How do I work with business partners?

Despite what we see in the media, business partnerships are almost never perfect. Individual perspectives and experiences can give way to conflict with the power to slowly dismantle your business. However, accepting and planning for conflict can help you leverage your differences in ways that can significantly improve your operations and ultimately strengthen your organization.

In this episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane and Micah unravel the myth of "effortlessly successful business partnerships" and shed light on the ongoing effort required to maintain a healthy, productive relationship. Tune-in as they dive deep into their personal experiences and share their innovative system to help manage conflicts and streamline decision-making to enable you and your organization to prioritize and execute efficiently. You do not want to miss this! 

Why Listen? 👇

• (0:00) Hear How We Navigated the Challenges of Business Partnerships
• (6:10) Learn to Balance Different Work Styles
• (10:06) Implement an Efficient Request System with Forms and Templates
• (13:21) Discover the Importance of Providing Context
• (15:16) Explore Our Strategy for Managing and Prioritizing Request Backlogs

Request examples of our Idea Submission Template and Form to see how we submit our idea and meeting requests!

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Chapters

• 0:00 How We Navigated the Challenges of Business Partnerships
• 6:10 Learning to Balance Different Work Styles
• 10:06 Implementing an Efficient Request System
• 13:21 The Importance of Providing Context
• 15:16 Our Strategy for Managing and Prioritizing Request Backlogs

Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to automate your agency. Every week, we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): Okay. So I think when people look at us from the outside, Alane, we've been business partners for 14 years now. Maybe somewhere around there. Unless you know us well, it looks like we got our shit together. But the reality is, it is being partners in business is extremely difficult.

0:00:44 - (Alane): Yeah. People always make it look glamorous, and maybe we make it look easy to outsiders, but we're constantly working at this. And what business partners we were 15 years ago is very different than the business partners we are now in the present day.

0:01:02 - (Micah): Absolutely.

0:01:03 - (Alane): And our businesses are different. We've gone through so many different, not just ups and downs in business, but growth versus startup.

0:01:11 - (Micah): Yeah. Yeah. So I'd love to shine some light on this because I think it's really interesting. You know, I know with my first business, I was very scared of, like, an official business partner coming in and wanting to run the show. And, you know, in the second business, it's like, I remember very early on, I was hiring. I was doing all the hiring, and then you came on board and basically told me that I sucked at hiring.

0:01:43 - (Alane): You did.

0:01:44 - (Micah): I did. I absolutely did. And it took me a long time to learn from you, Alane, why I sucked at hiring because I couldn't see it. Cause I didn't know what I didn't know. And when I think about business partnerships, I think that is one of the most valuable assets or reasons to have a business partner is because you have different perspectives. I was hiring people, and I'm sure, well, I hope some of the people listening hear this and go, oh, I'm making the same mistake. So I'm not alone here, but I would look at a potential applicant, do an interview, and only hear the good things and then ignore the bad things. Like, we could figure that out.

0:02:24 - (Micah): And you were like, no, we're not going to be able to figure this out.

0:02:28 - (Alane): No, there's too many red flags there. And so that was fun. And that was when I really started more standing up to you and just to give a quick background, Micah and I did not start off as business partners.

0:02:42 - (Micah): No.

0:02:43 - (Alane): So he was scared of business partners in the beginning. But I came on. I just worked for Micah. I'm just gonna say I brute forced it because us becoming business partners, we needed to make some changes. And we worked so well together that I took that opportunity.

0:03:04 - (Micah): Yeah. I mean, I think right off the bat, we really enjoyed working together. I valued your opinion immensely. And I remember when you asked to meet, I thought you were gonna quit. I was like, geez, this is going to be, what am I going to do now? Because already at that point, you had said, you suck at hiring. We improved hiring. We improved the team structure. We improved many of the things that we did. So having that partner, as you brute forced your way into being a partner, which was awesome, honestly, immediately allowed that diversification of perspectives.

0:03:47 - (Micah): You know, I love, we were talking earlier, and, you know, you made the comment, I just want to get out there and do it. But for me, my, like, M.O. is to plan stuff out. And so we can't just sit there. We can't just always just do it. So that's one of the other major benefits of having a partner.

0:04:06 - (Alane): It is. And, you know, why we work well together. And we looked at the strengths and the weaknesses, and we've finally been realizing kind of where each other sit on that. Even years after working together. You know, early on, we could see, okay, Alane is really great with working with clients. She's great at managing a team, and we could kind of mold things like that. But I really feel like that we were moving so fast and growing so fast that we just had to do things that way.

