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Business News/ Opinion / Choose partners with care, and work at the relationship
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Choose partners with care, and work at the relationship

Choose partners with care, and work at the relationship

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As a start-up entrepreneur, managing your relationship with your business partner is one of the most important areas and yet, one you are most likely to ignore. You frequently take your partners for granted.

Remember, a partnership split is an extremely traumatic experience and can be a serious setback for the business. Why do splits happen and what can be done to prevent them? Before starting out, you need to examine why you need a partner in the first place. Most young entrepreneurs do a start-up with a friend or a colleague or a classmate.

Also Read Sanjeev Bikhchandani’s earlier columns

It is usually not a rational selection of a partner, but simply because you feel a sense of bonding and camaraderie, the chemistry seems right, and you have discussed the idea together. Hence you feel a certain joint ownership of the idea.

Young entrepreneurs may not acknowledge this, but most often, you have an emotional and a social need for a comrade-in-arms since you are taking a risk and feel somewhat apprehensive of going alone. And the most natural thing for friends and classmates to do in such a situation is to divide the stock equally among the partners without questioning who is bringing what kind of value to the table.

Of course, there are other, more tangible benefits to starting a business with a partner. You get width and depth in the management team without paying a salary. You are able to pool your meagre capital and share your ideas. You have someone to talk to and you are able to keep each other’s spirits up in difficult times. You may even be bringing complementary skills to the table. You share the work and the risk. And, of course, you share the rewards and recognition.

Partnerships are natural. People start businesses with others because they feel a need to do so. It becomes important, therefore, to ensure that you are selecting the right partner to minimize chances of a future split. Most entrepreneurs do business with people they know, trust and instinctively like.

Before starting a business with a partner, you need to ask some hard questions. Do you have similar values? Do you share the same vision, passion and aspirations for the business? Do you have the same commitment to the business? Will you both quit your jobs and devote full time to the business and stick it out without a salary for a couple of years?

Do you have a similar work ethic? Will both of you be willing to work 24x7, if required? How much capital will each of you invest in the business? Are both of you equally competent? Do you bring complementary skills and experience to the business? What will your roles be? Who will be the chief executive? Will investors trust each of the partners equally? Do you have similar views on how wealth would be shared with employees and how customers and vendors should be treated? Will you agree on the kind of risks that are reasonable to take?

When the business makes a profit, would you agree on the utilization of the profit? Most importantly, are both of you good listeners and accommodative of each other’s views, needs and aspirations?

This may seem like complicating a simple decision when you are starting out. However, most partnership splits have their roots in inappropriate selection of a partner. And you don’t want to learn this the hard way many years later.

Having said that, selection of the right partner does not alone guarantee that the partnership will endure in the long run. Right selection is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.

You need to continuously work on your relationship with your partner.

Communicate continuously, keep each other fully informed, spend time together, give each other candid feedback, listen a lot and give each other enough space. It’s like marriage.

The author is co-founder and chief executive officer, InfoEdge (India) Ltd, which runs the Web portal Naukri.com. He writes a monthly column on careers and enterprise.

Respond to this column at onthejob@livemint.com

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Published: 28 Oct 2009, 10:57 PM IST
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