Good Partner / Bad Partner

I can taste yo, yo, yo I can taste yo, yo, yo, yo I can taste. Hello and good evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Coming to you live in a few different places. We are on The Facebooks, on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and on Instagram. Hi, David Fryman. Welcome. This. This topic tonight is actually inspired by David Fryman, one of my. My current new business partners. I'm so excited to be partnering with him. We have so many updates coming your way, but, yeah, we're starting a second. Another. Not even a second, like a lost count of our businesses. Anyway, it's coming. It's coming. But tonight I want to talk about good partnership and bad partnership. Okay? So here. Here's what I see often happens with new business owners who are just getting started. They've never done this before. They maybe, you know, have just gone through a training program. Like this happens a lot in the coaching world. Okay. This happened to me. This happened for most of the people that I did my coaching training and certification with is that they start off on their own, and then they get squeamish and they get nervous, and then they think, okay, well, maybe I'm not good at this on my own. Like, I'm not getting any clients. This is really hard. Maybe I'd be better in a partnership. Maybe I should find a business partner and then we can do this together. Okay? I did this with my friend Kelsey. Dear friend to this day. We decided we were going to do the action incubator, which again, like, what the fuck is that? Neither one of us had our brand really dialed in for our own respective businesses. We both had very different ideas of what we wanted the partnership to look like and the program to be. And we built out a good chunk of the marketing stuff and the content, and we completely lost steam with it. It just didn't get off the ground. And that's really common with a lot of partnerships. Right? And the reason for that is that they're built out of insecurity. They are founded on a bedrock of, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing, you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Let's just not know what the fuck we're doing together, and then it'll be better, right? It's not necessarily how it goes. A good partnership should complement your competencies and your confidence, okay? It should create an added value to your client base. It should not be a band aid that you use to cover up when you're feeling Insecure and like you don't know what you're doing. There are a few reasons why a lot of partnerships for startups just do not work out. First and foremost. Like you, if you haven't figured out your personal or business brand yet as an individual, and then you're adding in another person who also hasn't figured out their personal or business brand as an individual, the two of you together, unless you are very conscious of creating a brand and you know exactly who you're marketing to and you know exactly the problem you're solving, you know exactly the desired outcome that people are going to be signing up with you for, you're just going to create confusion. Like there's just going to be like this murky water around whatever it is that you're launching. No one's gonna know really what they're gonna get from this. Right? Because maybe they're actually just interested in working with you. Maybe, maybe you've launched this thing, you're doing a webinar with your. Your partner and you've posted about it. People showed up because they were interested in you, and now there's this other person here, like, they weren't interested in that other person. You know, they were interested in you. You know, doing things in partnership is great. Like if you're. It's great if you need the training wheels, if you need that little boost, if you need to not be alone. It's great to learn how to put yourself out there, but it's rarely effective. I get really hesitant to work with clients who are in partnership like this. I've talked to several people in the last year who were starting a business, like a leadership training company or coaching company, trying to think. Yeah, mainly in those two spheres. And what ends up happening is like, one person has a stronger personality than the other. And when I say personality, like, they're more stubborn. Right. And so oftentimes I see, like, there's a slant to just agree with what that person says. And it doesn't necessarily mean that that person knows any better what should be done in the business. Right. It's just that they say things more confidently or way with a little more pizzazz, you know, like. And everything starts kind of veering that direction. It doesn't, it doesn't equal a successful business. It really doesn't. If you want to have a successful business, the key to that is knowing what the fuck you're doing. It's. It's understanding that you are running a business where you get to do the thing that you love. Not that you're just doing the thing that you love. You know, whenever people talk about starting a business with other people, David will. Will second this. I know he will. It started from a place of love and mutual respect and friendship, right? And so they assume that because they trust this person and like this person and