Starting a Business With Multiple Owners

While the collaborative effort is great for thinking outowners want to go in one direction, but one person
an idea, potential problems and so on, it can ultimatelydoes not? How will each of these issues be handled?
lead to disaster. Ironically, this is particularly true if theWhatever your decision, it needs to be put in writing.
business is successful. The problem? Sharing power.Depending on the structure of your business, it may
If multiple people start a business, they often refer to itcome in the form of a buy-sell agreement. Regardless,
as "our business". At the outset, this isn't really athe idea is to make sure you cover these issues up
problem. As time passes, however, each owner mayfront.
start to have very different ideas about what "our"At this point, you might be thinking you really would be
business should be doing, how it should grow, niches ituncomfortable discussing these issues. After all,
should get into and so on. When this occurs, "our"everyone trusts each other, right? Maybe, maybe not.
business soon becomes "my" business. The problem,What tends to happen is you find out that maybe
of course, is each owner is saying this. Conflict soonsome of the owners have some very different ideas
follows.than you do. It is always best to find this out before
If you start a business with others, it is very importantrevenues start coming in. Why? People are not eying
to understand that you are essentially getting married.the business bank account. They will be reasonable in
This is true even if you had the original idea, workdiscussing matters. In a worse case scenario, you may
harder than they do and so on. Ownership isnot be able to work things out. If that occurs, at least
ownership. Much like a marriage, you should giveyou found out before spending a lot of blood, sweat
consideration to the business equivalent of a prenuptialand tears on the business.
agreement.It is common to start a business with more than one
At the outset of any business venture with multiplebusiness owner. Such businesses often do very well
owners, time should be taken to discuss what happenssince the workload is shared. To avoid problems, just
if there are problems. What if someone dies? What ifmake sure everyone is on the same page up front
someone stops working? What if a majority ofand get it in writing!