Working with friends in Business can be an amazing experience and a real challenge at the same time. Developing business partnership with close friends can be full of complications. It seems logical to start business with a close friend, but many people think that this will ruin their friendship.
Challenges are likely to come along the way while building any relationship and starting a business will put the relationship at risk. One of the greatest gifts in life is to be surrounded by incredible friends. An even greater gift is to be able to not only play hard with your friends, but also work hard.
Before partnering with your friend, you need to consider the good, the bad and the ugly side before beginning.
Here are some of the good characteristics to consider:
- Integrity: This is the key characteristic before heading to a business with your close friend. If your partner/friend lacks integrity, it’s risky to work with them.
- Serious Work Ethics: Starting your own business is challenging and stressful and hence, you need to consider someone with strong work ethics. One of the most common situations is one person feels they are handling all the work while the other one is not putting in the efforts.
- Persistent Nature: Large number of startups fail due to lack of persistence. You need to partner with someone who remains supportive and dedicated in the tough and challenging times.
The above characteristics can be considered as the basis of screening whether to start with the partnership journey or not.
Here are some of the Bad characteristics to consider:
- Ego Issues: The ‘big ego’ of your friend can be humorous when you are in friendship zone, but lead to serious issues while working as business partners. You probably do not need a person that is full of overconfidence and pride that they know everything.
- Over Passionate: Passion is just passion. You must have diligence, and a well researched plan or your results will end up in disaster. A little passion is good and necessary as long as it is in line with the other key elements.
- The Talker: If your partner is talkative but does not work accordingly, this can be unproductive for your business. Actions are better than the great ideas. Your partner can be good at sales with talking skills but won’t turn out to be a great business partner.
And finally the ugly side:
Planning to do a business together can ruin your relationship– its true! Many friends start a venture together with great intentions and strong friendship but not all stay intact with their relationships.
Starting a business with your friend is not a decision to be made lightly. You need to give it deep thought as you will be spending more time with your business partner than with your family.
How to Turn a Friendship into a Successful Business Partnership? Listen to this episode of BIG BOLD YOU with Jennie Block/Lyndzie Birch on Youtube
Listen to more inspirational videos or shows hosted by Gens Johnson, Female Motivational Speaker TX for your self-development and mindset success here: https://gensJohnson.com/Big-Bold-You
