Brian at The Entrepreneurial Endeavor has a great post about partnering with friends that I missed last week while without the internet. He goes into some details about what you should consider when partnering with a friend on a business venture and all of it is very true.
He puts a great insight into his ideas through his personal experiences. I completely agree with everything he noted and would also add that a partnership agreement is something that should be considered if not required for the partnership to lay out everything Brian mentions including the roles of the partners and the compensation for each of you. This is something that my self and a partner and good friend have started putting together for our business venture. I will share more about it later on once completed and give you some more ideas on writing an effective and one equal to both parties.
But for now, enjoy Brian’s post on partnering with friends.
Very true. The ideal scenario is to find a partner that you can become friends with (not the other way around). All my partners were not friends previously for the most part now are some of my closest friends.
The easiest thing is to make sure you draft a ‘shotgun agreement’. Essentially you agree that if someone wants to leave or kick the other person out they need to make an offer. Say your partner wants to kick you out, and he offers to buy you out for 15k. You have the option of either saying yes and he pays you 15,000 and you leave, or you buy him out for 15,000. It prevents anyone from getting a bad deal and makes it known from the get go that getting out isn’t going to be an easy endeavor….it’s a marriage for all intensive purposes.