0:04:35 - (Alane): Whereas now, whenever we started this company, we really had to pay attention to where our strengths and weaknesses were. And when you're bringing on a business partner or you're currently working with one, that piece is so important.

0:04:52 - (Micah): Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And it does take time to figure it, especially in a small business. If you're starting a startup, if you're starting a small agency or B2B company, everybody wants to wear every hat, and you want to figure out, like, just how do we do this the best. But diversification of roles is almost a must.

0:05:13 - (Alane): It is. And it helps you stay in your lane, have ownership over what you do. You don't want to be stepping on each other's toes because that's not efficient. You might as well just be doing it by yourself.

0:05:25 - (Micah): Totally. Totally. All right, so let's get real a little bit. Beginning of this business, it got really rough for us. It was difficult. We, you know, I think there was so much that we wanted to get done and so many ideas that we both had, and because we have different perspectives, which we want to leverage that as a benefit, it was actually creating a negative, and it was hampering us and hindering our growth, because instead of you've got Path A, I've got Path B, and we're trying to work together to make Path C.

0:06:01 - (Micah): We were just arguing over Path A and Path B, and we'd never get to Path C. So let's talk a little bit about how we solve that.

0:06:10 - (Alane): Yeah. You know, and before we talk about how we solved it, you know, let's talk about some examples of, like, how some of the things that were driving each other crazy.

0:06:20 - (Micah): Oh, I was trying to avoid this part.

0:06:22 - (Alane): You would. No. You know, Micah, you are very passionate about ideas and coming up with solutions for things, whereas I like to sit back and I'm more of the quieter person on a day to day basis. And it's so easy now with technology, to Slack each other, huddle each other, send a quick message, hey, I've got this idea. What do you think? And I'm over here trying to focus on getting whatever I'm doing done.

0:06:57 - (Alane): And with technology, you're just able to constantly, hey, what about this? What about this? What about this? And where, you know, Micah, you're seeing it as, like, hey, this could be our next thing. We could jump on this. Like, let's focus this over here. I'm going, this is driving me insane. I am focused on what I need to be focused on in this moment.

0:07:16 - (Micah): Yeah. So, personality-wise, I think we really had to discover that we are. Not only do we think about things different, but we process things differently. So I'm definitely a shoot at the hip. I can answer quickly and get stuff out of my head, and I like verbalizing what's in my head to kind of process it, whereas I think you are really good at reviewing something, taking something, and letting it sit, and then coming back with the world's best ideas, period.

0:07:50 - (Alane): Mm hmm. Yeah. And you also think through writing.

0:07:57 - (Micah): Definitely.

0:07:57 - (Alane): So you like to write a lot because you're processing while you're writing, where I'm processing in my own head, but when I have to read all that, my brain shuts down.

0:08:08 - (Micah): Yeah.

0:08:08 - (Alane): So we had to really learn. You need to get stuff out of me, and I need to limit how much stuff I read from you because it was creating so much conflict for us.

0:08:19 - (Micah): So it's interesting, as a sidebar, hearing you say that is, I think about, like, I do art as a hobby and music as a hobby, and all of my process for creation is get it all out there and then reduce. And what I was trying to do was get it all out there and then send it to you to help me reduce. Because I just thought that's how stuff worked, but it obviously is not. You want me to reduce and then send it.

0:08:48 - (Alane): Yes. Send me your final product.

0:08:50 - (Micah): Yep. 

0:08:51 - (Alane): So let's talk about how this, this was a big thing for us. 

0:08:55 - (Micah): Yeah, for like over a year, right.

0:08:57 - (Alane): Where it was just starting to become more and more of a problem for us. And so we had to come up with a solution. Cause we're business partners.

0:09:05 - (Micah): Yeah. And real quick, slack teams, any real time messaging, email, even quick updates and project management tools like Asana, ClickUp and Monday, those can all be detrimental because what I was doing was trying to get everything out and I would get everything out in a Slack chain. So, Alane, you were getting like bing, bing, bing, bing. Like all the alerts with every idea.

0:09:29 - (Alane): It's giving me anxiety even just talking about it.

0:09:31 - (Micah): I know, I can hear you. I can feel you tense up.

