Shi:
Now, docking in partner ships. Welcome aboard. This is ships week and yeah, in the last segment we talked about leadership. We’re excited now to talk about partnerships, something we obviously know a little bit about.
Kay:
Well, we are so blessed to have a partnership in one another and talk often amongst each other about how grateful we are that we have someone that we can lean on and trust and that really has not that mindset of the 50/50, but that both people bring their 100/100 to the table.
Shi:
And I think that’s one of the things that ultimately help partnerships be successful and we’re going to talk about the romantic expression of partnerships and kind of those long term, significant others a little bit later towards the end of this episode. But talking right now about partnerships in the sense of working relationships and career-wise–thinking into those things–these are the ships that I think are hardest to build for a lot of people and I think that’s because–going into a business partnership–the nature of that relationship goes in a direction that if you haven’t been in partnerships before, it can feel really abrupt and jolting. So, it’s definitely one of those harder ships to build for sure.
Kay:
So, when the partnership is from a business perspective, I think it becomes even more important that idea of’’like I mentioned before’’that both parties bring their 100/100 to the table because a partnership in a business sense can easily breed resentment if one party isn’t pulling their weight.
Shi:
Well. So, some of the things we’ve learned about being in a partnership, and of course we’re still in partnership, also, not just with each other, but with my husband, Chad, and with our parents within the Squeeze In and we had a lot of years being a family business partnership like that, as well as entering into other partnerships and business ideas and things. So, we’ve had a lot of experience with it and a lot of it’s been positive and a lot of it’s been challenging. So, it is one of those things that we always encourage others like you’re going to do business with other people, or you’re going to form partnerships with other people. Do that with people that you trust and that you have a match with in values. I wish that was something that maybe we would’ve underscored earlier on if we could go back and do things again.
Kay:
The values match when it comes to partnerships is really important because when you don’t have the same value set going forward into a business setting oftentimes that can clash in the middle of things that can make it messy and business is oftentimes met with legality. So, you end up getting into contracts and how they need to get spelled out. So, you’re either extremely careful in the contracting process which you should be prudent in that. But the back end of that when you don’t enter in with the same value set can be difficult to rectify and then it all leans on the documentation that you’ve put forward in the first place.
Shi:
Those long agreements and things you wanted to breeze over and not read all the way through can sometimes come back around and you can be like, oh, you get taken on a technicality or something and we have to remember that as much as business is that rational side of us, there is also the emotional side and there’s no way you can’t form an emotional connection with someone that you have a business partnership with. So, that’s where I think things start to get messy if you don’t have that clear definition of roles, of goals, of values, of understanding what the future is and you can’t always understand. Sometimes it’s knowing what the first step is which is why one of our recommendations–before moving into partnership–would always be to do a collaboration with someone first. Find a way to do a project together, to bring a product forward, to have a shared challenge, or something that you can do that has an end date and a split date. That way you get a little dating period and I think that’s a big miss for a lot of folks. I know that was a miss for us in certain interactions over our last 19 years and 15 years of active business on this side of things would be something I wish we maybe would’ve considered more in the beginning.
Kay:
Oh, that is a really good point Shi, and when we get down to the partnerships of the people that you work with every day, right. That arm-in-arm human being who’s right there. I mean, it’s interesting how much overlap there is with the kind of best practices for romantic relationships. Things like open lines of communication, having frank discussions, not bottling emotions. When you work with somebody in a very close capacity, you partner alongside someone and this isn’t necessarily just in a business ownership standpoint, maybe this is a really close manager that you work with at your job. Maybe this is a coworker that you’ve gotten paired with. Maybe you’re a student and you understand how you sometimes have to partner with people on long term projects over the course of an entire quarter or half of a year and those kinds of partnerships require very similar upkeep to a romantic relationship which just goes to underscore the fact that really you get involved, which means your emotions are at play no matter what kind of partnership you’re in.
Shi:
What I love is what that means really is that these best practices are simple and applicable across all kinds of different ships, and I look forward to applying them to our next ship, pulling into the harbor, friendship harbor.
