One of the first businesses I started was a high-school DJ-ing business with my brother. We were going to ride the party wave to untold success. Because I had known my brother all my life, I just assumed that we would be on the same page in terms of the future of our little business, and I didn’t bother to check whether we had the same long-term vision.
When the money started coming in, he wanted to invest the earnings, while I wanted to plough them back into the business. Each of us had a distinct idea about an end goal. I wanted us to be a leading DJ company on the South African event scene. He wanted to preserve the capital. Both of these were noble pursuits, but we neglected to ensure that we were on the same page when we first started out.
The “why” really does matter
Right there is the first lesson that anyone should learn when considering a partnership – you need to agree on the “why”. Simon Sinek wrote that great book, “Start With Why”, which encourages people to begin by finding their purpose. In a business partnership, if your whys aren’t the same, if you don’t have the same fundamental reasons to do what you’re doing, your business isn’t going to fly.
As we all know, business can get tough – all efforts must push towards the same end-point to enhance your chances of success.
What?
If you’ve ticked the “why” box, the next thing to consider is the “what?” What are you and your partner each bringing to the table? When the skills sets are very different, it can be hard to understand value… which can result in resentment on both sides.
For example, if you are an engineer who has built an amazing platform, but you’re just not a people person, you could establish a partnership with a business development expert with loads of connections. From one angle, it might appear that your new partner spends each night having expensive dinners, until he lands the contract that provides your platform with national exposure and gives your business the first step into true operation.
There’s no way to put an actual value to the contribution that you’ve each made, but the business would be nothing without both of your efforts.
Once you’ve defined what your business needs, it’s a process of accepting that even if a different skills set cannot match the blood, sweat, and tears that you have invested in the business, it can still contribute exceptional value to your bottom line.
Partnerships in practice
Even established businesses can investigate partnerships in order to evolve. At Fedgroup, we’ve engaged in in three active partnerships to allow us to innovate in new, future-critical spaces.
Our Impact Farming venture was perfected as a product from a tech and accounting perspective, but would never have made it to market without the deep expertise of our partner Suraj Lallchand in the sustainable agriculture and agritech world.
We have also partnered with the machine learning and AI guru, Marco Cerutti and his company DragonFlower, clearly recognising that this technology is critical to Fedgroup’s sustainability, and further recognising that we simply didn’t have the skills to make fruitful contributions in this space.
Another example is our Internet of Things partner, Techsitter. Michael Stofberg, the head of Techsitter, has allowed us to enter this market with a deep skills set and vast knowledge that we would never have gained in-house in time to meet demand.
A leap of faith
The funny thing about all of this is that my brother and I are still the same people we were in high school, and both of us are using our particular approaches to the benefit of the companies we run. I still want to use my profits to reinvest in the business and grow, whereas his successful property portfolio investment company, Fieldspace, ensures capital preservation and growth.
In all the partnerships I’ve mentioned, there was a meeting of minds. There was a common why, and a complementary what, but in the end when you’ve ticked all the boxes, any partnership is a leap of faith, and sometimes you just have to take it.
