Choose Your Business Partners & Colleagues Wisely

It's important, no matter who you're partnering with, from a business standpoint, from an employee standpoint, from a VA standpoint. Whoever you choose as your business partners and colleagues have to have the skills that you lack, if you want to be able to accomplish the things that you need to get done. David: Hi. Welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the topic of choosing business partners wisely. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: It's good to be here. David. I'm excited to talk about this because this is always an interesting topic. David: Yeah. When we think of business partners, we tend to think of people that we're actually going into business with. But there's really sort of a wider group of people that could potentially fit the bill here. So I think it's important to cover that as well. Kevin: The first one you spoke of, the actual business partner, business partner. I mean that can test a friendship. It can test a relationship, it tests all kinds of stuff. So in your experience, just from that side of things. What are the biggest mistakes that business people, entrepreneurs make when choosing a business partner? David: Well, I've made them over the years. My very first business partner was a guy that I worked with in another business. We decided we were going to start our own things. And so we just started out renting the same office space and splitting the rent on that sort of thing. Then we got involved in projects that required both of us working together. It didn't work out well. I started from the standpoint of we got along well, we interacted well. But neither of us took the time to consider our strengths and what each of us would bring to the table. A lot of times when people start working with friends or family, they think, "well, I know this person really well. I trust them." That's a good start. But unless you have similar visions for what the business is going to be, how you're going to get there, and who's going to do what, you can really end up with a lot of problems if that part of it doesn't work out. Kevin: Yeah. it can go downhill fast. It can definitely go downhill fast. So, in any business partnership, you know, you talked about the fact that there's varying types of them. What qualities do you feel matter most in a potential partner and which maybe are overrated? David: Well, I would say, starting out, you need to look at: Are our core values basically aligned? Do we sort of view the world in a similar way? Are we viewing business in a similar way? Do we view the relationship with our potential customers and clients in a similar way? Because if there's a disconnect there, then you're going to have problems starting with the very first decision. So I think that compatibility is very important. Making sure that everybody wants to go in the same direction, right? If you're in a rowboat, you want to make sure everybody's pulling in the same direction. That's extremely important. If you have complementary goals, essentially that's going to be a very important aspect of it. I think also, what is the expertise? What are you good at? What are they good at? If it's exactly the same things, you need to make sure it covers everything that has to be covered in a business. So, if I'm really good at generating ideas and you're really good at implementing those ideas, then that's going to work out well. If we're both great at generating ideas, but neither of us are great at implementation, we're going to struggle with that. And so you want to look at complementary skills. I think that is probably one of the most important aspects of it. You've got the same vision, but you have complementary skills. So that one or more of you are not doing things they hate, right? If you have to engage in a skill that you don't like, or if your business partner does, then it's not a good recipe. But if one of you is really good at idea generati...