The views expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their very own.
The journey of a solopreneur is lonely — it’s all as much as you, there’s no one to bounce ideas off of, and the rough waters require incredible personal motivation to maintain going. That’s why finding a business partner for your recent enterprise is generally considered a smart move to reduce risk and spread the challenges. Two heads are higher than one, right?
However, finding a partner is tougher than it seems.
Where do you discover someone who has the complementary skills, the willingness to take on the risk and responsibility of a nascent business, and—perhaps most significantly—the integrity and loyalty needed to work together purposefully? For some, the first response is to look near home, to someone with whom you already share a strong bond and whom you trust deeply, namely a childhood friend.
That’s what I did. I began a company with my friend Richards, who I’ve known since grade school. We sold our first company for six figures and now we run Supliful, a consumer products startup. Would I need to do it with anyone else? No. But has it at all times been smooth sailing? No, either.
Here are three pros and one biggest cons that I’ve learned from my 15+ years of experience running a business with a childhood friend.
Three Benefits of Starting a Business with a Childhood Friend
Typically, a childhood friend is someone you know closely and vice versa. This brings several advantages to a business partnership.
1. Realistic expectations and synergy
You know what to anticipate. You know your strengths, weaknesses, limitations, talents, and motivations. At first, bringing in a friend will probably have its drawbacks from a business perspective. But knowing what those is likely to be means that you can effectively deal with them.
While an external partner can sometimes offer more immediate advantages in the form of hard skills and experience, it is harder to evaluate what they are lacking, potentially causing an unpleasant surprise down the road. It may take longer for synergy to develop and for an agreement to be reached.
Of course, finding the perfect synergy with your childhood friend can even take some time. That said, the foundation should already be in place, helping you avoid growing pains. For recent entrepreneurs, there will likely be a lot of learning, changing directions, and reorganizing, and you would like someone flexible on your team who is willing to adapt, change roles, and reply to recent events. In my experience, this is easier to do with an equal, i.e. a friend, in comparison with someone who is very specific about what they convey to the team, i.e. an external partner.
2. Easy, honest communication
Every entrepreneur faces setbacks. Dealing with them in the simplest way possible is key to moving forward. To that end, in my experience, honest communication is key.
However, honest communication is not something that might be taken for granted. The business world in general and the startup scene in particular have a very specific song and dance where failures are presented as learning experiences, challenges are called opportunities, and setbacks are simply experiments.
Sure, but sometimes failure is just failure. And the best method to overcome failure is through brutal honesty. It’s easier to do that with a friend as a business partner than with anyone else. You can say things to each other that are harder to say to another person, which in turn means that you can skip the charades and get straight to the problem-solving.
This freedom and ease of communication (and lack of pretense) translates into every aspect of the company’s operations, helping to take care of realism and rapid growth.
3. You are on the same team
Never underestimate loyalty in business. Knowing that you just’re in this together and have each other’s backs has helped us through thick and thin—for example, having someone to confide in without worrying about it getting used against you, or fully trusting each other to make independent decisions that profit the entire company.
There is a level of trust from the very starting with a childhood friend that may take years, if not a long time, to build in a relationship with an external partner.
The Biggest Downside to Starting a Business with a Childhood Friend
As anyone who has ever began a business with a friend will let you know, one of the biggest downsides is that it would affect your friendship. In some ways, it would probably make it stronger than ever. But it would also completely change the dynamic—something that not everyone could also be prepared for.
Business challenges, financial pressures, and differing visions can test friendships in ways you would possibly not expect. Disagreements can change into personal, and personal issues can spill over into business decisions, regardless of how in sync, compatible, or close you are.
Of course, in business the highs are truly sublime, and few feelings match the euphoria of celebrating a great success with someone who is an necessary part of your life. But the lows are truly low, and in these cases the brazen honesty that is otherwise a big positive can come back to bite you when everyone is at all-time low and you tell each other what you think without restraint.
At the end of the day, there is a real risk that the partnership will trump the friendship. The reality is that each side have to be nurtured. Finding the balance might be difficult, but no one is in a higher position to do it than you and your childhood friend.