Til Death Do You Part: How to Pick the Right Business Partner

Selecting the right business partner is akin to picking a spouse.

With a husband you have love, fidelity, beautiful kids and hopefully great sex to blind you from his faults. With a business partner the perfect match is all about finding someone to help execute the big idea and make you money--without the perks of heavy breathing, a big wedding and the ultimate, leg-shaking orgasm.

Romance and sexual compatibility aside, people make huge mistakes in partnering with the wrong people and it often leads to a loss of money, friendship and ultimately the death of a business. 

I should know. You are taking this advice from a woman whose last three businesses failed because she partnered with the wrong people. What should you do to pick the right business partner?

Go beyond the initial questions normally used to determine business experience and passion. Use my experiences to learn how to clearly screen for the necessary qualifications, skills and personality traits of your future business partner. Here's how to observe indelible character traits, check for self-esteem issues and identify childhood work-ethic clues to prevent your business partnership from failing before it even starts.

1) Where did the potential business partner grow up and how?

This question is the most important one and speaks to mindset, compatibility and most importantly work style. Hard work and long hours are required to start a business. Hard workers are made in childhood, not in high school, college or professional school.

If you were born and raised in the Midwest and worked on the family’s farm business from sun up to sun down, you will have different sensibilities from a city slicker New Yorker who summered in the Hamptons.

Why should you inquire about a potential business partner's upbringing and childhood? Because your personality and work ethic are fully developed by the age of 13, it is imperative that you examine your future business partner's childhood for work ethic clues. A hard-working person is not compatible with a pampered princess who has never worked a day in her life.

2) Is your future business partner happily married or happily single?

A growing business takes a serious blow to your mental health. The manic 22 hour work days and many sleepless nights requires an emotional support team of a happy family. Determine your future business partner's happiness quotient. If your business partner does not have a happy home life, his or her despair and family drama will cause many distractions. Unhappiness is contagious. An unhappy business partner will unconsciously seep despair and unhappiness into your business life. Happy people are money magnets.

3) How much money, business contacts and time is the business partner willing to invest into the venture upfront?

Too often enthusiastic business people sponsor college roommates, friends and acquaintances, into the new business venture. I made this mistake several times because I wanted to give people a chance and mentor them. If you need to mentor someone, find a non-profit to volunteer your services, a business partner is not a mentee.

My past business partners didn’t have to pay a dime to get into the action; at the time I foolishly valued their enthusiasm, more than the money. Here is the first law of Bad Business Partnerships: If you don’t invest any money, you don’t have any expectation of getting your money out of the business, so you don’t work harder than your partner, or expect the business to succeed...because you really have nothing to lose.

I never partner with anybody that doesn’t invest resources, contacts and money. Call me Cuba Gooding, Jr. because if your want to work with me you will have to…"Show me the money, honey.”

4)Does your future business partner think like an employee or an entrepreneur?

Is your business partner an employee or already an established entrepreneur? If they are an  entrepreneur ask them for how long, and what was their motivation to start this business?

Being an entrepreneur is a mindset. It is the ability to invest long-term. Unlike an employee who gets a salary every two weeks, a new entrepreneur must defer their salary and reinvest it into the business.

Most new businesses fail because the entrepreneurs still think like employees. They buy expensive furniture, pay high salaries to themselves and do not create products or services where they get a percentage of their money up front before they do the work.  

5) How does this partner respond to adversity?  

Profits in business are cyclical. Employees come and go, and customers, if you don’t have a solid process to retain them, are fleeting.

• Ask questions about how your potential business partner has overcome problems in the past.

• Put a plan in place to handle disagreements, employee disputes and customer complaints.

• Start looking for clues that will reveal how this person handles the bad more so than the good.

To pick the right business partner you have to balance the delicate mix of compatibility and like-mindedness with business acumen and sales expertise. Finding a person who can successfully withstand the instability and all manners of craziness in business is actually more difficult than finding a spouse.

You can find the right business partner, however, if you notice every nuance, habit and personality trait to determine whether you can have a work spouse who is a partner in business and in life before you sign the partnership agreement.