Do you feel like you need to start working on your own business now? That’s perfect, you’re on the right track. Not everyone is a “job” person. You need to do something different! But I do understand that it’s a long and lonely road if you’re trying to launch a business. If you don’t have anyone beside you, it might be difficult for you to get to the other end of the road. Because of this, you thought of asking your friend for a good and helpful company a.k.a business partnership.
Yes, it’s great if two friends meet and work on the same business idea and prosper at it but do you think it will always work? Do you think it’s easy if you have your friend by your side? You need to understand one thing that there’s no possible way that only has advantages and no disadvantages at all. If you’re trying to launch a business with your friend, then consider these pluses and minuses of this first and then think if you want to do it or not. If you think you can go past the negative points, then I’d encourage you to go for it!
Let’s take a look at the pluses first!
1. You Don’t Need to Gain Each Other’s Trust
Having the trust of someone is who you’re working with is an essential thing and there’s no compromise in it. You can’t be working with someone you don’t trust because that’s a very dangerous and uncomfortable position. And if you’ve just started to work with a new guy, it will take a lot of time to get to that level of trustworthiness. When you’re working with a friend, both of you know each other very well. There’s no such thing as distrust between you two because you’ve been together for a while now. Of course, BFF’s love!
2. Acceptance of Strengths and Weaknesses
Working with a new business partner, who you don’t know properly yet and they don’t know you properly as well, can be troublesome. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses but if you guys are strangers, you will definitely not accept and understand these things. All you guys are going to do is argue about each other’s weaknesses and things will be much less productive than you expect. This understanding and acceptance of each other completely can take some time when working with a stranger. But if it’s your friend you’re working with, you don’t need to worry about this thing. Friends know each other the best and they even accept each other’s strengths and weaknesses efficiently. This thing will help you a lot in taking your business to the next level.
3. You Easily Develop New and Effective Strategies
You can call this brainstorming since you get to come up with new ideas to improve your business. If that’s what you want to do, then you need a peaceful and comfortable mind and someone beside you who can help you with that. This can’t be possible with the person you’ve just met because there will be differences in minds and thoughts that will make both of you uncomfortable with each other. Plus, you guys can’t open up completely and stay reserved a lot which will kill your creativity and ideas. But none of this will happen if you’re working with your BFF. You guys know each other the best and can open up with new ideas and strategies that will help you develop your business.
4. A Friend Shares the Burden
When there’s no bonding between two persons and they want to start a business, there won’t be any sharing of burdens. Even though they both want to make it happen but the distrust and differences between them will stop them from doing it. What’s a friend who isn’t available to support you when you need it? A friend is who will help you here in this situation only. Starting a business is a difficult thing to do since there will be a lot of failures and wastage of money as well. Of course, one person can’t usually bear these things but if there’s a friend beside them, the burden gets shared equally and this amazing support doesn’t let each other down. Ultimately, the business will go up and up only.
Let’s see what the minuses are in starting a business with a friend.
1. Taking Unnecessary Advantage
In business, there come hundreds of moments when you need the help of your business partner because you know they can do something no one else can help you with. Of course, this is a good thing because if both of you are partners, then there must be mutual assistance. But because both of you are friends, there’s a lot of informality between you two that it becomes dangerous. For example, if your friend has a lot more money than you do, you’ll be asking for it a lot so your friend would spend more on the business than you do. And your friend will hesitate a lot to say no to you because of the relationship and still be convinced to give you the money. This is what happens unintentionally because you don’t even know when it’s happening.
This can happen to you as well.
2. You’re not my Boss!
When you step into a business with a friend, you guys decide there won’t be any bossy behavior between you. That’s a good thing to decide to be friends but unfortunately, this doesn’t come out to be true for long. It only lasts a few days and then one of you starts their bossy behavior to take down your partner. Seeing this, the partner backfires and both of you get indulged in this bad behavior. Don’t go opposite to each other and talk calmly to focus on only one direction. If you’re starting a business, let’s say, a gift shop, then you’re gonna need gable gift boxes from Dawn Printing. If your friend argues that they should only invest in hexagonal gift boxes, then keep your ego aside and talk to them calmly about buying gable gift boxes. But sadly, this is a genuine issue that will hit every now and then if you can’t control it.
3. You Guys Keep it Personal and not Professional
This is a huge con when it comes to starting a business with a friend. The professionalism between you guys will automatically be down and you will be more personal. Remember that your friend is your friend when you guys are out of work. The period you’re working together in business should be spent professionally. Don’t bring personal things between you guys or else both of you will lose your decision-making abilities and professionalism which are super important for running a business.
4. You Lose your Business, You Lose your Friend
This is one of the worst disadvantages of this whole thing because losing a friend can be much more stressful than losing a business. Bearing both of these stresses is a huge challenge and you wouldn’t want to face it. Even if you think that if the business fails, it won’t affect your friendship, that won’t be enough because your friend might not have such a mindset. They would start hating you or have many bad things about you in their hearts just because of this very incident. This is something that happens usually but if you think that it won’t happen between you guys, then go for it.
Conclusion
The worst mistake that you can do while having business with your friend is to be personal with them. If you’re not personal with each other, then you won’t be facing many problems like not understanding each other, distrust, being bossy around, etc. If both of you just keep a professional mindset and keep these things in mind while trying to run a business, I bet that this business will reach unexpected heights.