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partnerships and business can be the best thing that ever happened to a company without no one had to organize the partnership and how to manage it it will fail no matter how good it was at the start cero the fastest-growing most fun companies that I've ever started have been with partners now it wasn't always 5050 partnerships but no matter how much stock they owned I always treated them like an equal partner because when you have two or more minds working together towards the same goal you can achieve amazingly fast results so if you're in a partnership it's your job to set up some basic rules that keep that partnership strong now with that said there have been two companies that I used to own with partners that ended up being very costly lessons for me lessons that I've never repeated again but lessons that I don't want you to go through either because it's faster and easier to just learn lessons from somebody who's been there done that than to pay the price yourself so the first one was a partnership with a friend who I had known for years and Hawaii respected and because of that we kept doing things like a personality profile and credit checks now that was back when I was still a really novice business person but had we done those I would have found out that his top two values were his family and his status in life now I'm a big believer that your family should be one of your top if not the top value in your life but because he had those two values on the top of his list the very first year of us being in business after we agreed to reinvest most of our profits back into the company to help it grow he went out and he bought a brand new luxury sports car and a new house for his mother and by the way his previous car wasn't really in bad shape and his mother's place was pretty damn nice but he needed to see growth in his status and that caused him so much stress that he went out there and started a new bank account and he funneled a portion of our company revenue into that new account and that didn't last long but it happened and I had to walk away from that business fast I mean super fast I literally gave him everything and I told him that if his family really needed the money so badly they could have it because the time and the focus it would have cost me to deal with that in any other way would have been damaging to me and me getting my momentum back into another business and I was right because I grew my next company within a few months and now flash-forward almost a decade because this happened like almost ten years ago flash-forward almost a decade and today his business is still struggling and he still gets a new car almost every single year now the lessons in that one was number one always do personality profiles on a potential partner so that you both know each other's strengths and weaknesses and also run a credit check so you can see the financial track record on each other that'll give you massive insight into that side of the partner right that side the financial side of a partner which sometimes people sometimes it's their dark side put it that way and if that's a friend I guess the third thing on there would be if that's a friend that you're going into business with it's even more important not to skip those tips now the other partnership that I went into that was you know not that great for me was with a team of people that had a great reputation in their industry and I knew their company for a long time and I watched them grow and I knew that if I just plugged my core competencies and my relationships into their model that'd be a game-changer for that company the challenge was that even though I knew that company I didn't know each individual partner well enough and I didn't do background checks or psychological evaluations now had I done that it probably would have saved me several million dollars because basic psychological profiles uncover stress points that people have that might not be a challenge in your life but when that other person is faced with pressure in that area their business or that area of their life it's literally crippling to them and crippling to you as a partnership and a basic background check uncovers actions that someone may have taken in the past that throw up a red flag for you and although there's no one test or checklist that you could do on a partner or an employee or whoever you should have a basic list of tests that you both both you and your partner are totally open to completing so that you both know how to communicate with each other and what you might expect from the other in good times and in bad now we use a variety of tests for candidates for employment as well as our covered employees to evaluate if they're ready to go to the next level in our company but also with potential business partners and I'm not gonna give you my entire list because I you should go out there and you should do some research and you just find the ones that are best for what you're trying to accomplish but a really great place to start for you is to research EQI 2.0 now I'm not part of that company I get nothing for aiming you in that direction but so far we've had really good luck with them and although we do use a variety of different tests that one seems to currently be really more on mark than almost any other so I'm a big believer in partnerships when you meet somebody whose strengths complement your weaknesses who your strengths complement their weaknesses and who has the same values you have n who wants the same things out of the business as you do but even when all that lines up you still need to remember that you're the guardian of your company and as such at your responsibility to make sure the partnership is a great fit and one last note once you go through that exercise and you're ready to move forward the best first step is to sit in a room with just you and your partner and a great business attorney and when I say a great business attorney I'm speaking about one who has a track record of writing up partnership agreements not a general attorney or your family attorney or the guy who wrote your will but a great business attorney who's negotiated partnership agreements many times in the past then what you're sitting together in that room go through a boilerplate Partnership Agreement paragraph by paragraph and it has partners tell your attorney exactly what you want each paragraph to say to represent your agreement to each other and in the agreement be sure to include an area and this is real important make sure you include an area that lists your core competencies I don't care if it's one two three four five bangs what are your core competencies and then in another area what are your partner's core competencies so if there's ever a dispute in either of those areas right either of those categories the partner with the most experience gets the final votes so for example if you've negotiated the acquisition of two or three other companies in the past and your partner has never been part of an acquisition then if there's a dispute while you're trying to acquire another company you get the final vote because you have far more experience and it's in that agreement documenting all of that at the start of the partnership is one of the smartest things that you could do and getting it in one day in a room with your attorney will save you a lot of time and money and frustration no matter what stage of growth you're at we all need an unbiased review of what's working and also what might not be working anymore in our business because the greatest cause of stagnation in any company the reason most companies have plateaus and their growth is because they fail to see the roadblocks it's top momentum in its tracks