We run Phippen Tax & Financial Services as a family business together and would not have it any other way! It is exciting to build a business with someone who is not just a business partner. Working together towards common successes is fulfilling, and it is fun to develop creative ideas with each other and see what new innovations we can create.
But we know that some folks feel hesitant about the idea of running a business with a partner. They worry about having business-related arguments and how those may hurt their relationship. They also worry that they will not find their partner to be a good co-worker even if they love them as a life partner. (Remember how many people learned they did not enjoy working with their partner in 2020?)
Luckily, you can avoid these pitfalls with a few intentional actions. Most of them are probably good ideas for running a business generally, or even building a healthy relationship generally (but ask a professional for that one). If you and your partner are considering running a business together, set a plan in advance that considers the following aspects regarding your venture.
Divide Tasks by Talents
We all have strengths and weaknesses. When running a small business, it makes the most sense to pour your energy into the areas in which you are strongest while outsourcing your weak areas to someone else. In a situation where you run a business with a partner, this means you have two people’s strengths instead of just one, allowing you to outsource fewer weak areas. Fewer weak areas and less outsourcing means more money in your pocket, a terrific situation in the early days of running a business when each dollar counts!
Your biggest strengths and biggest weaknesses are probably obvious. Say you and your partner run a baseball/softball batting range, and you were a former Division I ball player while your partner is an accountant that struggles to make contact in the summer slow-pitch softball league. It would not make sense for your partner to teach children how to perfect their swing while you track the business finances.
However, individual talents—or which partner has the edge in a particular area—are not always evident. We both are exceptional writers in our respective fields. (Hopefully, we do okay with these blog posts, too, but neither of us has any training in this area!) We also both have far better math skills than the average person you meet on the street, read more books about personal finance than is normal, and are the type of people that explore how to solve a technology issue ourselves rather than immediately claiming helplessness and calling IT support. On the other hand, neither of us had an Instagram account before expanding this business, so social media was a new realm for us. (You may have noticed we delayed that to year two!) We collectively had no experience in digital marketing, website building, or promoting a business to grow.
Despite the overlap of some of our strengths and weaknesses, we had to figure out how to divide these tasks. We quickly figured out that Xa writes faster than Patrick since she comes from a field where shorter, faster written products are expected. This resulted in Xa writing more than 100 articles in our first year while Patrick wrote just over 40. However, because Patrick has more experience in technical and legal writing, he took the lead on certain topics that required articulating technical concepts in a manner that allows folks to easily understand them. In other words, “writing blog posts” is not just one of our jobs, but we have a system for dividing the writing that makes sense given our strengths.
Additionally, dividing by talent often means working together on certain projects and determining which pieces of a project should be each person’s individual responsibility. Patrick has superior accounting knowledge to Xa, but Xa has more advanced Excel skills than Patrick. If we want to create an accounting spreadsheet, it is sometimes worth Patrick explaining a concept, Xa creating a mockup, Patrick verifying that the mockup correctly conveys the data, and then Xa formatting it for someone else to use. This kind of teamwork can allow you to create better products than either partner could individually, but it also requires coordinating to divide responsibilities by talent before initiating a project.
Organize Joint Responsibilities Clearly and Early
Organization is key to maximizing your potential on joint projects. If you are fortunate enough to work with your partner, you likely have more similar schedules than two random coworkers at a business. But you still are two different people with different responsibilities! This is important to remember when planning joint responsibilities because the best way to work together means respecting the other person’s competing responsibilities.
This does not mean you have to memorize your partner’s schedule. Please do not—that sounds like a lot of wasted brainspace. Instead, plan in advance and set realistic expectations for both partners.
“Plan in advance” means you should not go up to your partner on Wednesday and tell them you need a three-hour project done by noon on Thursday. That is disrespectful of other potential obligations they may have. Instead, enter it on the calendar a week in advance. Even better, enter it on the calendar a month in advance with a note that they can complete the project any day that week, according to what works best with their schedule.
Notice how we said “enter it on the calendar” in that last part. Even if you and your partner run a business with no other assistance, it is worth using a workflow management software to organize your tasks. We know it sounds silly. You live with this person, so why not just tell them or write it on a sticky note? However, it would be pretty rude of me (Xa) to decide I needed to tell Patrick that he needed to edit this section of the article right now since he is talking to a client. If I do not tell him right now, by the time he is available I will have moved to another task and forgotten, which means you would never get to read this article. Instead, I can check off that it is now his turn to update this article in Asana, and he can get to it when he is not otherwise preoccupied.
