A gentleman named Craig called sounding very distraught because his business partners are having a meltdown. After 12 years of getting along in a successful business, they were shocked because they lost their biggest customer. None of them saw it coming. Worse still, the four partners, usually friends, blame each other, yell at each other, and behave in ways that until now were totally alien to this “ideal partnership.” He had heard that I rescued trade associations and he implored me to rescue his.
I spent a day at the site, interviewing each one separately and in the afternoon I brought them together as a team. Each one shared with me and then with each other their complaints, concerns and resentments towards the other partners that they kept hidden all these years. There was a basic trust and respect between them, but the minor hurts and annoyances over the years had been getting worse. As a result, they gradually avoided regular meetings to discuss any topic. Losing their most important customer was the final straw that made it impossible to keep quiet.
The client was lost without anyone noticing the signs that he was considering leaving. Who was responsible? Nobody thought it was himself and with great conviction he blamed others.
There are a number of advantages to having a partner in your business. One of them is that the work is divided according to the strengths of each partner. It’s great to be able to tap into someone else’s creativity, knowledge, and skills. It’s a relief to have someone else working in an area that you don’t enjoy, but all too often partners interpret it as not having to know anything about the other areas, especially when they trust each other’s skills and work ethic. It is a big mistake to adopt that attitude.
This is what Tom, Craig, Lenny and Ray (not their real names) had done. Each of them had their own area of expertise and was responsible for managing it: finance and IT, marketing, inventory and fulfillment, and customer and employee relations. They had more than 40 employees divided among their departments.
All partners must be “informed” on all areas of the business, including project status, milestones, key vendors, team coordination and budgets, and so on. This has nothing to do with not trusting your partner’s experience. Too often, I’ve seen business partners discover that they don’t know anything about the company’s marketing strategy, hiring processes, and even cash flow because it is the “responsibility” of another partner. They find out when something catastrophic happens.
Not only is everyone responsible for knowing all areas of their business, but without coordination and discussion between departments, the business could not function optimally. And the bottom line, even with the big customer on board, is at least not as solid as it could be. All partners are responsible for knowing what is happening in all departments, actively evaluating, exchanging ideas and making decisions that affect the whole.
My rescue plan was successfully concluded with the reinstatement of regularly scheduled meetings where open communication would always prevail. Annoyances, misunderstandings, and disagreements would be raised the moment they occurred, avoiding the bitterness that leads to disastrous results.
In order for the business to prosper, each partner made a commitment to be responsible for the big picture, in addition to their particular area of responsibility. Blaming others was no longer an acceptable part of their culture.