steering the ship. It simply won't end well. (In-fact, I hear that's actually what happened with the Titanic).

I had two failed business partnerships, talked to everyone imaginable about if it could work (even asking @theChrisDo back in the day on a live stream—he's actually who gave me the Ben & Jerry's example 😂) and after years of debating, the consensus was in—never again. ✅

Then as the saying goes: when you least expect it—someone enters your life and changes everything you thought you knew. (Andra Vomir 👋😅)

BUT there is no romanticizing it: ANY successful business partnership takes hundreds, if not thousands of hours of conversation: negotiation of ideas, working through conflict, expectations, power dynamics, heck, even a contingency plan if all goes to 💩 (e.g. disillusion agreement).

This episode is a 1-hour conversation that condenses 3-years of learnings that came from working together as business partners. We share the early discussions that led us to become business partners, splitting the business 50/50 (spoiler: it was INCREDIBLY hard for me and we're STILL working through what exactly that looks like with legacy customers), setting boundaries, and ultimately figuring out the best way to work together.
What's it like working with your spouse? In this episode, we discuss our different routines, setting boundaries, income splits and the role of communication in our personal and professional relationship.

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Podcast hosted on Transistor (efficient.link/r/transistor)