Talk About It. Don’t Look Back.
When I started my agency, I reached out to someone I had been working with to gage his interest in being my partner. At the time, he said he was intrigued, but was just not ready to make the leap.
I would have liked to start my business with a partner, to share the weight and to make the growing easier. But, I knew that partnership was like marriage, challenging even with the best match, so I decided to make a start as a sole proprietor
The first year felt like a decade – an exhilarating decade, and exciting decade, but also a stressful, challenging, dread-inducing decade during which I was either earning or losing roughly $70,000 per month with zero cushion for error. After all of this, my friend declared himself ready and admitted, “I didn’t think you would really do it. I had always thought that people who talk about things don’t do them and people who do things don’t talk about them. Obviously, I was wrong.” He proposed he’d join the business now with something like half of the equity.
The idea that people who talk about things don’t do them struck me as absurd. If I had to choose a cliché’, I would have chosen the one about snoozing and losing. I told my friend that the year I had invested and the risk I had taken to establish the agency had great value and that there was no way I could pretend otherwise and treat the situation as I might have a year earlier.
We decided to remain friends and I continued on my own.