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Should I end my business partnership, or keep building with the same person?

Should I keep building this with my current partner, and if so, in what structure?

Question 15 of the Index

This has been going on longer than you would admit to a third party. Nothing disqualifying has happened. There is a low, steady friction that shows up around decisions, and every time you try to name it out loud it turns into a specific disagreement that is not really the thing.

Partnership trouble rarely presents as trouble with the person. It presents as an argument about a decision, and you both litigate the decision because that is the part with evidence attached. Then the decision resolves, the relief lasts about a fortnight, and the same friction returns around something unrelated. When the subject keeps changing and the feeling does not, the subject was never the subject.

Underneath it is usually one of three things, and they want different answers. It can be mismatched appetite: one of you wants a larger thing than the other and neither has said so, because saying so sounds like an accusation. It can be structure: the ownership, the titles or the decision rights no longer describe who actually does what, and no amount of goodwill outlasts a structure that lies. Or it can be that you have stopped respecting how they think, which is the one that does not get repaired and the one people spend years not saying.

So the question is not whether to end it. It is which of the three you are in, and you can usually tell from what you picture when you picture the good version. If the good version is this partnership with a different distribution of authority, it is structure, and structure is negotiable in an afternoon with a lawyer. If the good version is this work without them in it, you have had your answer for some time and have been looking for a reason that would be fair.

When the fight is about something else

Cofounder conflict and business partner conflict look the same from outside: decisions reopened, and a tone in meetings that the rest of the team has started to notice. The problems with business partner relationships that end companies usually sit under the visible disagreements, in one of the three places described above.

When to leave a business partnership is easier to judge once you know which of the three you are in. Structure can be renegotiated. Mismatched appetite can sometimes be settled by one of you buying the other out. Lost respect is the one that gives you the answer, and it is worth saying to yourself before you say it to them, or to a lawyer.

Bring the last disagreement, the one that was not really about what it was about.

No account, no card, one exchange. Yours to keep.

Questions that sit near this one