I’ve owned a few businesses, some on my own, two of them with partners. For tax purposes, it’s important to be clear whether any person I am working with is an employee, a self-employed contractor, or a partner. An employee does what I want, how I like it, and when I want, typically at will, which means either of us can end the relationship if we’re unhappy. A self-employed...
Gene Marks’ NY Times blog on the art of running a small business included two items that caught my attention yesterday. The first is a great quote from Penelope Trunk in Venture Beat: “The dirty secret about start-up founders is they can’t keep marriages together. Part of the reason for this is they are crazy to begin with. And part of the reason is that you have to be married...
Whenever I declare that there are things worth learning about how to succeed at marriage, I risk offending good friends and even relatives who have divorced. Divorce is often painful, almost always life-disrupting. How cruel to even suggest it wasn’t necessary and the result of a bad match-up of partners. I was thinking about this earlier today and how similar it is to a business failure...
Whether you call yourselves copreneurs, couplepreneuers, or a mom and pop business, every relationship feels unfair at times, and so does every business partnership. How can you tell for sure when it’s time to get out? How can you get your mate to carry more of an unjust load? How do you balance child care and cooking against cold-calling and bookkeeping? How can you work things out when...
