Update time.
Tldr: I'm entering a partnership.
Over the past few months I've been working with a guy called George who has a very similar company to my own. We've been in business for a similar amount of time and over the past year have been working together on a large amount of jobs that we couldn't do by ourselves. It's been a very successful relationship so far and we've accomplished a lot more than we could have alone. We've also had lots of problems we've faced and solved together on these jobs but have always worked through them effectively. After about 6 months of working together he suggested that we could merge our businesses into one so we could work together on all aspects of the business as one entity instead of competitors.
I've taken the past few weeks to think it through thoroughly and have had a series of meetings with business owners with experience in partnerships to get their advice and have decided to go ahead with the partnership.
A bit about why I believe this is the right decision.
Firstly, its not always been super easy or stress free. The nature of some of these bigger jobs I've been working on is that they're very stressful with lots of moving parts and we've faced a lot of challenges over the period we've worked together. For example I knocked over a wall at a customers house and it fell onto a roof below it, causing multiple tiles and a beam to snap. The situation sucked but we worked together to get the wall fixed by a professional the very next day and the customer ended up buying us food at the end of the job so they were certainly happy with how we managed the situation. There have been many situations like this where we've calmly worked through some difficult problems but this has led to us building a very trusting relationship. Working together we've been able to find multiple inefficiencies in how we do things and have streamlined how we approach jobs together.
He is about 20 years older than me and has previously ran a successful security business before starting his current business. His main skill set is with social media / SEO so he has a massive amount of work coming his way, whereas my skill sets are mainly with the technical side of things, customer fulfillment and the numbers of it all.
In our best week working together we managed to turnover just over £5K as we were able to get through multiple large jobs that week working together so financially it makes sense, the next step will be hiring an employee to do the simpler jobs as we focus on the more difficult projects / expanding the business.
We had our first serious meeting last week where we discussed every aspect of the merge we could think of, and both left satisfied that this was the right decision. As it stands I have a call with my accountant tomorrow to explain the situation to him, then I have another meeting with George on Friday so we can address any final questions that either of us may have going into this.
The next step would be setting up a meeting with my accountant and George to finalize everything.
I've heard the success stories but also all the horror stories of how partnerships have gone wrong so have taken my time with this decision.
I'm putting together a list of questions that I have for us to discuss at our meeting this week before we finalize everything.
It'd be really great if anyone has any suggestions on what I should ask?
I'm confident that it will be a successful relationship but would really appreciate any advice the forum may have.
I want to make sure that I ask all the right questions going into the relationship and get all the difficult conversations out of the way upfront so that we can have a successful business relationship.
Let me know what you think!
Thanks for reading.
Tldr: I'm entering a partnership.
Over the past few months I've been working with a guy called George who has a very similar company to my own. We've been in business for a similar amount of time and over the past year have been working together on a large amount of jobs that we couldn't do by ourselves. It's been a very successful relationship so far and we've accomplished a lot more than we could have alone. We've also had lots of problems we've faced and solved together on these jobs but have always worked through them effectively. After about 6 months of working together he suggested that we could merge our businesses into one so we could work together on all aspects of the business as one entity instead of competitors.
I've taken the past few weeks to think it through thoroughly and have had a series of meetings with business owners with experience in partnerships to get their advice and have decided to go ahead with the partnership.
A bit about why I believe this is the right decision.
Firstly, its not always been super easy or stress free. The nature of some of these bigger jobs I've been working on is that they're very stressful with lots of moving parts and we've faced a lot of challenges over the period we've worked together. For example I knocked over a wall at a customers house and it fell onto a roof below it, causing multiple tiles and a beam to snap. The situation sucked but we worked together to get the wall fixed by a professional the very next day and the customer ended up buying us food at the end of the job so they were certainly happy with how we managed the situation. There have been many situations like this where we've calmly worked through some difficult problems but this has led to us building a very trusting relationship. Working together we've been able to find multiple inefficiencies in how we do things and have streamlined how we approach jobs together.
He is about 20 years older than me and has previously ran a successful security business before starting his current business. His main skill set is with social media / SEO so he has a massive amount of work coming his way, whereas my skill sets are mainly with the technical side of things, customer fulfillment and the numbers of it all.
In our best week working together we managed to turnover just over £5K as we were able to get through multiple large jobs that week working together so financially it makes sense, the next step will be hiring an employee to do the simpler jobs as we focus on the more difficult projects / expanding the business.
We had our first serious meeting last week where we discussed every aspect of the merge we could think of, and both left satisfied that this was the right decision. As it stands I have a call with my accountant tomorrow to explain the situation to him, then I have another meeting with George on Friday so we can address any final questions that either of us may have going into this.
The next step would be setting up a meeting with my accountant and George to finalize everything.
I've heard the success stories but also all the horror stories of how partnerships have gone wrong so have taken my time with this decision.
I'm putting together a list of questions that I have for us to discuss at our meeting this week before we finalize everything.
It'd be really great if anyone has any suggestions on what I should ask?
I'm confident that it will be a successful relationship but would really appreciate any advice the forum may have.
I want to make sure that I ask all the right questions going into the relationship and get all the difficult conversations out of the way upfront so that we can have a successful business relationship.
Let me know what you think!
Thanks for reading.
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