How to Choose a Business Partner

One of the most important decisions a business person can make is choosing a business partner. This decision has so many repercussions that you can’t even think about all of them in advance.

It’s a financial decision first because you need to use your resources together, but it’s also about organizing the day to day activities.

In the end, it’s also a personal decision that you need to deal with which is something to consider before jumping into it. It’s important to try to find out as much as you can about the person before making the call.

Trust

You need to trust the person that you plan to start the business with. A business is a complicated machine and a lot of people are dependent on it, not just your employees or creditors.

It’s a burden that a lot of people don’t want to deal with even though it’s lucrative to do so.

The person you plan to work with needs to be someone you can trust with your money and with these complicated and long-term obligations.

They are difficult to find because you need to know the person very well and to work with them in a variety of different circumstances.

Vision

Businesses tend to grow and change pretty fast. When they do, you need to change your plans, your managerial system and often your finances.

That overall vision of what your business should be in a matter of months or even years is something you need to share with your business partner.

There’s one simple way to make sure that this is the case – talk to them. Go into every detail and talk about the possibility of your business losing money, as well growing beyond your abilities at the time.

Background

Regardless of how well you know the person, you should try to find out everything you can about their past before you go into starting a business.

Begin by asking them and being open about it. However, you need to go further than that and get a police clearance certificate that will show you if they’ve been convicted of a crime, including those that are traffic-related.

You should also try to learn about their financial history. That’s a good way to know if your potential partner is someone you can trust.

Responsibilities

When the business is just getting started, the owners are doing most of the work and their managerial duties usually grow out of this initial stage.

That means that you need to divide responsibilities in a way that covers all that you need to do, but that suits your interest at the same time.

In an ideal situation, you and your partner should have complementary sets of skills that will work great together.

This is best dealt with by actually making a list and deciding on who will do what.

Evaluation

Everyone wants to believe that they could start a business and that it would exist for years to come.

However, this isn’t the case for many businesses since most of them fail within the first year. It’s best to have an evaluation system in place that will check how well your partnership is working and what can be changed about it.

You should set clear goals that you can review and decide the future of your partnership based on the results of that review.

That way you can quit before things become too complicated and get beyond your control.

A business partner needs to be someone that you trust and who complements your skills.

A person like this is much harder to find than it might seem and you need to have a few trial runs to be sure of your decision.