0:09:35 - (Alane): So we really had to think through, okay, what is going to work for both of us. We had to come up with that Plan C. We took some ideas from how I think Amazon does it with their one page business plan, not business plan, but press release, how they do their executive meetings. And we kind of took all these ideas and we put together what's going to work for us. That's still going to be quick enough for us to execute on. That's not going to take us 3 hours to put together.

0:10:06 - (Alane): And for the recipient of that information that they can digest, know what type of decision needs to be made? Is this a brainstorming? Do you just want my feedback and ideas? Do we need to make a decision? You know, we need that context, but that we can act rapidly and it's not going to take us to days, months, whatever to give whatever is needed back to the person.

0:10:29 - (Micah): Totally. So we built a system.

0:10:31 - (Alane): So we did. Because we're systemizers.

0:10:33 - (Micah): Yes. So the first thing that we did was created a form. We created a form that allows us to specify what type of interaction or what type of meeting we're requesting of the other person.

0:10:46 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:10:47 - (Micah): So like you said, like, is it brainstorming? Is it where we just need to make a decision? Is it just getting ideas out there? I think we ended up with about five or seven different meeting types. You know, is it just a one on one that we want some personal feedback? And so that's the first part of the form. We ended up giving it some clarification on how urgent is this? Because if you don't provide urgency upfront, everything feels urgent, and then it gets frustrating.

0:11:16 - (Micah): And so we specify that in the form because sometimes you get ideas and you could say, this is not urgent.

0:11:22 - (Alane): Yeah, this is something that I've got kind of percolating here.

0:11:27 - (Micah): Exactly, exactly. And then in addition to the form, we created a template in a Google Doc. And this we modified, we did some test runs and we modified it over time. But this allows me to spell stuff out and then reduce in that template. So the end result is the end result that you're looking for. And it's a very succinct, like, there's about five questions on that form, and we could probably link a copy of this.

0:11:56 - (Alane): Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

0:11:56 - (Micah): To the podcast description so that everybody can see how this works and maybe even a quick rundown on the form. But the form creates structured data. It gives us a place for both of us to go to start conveying the idea. The template in Google Docs gives us a place to answer questions like, why would we even care about this? Why would the other person care about this? What is our plan? What do we need for a budget to do this kind of stuff? Stuff. What are examples?

0:12:24 - (Micah): All that kind of stuff. And so those two combined essentially go into a board inside of our ClickUp account that just sits there.

0:12:33 - (Alane): Yep.

0:12:34 - (Micah): And we each get notified if somebody, if one of us submits, the other person gets notified, which gives us the opportunity to go in and review.

0:12:44 - (Alane): Yeah. And so just for a clarification piece, we built our form in ClickUp, so that way when it's submitted, it creates a task automatically that adds Micah and I, and then we have the link for the Google Doc in there. And one of the things that this really helped, that I realized when we were really starting to have a lot of frustration with each other, is context. We had gotten to a point in our business, in our own expertise, that we didn't have the context for each other anymore.

0:13:21 - (Alane): And when we go to just spilling ideas, putting a bunch of stuff together, it was so foreign to us. Like, we still had a bunch of questions because we missed the context. So now a part of our process is to add context. Why do you think that this is important? Where is this coming from? Where did this idea spur from? And that has given us so much insight into the other person's thinking, because our perspectives are different, our days are running differently.

0:13:50 - (Alane): Just like, even sometimes it's just three bullets. This isn't paragraphs and paragraphs of information. It's short and snappy.

0:13:58 - (Micah): Yeah. And also to kind of illuminate, I think what you're talking about, Alane, is our roles were already. They have been separated, which is good. That's what we want to have happen. But that means that I'm doing things that you can't see or you might not have the context for, and you're doing things that I don't have the context for. So when we eliminate that context, like, you're saying, I go, why the hell is Elaine wanting to do this? And then, Alane, you probably go, what the hell harebrained scheme is he coming up with now?

0:14:36 - (Micah): But once we add that context, then it's like, oh, that's why she's suggesting this. Or that's why he wants to do this.

0:14:44 - (Alane): And then one step past that is we have a Monday morning meeting where we can review everything in our request backlog. This is what we call it, our request backlog. So we can review stuff in there. So we already have a meeting place designed for it, especially for things that are not urgent. We don't need to have a meeting about something not urgent. We can use that time we've already blocked on our calendars, go through that, and if it's something more urgent, then we can say that in ClickUp, and we can just book time on each other's calendar.

