Choosing your partner to create a business cannot be improvised. If some are relying on affinities, others advise to prefer skills.
Your partner is the person you will spend the most time and who will play a major role in the success or not of your business. So you have to choose it to avoid disappointments.
Let's discover together how to choose your partner to create your business and what are the real issues hiding behind the choice of your partner.
Why choose a partner to undertake?
Creating an company is an ambitious adventure that takes time, resources and significant risk. Entrepreneurship is also a long road strewn with pitfalls and the loneliness of the perhaps heavy entrepreneur.
Combining can be a strategic solution to share responsibility and increase the chances of success.
However, this decision should not be taken lightly, because it directly influences the future of the project.
Motivations behind an association
Several reasons can push an entrepreneur to seek a partner.
The first is financial. By joining forces, partners can bring more substantial capital. In addition, a partner can open doors thanks to its network and notoriety, thus facilitating the development of the company.
The second, important, is the complementarity of skills. An entrepreneur cannot master everything alone. Having an associate with additional skills makes it possible to better distribute responsibilities and to avoid certain gaps.
The third is that undertaking alone can be stressful and discouraging. A partner can provide moral and strategic support, thus helping to make more thoughtful decisions. It is also an aid to overcome difficulties. Finally, undertaking to two is a human adventure often more enriching than to undertake alone.
The advantages and risks of a partnership
Combining offers several advantages: sharing of tasks, better decision -making, greater investment capacity and skills synergy. A solid team can give an additional impetus to the company and accelerate its growth.
However, a partnership also includes risks. Disagreements may appear, in particular on the vision of the company, the distribution of roles or even financial management, remuneration or recruitment. A bad understanding between partners can slow down the development of the project and lead to sometimes dramatic conflicting situations.
To minimize these risks, it is essential to establish solid bases from the start, clearly defining the expectations, responsibilities and operating rules of the partnership.
The criteria for choosing your partner
The choice of a partner is a decisive step in creating a business. It is not enough to have a good personal understanding, it is also necessary to ensure that collaboration is beneficial on the professional level.
Here are the criteria to take into account to choose your partner.
Choose an entrepreneur at the soul
Creating and managing a business is an adventure full of uncertainty. It is therefore essential that your partner is ready to face the challenges inherent in entrepreneurship. He must understand the responsibilities of the role of leader and be able to make pressure decisions.
A good partner must have an entrepreneurial state of mind, be proactive and know how to manage difficult periods without being discouraged. A person looking only for employment safety is likely to abandon in the face of the first difficulties.
Choose someone with a common vision
For a collaboration to work, having a common vision of the company is essential. You must be aligned with long -term objectives, development strategy and fundamental values of the project.
Vision differences can be enriching for the project. But it can also create tensions and curb business growth. It is therefore important to discuss upstream of the main strategic orientations and to ensure that you share similar ambitions.
Choose an associate with additional skills
A good partner must bring real added value to the company. Favor a person with skills that complete yours, to cover a wider field of expertise and reduce the need to hire too early.
If you have technical skills, a partner with commercial or financial expertise can be a precious asset. Conversely, if you excel in management and strategy, a partner mastering the operational or production can strengthen the efficiency of your team.
Choose an partner you trust
Combining means sharing important decisions, responsibilities and issues. The relationship must be based on mutual trust and fluid communication.
A good partner must be able to express their ideas in a transparent way, listen and respect divergent opinions. Clear and honest communication avoids misunderstandings and quickly solve potential conflicts.
Before committing, test collaboration on a short -term project to assess your compatibility and your way of working together.
How to assess an associated potential?
Choosing an partner is not lightly done. Before engaging in a partnership, it is essential to assess the professional and human compatibility of the person with whom you plan to associate yourself.
This is all the more true if you do not know your partner personally. But this is also the case when you associate yourself with a friend.
Here are some steps to help you make the right choice.
Test professional and human compatibility
Working with a partner implies daily collaboration and common decision -making. Checking if you are professional and relational compatible is essential.
To do this, you can carry out a pilot project together before formalizing your association.
This test phase will allow you to analyze its work method, its responsiveness to problems and its ability to invest in the project.
Analyze your career and reputation
Before associating, find out about the professional career of your future partner. His experience, his past successes and his reputation in the community are all indicators of his credibility and his seriousness. His failures can also be a positive sign, because he will be able not to reproduce them.
Do not hesitate to request references and to contact former employees to get a return on his way of working.
Another very important point: check its legal and financial situation to avoid unpleasant surprises.
Secure its partnership to avoid conflicts
Once the partner has been found, it is necessary to establish solid bases to avoid possible conflicts.
The best way to protect your collaboration is to anticipate disagreements and formalize the association's operating rules.
Writing a associate pact
A Associate pact is a legal document making it possible to supervise the relationship between partners and to prevent future conflicts.
It defines the roles and responsibilities of each, the distribution of the shares, as well as the rules of decision -making.
This pact may also specify the terms in the event of the departure of a partner, the sale of shares or dissolution of the company. This is an essential tool to ensure serene management of the company and avoid disputes.
Management of disagreements and strategic decisions
Divergences of opinion are inevitable in a partnership, whether in the short, medium or long term. But they must not block the progress of the business. It is therefore important to establish clear rules on how to decay.
To prevent conflicts, you can define a decision -making process, whether by consensus, by majority vote or by entrusting certain strategic decisions to a particular partner according to his field of expertise.
Anticipate separation: exit and non-competition clauses
Even if you start your partnership in a positive dynamic, it is essential to anticipate a possible separation. A partner may want to withdraw for personal or professional reasons, and it is best to have planned this situation in advance.
An exit clause will define the conditions under which a partner can sell his shares and the terms of buyout. A non-competition clause can also be added to prevent a former partner from creating a competing company after departure. It is also possible to anticipate situations such as the death of a partner, to avoid becoming a partner with the widowed spouse or the children who inherit.
Taking the time to secure your partnership with clear and legally supervised rules will allow you to avoid many problems in the future and guarantee the sustainability of your business.
Choose an partner for the right reasons
The desire to choose a partner is often justified by 4 reasons.
- The first is economical: you want to open your business to one or more other people to strengthen yourself financially.
- A partner could also bring you a address book or a certain notoriety. Significant assets knowing that the network is a powerful lever for the development of a business.
- He can also have SKILLS useful for the development of your project. Even if versatility is a major quality in entrepreneurship, there are sometimes areas in which we lack personal resources. Finding a complementary person can be useful to extend their field of action.
- Entrepreneurship is a lot of choice to make and decisions to be made. Having another person with whom to exchange, think and share their ideas can be reassuring.
These are the 4 main reasons to associate: this collaboration must bring added value to the company.
Conclusion
As you can see, associating can prove to be a real force in the success of your business. It is nevertheless necessary to keep in mind that it is a step that requires reflection: to precipitate the choice of his partner is part Errors not to be made by being an entrepreneur.
So, ready to associate yourself?