Once in your life you are given the opportunity to start a business. Yes, you might have an amount spared to invest in an entrepreneurship. But you are afraid you don’t have the necessary skills and finances to make it in the business world. Eureka! Your best friend whom you know quite well who owns a business (and is successful) comes to mind and answers your fears and doubts.
Yet, you are in a haze to start a business with your friend? Perhaps, you are mulling over in your mind if things won’t work out your friendship will be shattered. Still, you know that when it comes to fiscal matters you two totally have the same point of view. Well, that’s a good sign! But partnering with your best friend in a business venture is an entirely different picture. Below are some favorable and unfavorable reasons why you must consider your friend to be a business partner:
- Working and sharing of bills.
Working along with a friend can be fun. Fun is doubled because bills are split in two.
- Flexibility in running the business.
Your friend or partner might have the knowledge and skills in administering a business that you don’t have. Plus, one of you might have the ample time to run the business. Either way if your strengths and weaknesses complement each other, it means you both can compromise. It’s a give and take relationship but in this sense you are both giving and taking what’s good for your business.
- Mutual and shared responsibility.
Each partner is almost accountable for his or her own decisions and actions, the decisions and actions of the other partner, and the actions of any of your employees.
- Conscientious fiduciary duty.
You decide and act for the benefit of someone else or the benefit of many even while putting yours secondary. Let’s say, you run a flower shop with a partner and an amazing deal comes your way to open another shop without your partner, your fiduciary duty means that you either have to forego the opportunity or share it with your partner.
- Having a business partner can provide skills you don’t have, money and connections.
- Sharing of workload, financial burden and creative ideas.
As the old adage says, “two heads are better than one.”
- Disagreements about minor and major issues.
Having a friend as a business partner is supposed to be fun, but if you don’t want to ruin that by working closely with someone who irritates you then you might as well run your own business now rather than later on buying out your partner because you realized you basically disagreed about everything.
It is an excellent idea for any new business partnership to do a trial period first. Make a project or two together and if you coordinated well and worked harmoniously, your styles mesh. If so, good luck to your business partnership. If not, it’s a hard lesson learned and to be avoided.
