Fixing Business Partnerships Gone Wrong – Step 5: Regular Meetings
My partner and I have an 8:30 am call every Tuesday to connect and game plan. It’s the best spent 30 minutes of the week. There isn’t always an agenda, but there’s always something to talk about. Last talk we identified a major hiccup in our process and I was able to fix it. A previous call we simply talked about life and we vented out some frustrations that didn’t even have to do with work.
Something I know now that I didn’t know back in my previous partnership was the need for regular meetings between the partners. I would have meetings, but they weren’t intentional but more reactions to a certain crisis going on.
In hind sight, this is probably the biggest reason we failed as a partnership. I think we all felt lonely and that we each were running the company on our own. If you asked each of us individually, you’d hear that the biggest weight of the company was on that person being asked. This lack of meeting caused distrust in the accounting, no single vision for the future, no way of venting and no clear leadership.
What happens when we don’t meet regularly is that we’re not giving ourselves time to connect with one another. Connections are formed with time spent together. I’m not talking about a company dinner with all the employees or going to happy hour with friends. I’m talking about just the partners.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 says
It’s better to have a partner than go it alone. Share the work, share the wealth. And if one falls down, the other helps, But if there’s no one to help, tough! Two in a bed warm each other. Alone, you shiver all night. By yourself you’re unprotected. With a friend you can face the worst. Can you round up a third? A three-stranded rope isn’t easily snapped.
You might be at a point in your partnership where you just want to quit and do it alone. You figure that you’ve already been doing it alone, why not make it easier for everyone and just dismantle the partnership agreement.
That’s not God’s design. I’d be surprised to find any hugely successful businesses out there that are 100% owned by one person only. God’s design is for community to be formed and for one hand to wash the other.
Pull out your calendar and set a weekly catch up meeting. This can be on the phone. Set up a monthly dinner where you talk in a relaxed environment. Then set up an annual planning meeting. You can do this quarterly, every 6 months or every year. There is no such thing as connecting too much. Things move so fast in business that the more we can communicate the faster we can grow.
We can let our selfish pride, greed and ambitions rule our lives and make us a LONER in business, or we can choose to embrace the design of connecting with one another regularly.
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