Chad Silverstein reflects on his personal experiences with business partnerships, noting they can be rewarding but often hard to sustain. He advises prospective partners to anticipate conflict, build foresight, and formalize expectations with agreements (buy-sell, majority-control arrangements, phantom stock or equity-like mechanisms). He emphasizes choosing partners carefully, planning exit mechanics up front, and now recommends using AI (e.g., ChatGPT) to draft documents before attorney review to save costs. The piece mixes anecdotes (partnerships that remained friendly, ones that ended badly) with concrete structural recommendations.
Chapters
You know, partnerships are a funny thing. They're hard, and you're either a partner person or you're not. I was definitely a partner person. I think I'm a great partner for somebody. I think now where I am in my career, I like being by myself and being more of a solo entrepreneur, and you just have to know what you're getting yourself into. I always tell people who ask me about partnerships, I say, if you don't think you're going to be with this person for the rest of your life, which you won't be. You won't be. If you're in business with someone, then you have to kind of be able to have the force, the fourth, the foresight, to be able to look out and say, you know what? I want to be in a. In a conflict with this person. Because it very well could be that if you grow a business with someone, you could have a problem if you could. If you're going to go break up. And that's why having, you know, agreements up front and being very diligent about them is really important. Although, again, they don't solve every problem. But I was really blessed with my first partner. We kept a very strong relationship. We don't talk today, but if I saw him today, we would give each other a big hug, and it would be like best friends, and we would reminisce and we would laugh and we would. And we would just, you know, we would just really enjoy being with each other. But, you know, I think there's just not much that we have to talk about right now. Even though we were so close because we were always in business together. Another partnership of mine, I'm really close with the person I was in business with, and we still kind of talk on a weekly basis. So I think there's all kinds of different partnerships. And my other partnership, we had a conflict, and I don't talk to her anymore. And so, you know, I've kind of experienced it all. And I think, you know, I think that you have to kind of experience a partnership to know what it is that you like or don't like. But if you don't have experience and you have to go into a situation with a partnership, you better think carefully and choose wisely, because once you get in bed with a partner, it's really hard to untangle that. And so I always recommend, people can get really creative. You know, someone's got to be in control. Someone's got to be the one who gets the majority, makes the decisions. There are no equal partnerships. And I think overall, you know, you have to have your, your, your due diligence in regards to a buy sell agreement or, you know, some sort of, maybe a stock, you know, phantom stock opportunity where someone can own equity, but not necessarily be an owner in the company. There's lots of creative ways to kind of set up a partnership. And now that we have ChatGPT, you can go on and you can ask ChatGPT to teach you about all the different ways to structure a partnership. And it's going to save you thousands of dollars that you don't have to waste with an attorney. And you can pretty much do all your documents and do all your contracts with AI and then take it to an attorney to review and spend a lot less money and get much better advice.