0:15:16 - (Micah): Totally. But that's an important part that you just said, because we didn't used to do that when it was urgent. It was a, hey, Micah or, hey, Elaine and Slack. And we were already working and focused and busy and pulled in so many other directions that we would immediately get frustrated with each other because one of us thought it was urgent and the other person didn't see it coming. So booking time on each other's calendar was a huge, huge improvement for us.

0:15:42 - (Alane): Yeah. And then when we knew the time was booked, we could review that document beforehand. Even if it's ten minutes beforehand, it's before the meeting, and we're able to review things. And there's been so many times, Micah, where we've done this document and used the form that we didn't have to have a meeting.

0:16:03 - (Micah): No, we resolved it. We resolved it in ClickUp, asynchronously, without a meeting.

0:16:07 - (Alane): And you think about how much time that saves. And also, I want to say this, too. You and I are talking about this in the perspective of business partners, this can easily be done with any leadership team.

0:16:19 - (Micah): 100%. 100% agree. I would argue that it should be done with every leadership team, because you're.

0:16:26 - (Alane): Going to have the same problems that we're talking through, whether you're a business partner or an executive, a manager, things like that, where you're going to be pinged, things feel urgent. This system works for any type of.

0:16:38 - (Micah): Decision making process, especially a CEO to a VP level, or CEO to a manager, or c level, or any combination of leadership to somebody being tasked with something. If it's coming from a leader, it's going to feel urgent unless this stuff is specified.

0:17:02 - (Alane): So we've saved ourselves hours and hours of meeting, and most importantly, we enjoy working with each other again.

0:17:10 - (Micah): Yes, yes, definitely. And so we continue this now. So every Monday we go through, we update our priorities based on these forms and documents that we create, and then that helps us align where we each need to be focused, because one of the benefits of partnership is delegation. So now we can tackle a lot more together with context, with understanding, and a whole bunch of Path C's, instead of arguing over who's right with Path A or Path B.

0:17:39 - (Alane): Yeah, it's been wonderful. And when you start, start documenting these ideas and prioritizing them, then every, we do it on Monday. So every Monday we're able to say, well, is this more urgent than this other idea that we had, this other priority? And so we have it documented. We're able to renegotiate where things fall. And these aren't the only things we have in our day. We're managing our company, managing the team, managing our clients, all the things with running a business.

0:18:13 - (Alane): So maybe things that we felt were urgent a week ago have now subsided and now something else came as a priority. So we are able to visualize what that looks like.

0:18:23 - (Micah): Yes, we could probably do a whole episode just on this concept of prioritization, because what you're bringing out is such a, is such a great point, is as a leader, and I see this happen over and over and over again with the businesses that we work with and other friends that have businesses, is you get an idea, it sounds and feels urgent, you pass that on to your team, and then they go, oh, crap, we gotta get this done.

0:18:51 - (Micah): But this is idea #10, and they're still working on idea one, and their minds are about to explode because everything from idea #1 to #10 feels so urgent that it's then they're starting to question reality and go, well, how am I gonna get this all done? What do I really need to work on? And I guarantee if you were to go back to the leader, eight of those ten ideas are probably like, why are we working on this right now?

0:19:17 - (Alane): Yeah, that's just an idea. We can look at that in the future. I just wanted to document it.

0:19:20 - (Micah): Yes, but the person that's on the receiving end has no idea how to understand, is this urgent? Is this not urgent? And I mean, the system that we were running into that with each other and the system that we put together has solved that, because we do every week we look at our priorities, is this urgent? Is this not urgent? And the things that we move down in priority over and over again, eventually we just take off the list. Because while it might have been a.

0:19:46 - (Alane): Good idea, yeah, we don't have the capacity to execute it right now, basically.

0:19:50 - (Micah): Or the market changed or other things were validated, more things became important. So we're constantly prioritizing.

0:19:58 - (Alane): Yes, we are.

0:20:01 - (Micah): Awesome. Well, I hope that was helpful for the people that are listening to either have business partners with conflict. We'll put some links in the description of this podcast so that, you know, you can get some examples of, visual examples of how all this works. Or if you were thinking about getting a partner and were nervous about it or scared about it, you know, you want that difference in perspective. You want to be able to delegate. It's so helpful. You can grow faster, but have a plan for conflict because conflict is healthy unless it gets to the extreme and you're looking for a business divorce.

0:20:37 - (Alane): Right?

0:20:38 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate your agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website, workdayninja.com.

0:20:49 - (Micah): Dot, and join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:20:54 - (Alane): Bye for now.