that this person likes and trusts them back, that they don't need any of the foundational things set up, like contracts. Like, they don't need to kind of like, create their exit strategy before they even get started. As David and our friend Jesse Cohen and I are establishing our company Scaling Squirrels, which super excited for that name. He. You know, one of the first conversations we had about this is like, if one of us wants out, how do we do that? Like, and we have it in writing. In our. In our partnership agreements, we've laid out exactly how one of us can extricate ourselves from the business if we decide it's no longer a fit for us. You know, we've also decided, like, how long it'll take for our ownership in the business to vest. When you're starting a business with someone else, I know it's really hard to think about this stuff. It's kind of like getting a prenup. You know, talking about getting divorced from this person that you're just about to get married to kind of steals the thunder of the moment. But here's what it does. It makes making those decisions down the line a lot easier. It makes doing things correctly that honors and respects everyone a whole lot easier because you understand what everyone expects in respect to this division. David, Good fences make good neighbors. 100%. Yes. You know, it's not exciting and it's not sexy, but you want to be sure that you have a fair and equitable partnership set up and that you also have things set up that allow for you to renegotiate things if it gets uneven. Few things that I recommend for my clients when they are thinking about partnership is get really clear on who's going to be doing the selling and the marketing, right? Because. And how are you going to differentiate the payment structure? Right? So say you're. You're starting a coaching company with two people. Oftentimes one person will be better at sales and marketing than the other. That's just how it goes, right? And so that person will end up doing more marketing and more sales calls and a lot more of those kinds of activities and sign a hell of a lot more clients. So if you have one person who's doing that much more work and getting 80% of the clients. And you have the other person who's just not that good at it and so isn't doing as much work and isn't having that many sales calls. And, you know, so they're doing about 20% and they're getting paid 50. 50. That is going to create a whole lot of resentment, all right? And maybe that maybe there is a very clear division of activities. Maybe the person who's not doing the sales and marketing is doing a lot of the operations. Maybe they're doing other things within the business, and that's totally fine. You know, one of the things that we're designing in our partnership, you know, our trifecta, is, you know, I'm the salesperson. You know, that's just what I do. Right? And so I'll be doing a lot more of that. Now. David and Jesse will have other things that they will manage within our business that I won't have to touch. Right. Because my specialty is enrolling clients. Luna's yelling at me right now. Here. I'm going to. Luna, what is it? What is it? I'm showing everyone how messy the floor is. Yeah, showing on my phone. Luna, what is it? Huh? What do you want, Bubby? Are you upset? I know, I know. I'm going live. I'm going live right now. And then you get treats in a minute. I know. So it is past her bedtime. If you want to know a little bit about my life, it's basically around 8pm every single night, or it's past 8pm right now. This little girl decides that it's time for bed and makes me go to my room because she won't go to bed by herself anyway. She's going to start being an absolute terror. So I'm going to wrap this up really quick. Don't partner with people. Like, do not partner with people. Hi, One Club. Welcome. Don't partner with people until you have your business set up, until you are confident what you can bring to the table, how you can get clients, and you understand your brand. You can hear her grumbling. This is what I deal with every single night. Missy, what are you doing? No, you can't talk to me this way in front of people. This is embarrassing. People are gonna understand what my dog treats me like anyway. Yeah. There are good partnerships and there are bad partnerships. Go for the good partnerships. If you are struggling to get started and you've fallen into this trap of a partnership and it hasn't gone anywhere, and you realize you have to dial back and do it on your own, and you still don't know what you need to do. Shoot me a message and we will hop on a call. Okay, that's that. Anyway, thank you, everyone. I will be going live every single day this week, Monday through Friday, and so stay tuned. If you have any topics you'd like me to go live on, then please DM them to me. And I apologize for wrapping this up so quickly. I didn't realize that I wouldn't be getting a full, like, 15 minutes on that treat I gave her. So, anyway, Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and money mindset coach. Thank you for joining One Club and David Fryman, everyone else who was here who didn't comment, I hope you have an amazing night, and happy Halloween tomorrow. All right, love you all. Bye. Luna, you drive me crazy. What are you doing.