Finding the Right Partner

Or how to start a business with a friend

Rumen Manev
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read
Photo by Daniel Cheung

Throughout your life you’ll hear a ton of advice from a lot of people. Most of it will probably come from your parents. One of the most frequently recurring themes will be “don’t make business with your friends”.

Starting your own company with a friend looks like a good idea from afar. You already know what to expect — you know all your strengths and weaknesses and even if you get into a fight you know everything will be fine after half an hour.

So what’s up with all the warnings, mom and dad?

It’s not just them. There’s countless stories of good friends doing business together, only to get into a fight a year later, break up everything and never speak to each other again. You don’t want this to happen. Luckily, there’s also a few precautions you can take to ensure that it never comes to this.

And you’ve already taken the first step.

Start small

It’s always a good idea to do a test run before diving in the deep end. You may know your friend when you’re chatting over a beer or going on a trip together, but there’s a whole different side to people when they’re doing serious work.

In order to get a first impression of this, think of a small project you can work on together, before actually starting your business. It could be a small side project or a weekend hackathon. Something with a deadline that will help you see how your friend behaves when confronted with a deadline. Do they stress too much? Do they have a good sense of priorities? Are they committed to push through until the end?

You can also use this an opportunity to showcase your personal work ethics. Prove that you’re a good match, before going all in and realising it doesn’t work 6 months into your big project.

Define roles

When you do business with a friend it’s easy to do things less formally. After all, you both know what each of you are good at, maybe you even understand each other without explicitly saying things out loud — you don’t feel like there should be any rules to make things stiff and corporate-y.

This is breeding grounds for lack of responsibility and unnecessary blaming.

If you define your roles early on, each one of the founding team will know exactly what they’re responsible for and others won’t have to deal with the difficult situation of enforcing anyone’s duties. The system of roles you’ll create will do that instead.

Moreover, it’ll help you know exactly what to focus on, knowing that nobody else will interfere with your role’s duties. If someone does, you’ll have the full right to let them know not to.

Good friends, same interests?

The reason you and your co-founder are good friends is because you have a lot of things in common. You probably even teamed up, because you’re interested in the same things, which gives you a common vision for your product. That’s great, however, it also means you lack the same things when it come to skills, knowledge and personal qualities.

When considering to start a business with a friend make sure you have enough differences to supplement each others’ gaps. Either that, or make sure the first people you hire will bring in some new skills and ideas.

Diversity is crucial when it comes to dealing with problems and finding out of the box solutions.

Is this a democracy?

This is again something you’ve heard before. “Business is not a democracy”. It’s also where the role division helps. Not everything has to be up for debate.

Of course, important things that require all founders to give their consent should be discussed together, but sometimes it makes more sense to take operational decisions alone for the sake of moving quickly and pushing things forward.

The exact decisions that should involve all founder is something individual to every organisation and will have to be determined early on, so there are no unpleasant surprises.

Finally, the rewards of working on something you’re passionate about with someone you genuinely like far outweigh the occasional arguments and risk of throat grabbing.

But do not forget to spend time with your cofounder /friend the way you used to before starting a venture together. Just hanging out and not thinking about business. Otherwise your only topics will be financial statements, inventory inaccuracies and vendor issues and this will definitely bore the rest of your mates.

Thanks for reading! When was the last time you rode your bike or went for a run? Check our Website or follow us on Instagram for some outdoor inspiration.

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Performance Apparel and Everything that Comes with it.

Rumen Manev

Written by

Helping companies create beautiful products people love using @ melewi.net

Ride & Run

Performance Apparel and Everything that Comes with it.

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