Some method of organizing yourselves also helps keep the peace. Chances are that even if both partners are organized backwards planners who keep a pretty solid calendar, someone has a higher expectation of organization farther into the future. One of you needs a plan more than the other. Xa here again, and I am the one who needs the plan. We both are planners, but I am the one who will not sleep if the smallest piece of a giant project is unplanned, or at least scheduled to be planned. To accommodate both of our planning needs, I schedule projects far in advance, leave more time than Patrick will actually need to accomplish them before I start to panic about an approaching (or actually one month in the future) deadline, and still leave ample time for any final look from me.
By staying organized, we can schedule in advance, predict when each of us will be busier than the other, and schedule our workloads accordingly. By collaborating to accomplish tasks with a cadence that prevents the other person from feeling overloaded, we best help our clients while respecting each other’s time. Since we are only human, we acknowledge that this is only possible with the assistance of a process management tool to organize us.
Communicate Frequently but Intentionally
Be sure to regularly check in with your partner regarding how they feel about their workload, if they feel happy with the work they are completing, and their overall stress levels. (This is probably good life advice as well as business advice, but you can consult a professional to make sure.) When you regularly check in about work, you will find ways to improve each person’s happiness and the success of your overall business.
You may find that a certain task actually aligns more with your partner’s talents despite your initial assessment. They may find one piece of a project truly annoying, while you find it fun (or at least tolerable). Talking about what work makes you happiest and most frustrated can serve as an indicator to try trading some tasks. (This works for household duties as well!)
Additionally, coming together to discuss frustrations can sometimes solve problems quickly. Your partner may already have a solution to a minor technology issue you were having. You may know how to structure a task in a simpler way to save them time. You may also just share ideas to come up with bigger ideas than either of you had individually. Often, another set of eyes and a fresh perspective is all it takes.
Finally, if either partner feels the workload distribution is unfair, that will hurt your business and relationship. Let your partner decide and communicate this threshold for themself, and listen to them if they feel overworked. The opposite is also true: If you think they are doing too much, but they are feeling the momentum and loving their work at the moment, let them fly as long as there is a stop date to any extreme workload. The key is to maintain open communication where you are both (1) honest and forthcoming about your own perspective and (2) receptive to what your partner shares. Consistently expressing genuine recognition and appreciation goes a long way, too!
Respect Schedules and Energy Differences
Patrick can sit at the computer for approximately 1,000 consecutive hours without moving, diligently working the entire time. If he encounters a problem, such as an app that does not work according to plan, he will fight with it for a couple hours until he resolves the issue. Meanwhile, on a good day, Xa can sit at the computer for a maximum of about an hour without moving. If she encounters a problem, she will probably drop it for a moment, go to the gym, see if the change of scenery gives her a new perspective, and then dive in to work on it.
Neither of these approaches is correct or incorrect. We simply work differently. Both are productive ways to work, and they each lend themselves well to the different tasks we tend to specialize in more than the other person. Respecting these differences in work habits is important.
In particular, some people are sprinters while others are endurance workers when it comes to their obligations. Sprinters want to work hard for short periods of time, accomplish a task of some sort, then get away from work. This often means crashing, sometimes by reading a book or watching a TV show, which is entirely unrelated to work. Endurance workers would rather go a bit slower and work for longer periods without the reading or TV break.
You can see where an endurance worker, only considering their preferred approach, may feel resentful of the sprinter, even if they each accomplish the same amount of work in a day. But that resentment is unhealthy. If you and your partner have different work styles, it is important to acknowledge that you are both contributing equitably to your end goal. If one of you does that by focusing on some deep work and then watching a movie while the other works slower with intermittent breaks to read the news, that is okay.
Work styles are not the only energy variance you may experience. When you experience the most energy may vary as well, whether that is time of day, time of the week, or even season of the year. Here is a fun fact: Xa does almost no work for Phippen Tax & Financial Services during the fall and spring rugby seasons. Almost all the newsletter mailings and social media posts are set up before the season starts, so she only needs to complete a few small tasks each week that typically total less than an hour of work. Meanwhile, spring rugby season is tax season for Patrick, meaning he is working the most hours of his year. We both respect these differing schedules and use the organizational practices listed above to easily make them work for the business.
The best practices for running a business with a partner are generally best practices for a business or relationship anyway. Recognizing strengths and weaknesses, staying organized, communicating, and respecting differences in energy are good ideas to consider whether deciding how to run a household or figuring out how to work with a colleague. If you are fortunate to have chosen your life partner, you can probably figure out how to run a business with them.
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