How to Choose a Business Partner

Choosing a business partner is like choosing a life partner—you’re tying your future to someone else’s decisions, habits, and values. And just like in romance, mutual attraction isn’t enough.

We tend to look at credentials, charisma, complementary skills. But we often skip the deeper questions: What does this person believe about money? Conflict? Success? What are they like when they’re under pressure? Do they take responsibility when they screw up? Do they have a track record of healthy relationships in other areas of their life? What have they done in the past when they’ve failed? What do they do with power?

You will not always agree with your partner. You shouldn’t always agree. A good partner will challenge you and force growth. But there has to be psychological safety—someone who can sit in disagreement without blowing things up. Someone who’s aligned with your values, not just your goals. And ask yourself: Is there any unhelpful pattern or trauma that has appeared in my life which I am at risk of repeating in my business by selecting this person to be my co-founder? Are we each skilled and self-aware enough to be accountable and mitigate for any psychological baggage we are carrying into this venture?

Before you sign anything, talk. About fear. About failure. About ambition. About what happens when one of you wants to leave. This isn’t paranoia—it’s maturity. If you can talk about all of this now, you’ll know how to move forward when things get hard.

Want more help with this process? Need to re-set things with your business partner to make them healthier and more functional? For the first time in a long time, I’m taking on new clients: Let’s talk.

The Two Approaches that Help Entrepreneurs Beat Anxiety (and Yes, You Need Both)

Anxiety can manifest in many ways for entrepreneurs. Perhaps you find yourself constantly worrying about finances, second-guessing your decisions, or struggling to control racing thoughts. Maybe you experience physical symptoms like muscle tension, digestive issues, or a racing heart. These are all common signs that anxiety might be impacting your well-being.

When anxiety hits, there are a couple of frameworks I teach all my entrepreneurs so they can beat it. The first is managing the body-based symptoms that are distressing. Using breathing exercises, meditation, exercise, and getting proper rest and nutrition are key here. You should have both in-the-moment tools as well as routines that support your physiology on a regular basis.

The second framework is something known as cognitive reframing. Filtering your thoughts through the lenses of both accuracy and helpfulness is key - if you’re having a thought and it’s not both accurate and helpful, it’s time to change the thought.

I teach these frameworks in sequence, because it’s very hard to change your thoughts when your body feels out of control. Many entrepreneurs wish they could ignore their bodies, but when you treat your body with respect, it really serves you and your business, so tend to your breath and body, and your mind will be more capable of accurate, helpful thoughts - and more poised to help you problem-solve.

Good therapy and coaching should help you understand your anxiety, develop coping strategies, and build the mental resilience you need to master your anxiety as an entrepreneur. As a therapist and executive advisor, I help you identify the root causes of your anxiety, whether it's related to specific stressors in your business, past experiences, or underlying thought patterns, and then I teach you the tools you need to get through it. Therapy can also help you develop long-term strategies for building resilience and managing stress, so you can face challenges with greater confidence and clarity.

Money is a Tool, Not a Goal

As a therapist for entrepreneurs, I spend a lot of time talking to people about money.

We learn a lot about ourselves when we talk about money, because money is a completely neutral and amoral object that we imbue with immense meaning. As a collective, we project our own light and darkness onto it. As individuals, we turn money into a god or a weapon, and we force it to act as a stand-in for happiness and power and freedom and safety. 

But beyond meeting our basic needs and the needs of people we care about, and giving us access to experiences and objects that we find personally meaningful (not status symbols, but things we actually care about), money has no inherent value. It has limits.

On the individual level, most of us need to learn the lesson that enormous sums of money won’t make us happy or safe in the ways we imagined, and that needing money to feel free or powerful creates a really precarious, tenuous, conditional, and ultimately false freedom and power. (The collective seems never to learn this lesson, nor to remember it for very long.)

Deep conversation about money is important because we are only able to have our highest-level relationship to money when we can put it in its proper place: Money is a tool, not a goal, and it is meant to be deployed in the world as a means of exchange and a conduit for creation. And like another common tool, the hammer, we can use money either to build or destroy. When money becomes something different than a tool, something bigger, we’re playing games that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with our interior lives, and our unexamined values and fantasies. So perhaps money’s greatest power is not in helping us achieve some abstract feeling like freedom or power or happiness, but in revealing exactly who we are and what we want. Money, and how we behave with it, is a mirror. 

When money causes distress, when you feel like it’s never enough, when it seems like money slips through your fingers constantly, or when you conflate it with abstract ideas it can never hope to live up to, it might be worth examining your relationship to it. Coming to a mature understanding of what money means to you–what you’ve made it in your mind, which it can never live up to–is a major developmental task for most entrepreneurs. And that exploration can often lead to making money with more ease and satisfaction and creating a company and life you actually value.

Did this post make you think? Consider sharing it with a friend, and reach out below if you’re ready to explore more.

Therapy for Entrepreneurs featured on Mission Matters Podcast

Thanks to Adam Torres and the team at Mission Matters for featuring my work with Therapy for Entrepreneurs and Run Walk Talk® on the Mission Matters Podcast. We talked about psychology for entrepreneurs and I explained what I teach entrepreneurs to help them be successful, including the basics of self-management, which include self-awareness, self-care, and self-regulation.

I’m always excited to spread the mission of mental health and appreciate the opportunity to do so in the media. If you’re interested in learning more or need an expert to comment on entrepreneur psychology, reach out here.

So You Hate Your Business Partner. Now What?

As a therapist for business partners, it’s not uncommon for me to have people to show up to my office ready to walk away from a profitable business because they hate each other so much. Just like in marriage counseling, often business partners have been suffering for years in bad communication, unhealthy dynamics, and pent-up resentment before they seek help (though unlike marriage counseling, the number of therapists who can help them is much more limited).

I don’t know your situation, so I can’t tell you what to do (and even if I did know your situation, the only ones who can decide what to do are you and your partner - so it’s rare for me to ever tell someone what to do). But the first step to dealing with your hatred of your business partner is to remember that you have options. You are not stuck, and here are some options.

Your first option, of course, is some version of leaving - either you or them. Cut your losses and just go. Or find a mediator or attorneys, get a valuation for the company, find some financing and get your partner to buy you out or you buy your partner out. Depending on how much hatred is between you, this version can be very fast or very drawn-out and expensive. You can also sell the business, essentially both leaving. Life is very short, and spending the bulk of it with people you hate is not a great way to live it.

The second option is to kill the business. I heard a quote by Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, recently: “More startups die by suicide than homicide,” and that’s this option - a successful business can end because partners don’t get along. If you wait long enough in a dynamic where you hate your business partner, you may both “commit suicide” on behalf of the business by acting out your dislike for each other on your employees or customers - then the company will die, because no one wants to be around owners who hate each other or to suffer the consequences of their bad behavior.

Then there’s a third option: Work on not hating your business partner. Take 100% responsibility for your own behavior, learn to ask for what you want, and see what happens. You and your business partner are part of a system. By changing yourself, your business partner will likely change, too. Start treating your business partner like someone you care about, whose well-being is inextricably tied to your own, as though they are a unique and valuable person who could leave you at any time and is totally irreplaceable - because that’s often the truth. And often when you become impeccable in your own communication and behavior, without worrying about what the other person is doing and giving them time to trust the changes you are making in yourself, you will be amazed by the positive ways they change in response.

One of the very hard things about having a business partner is the vulnerability that comes from having a business partner, and all the horrible things it reveals about yourself. So sometimes it’s easier to hate the person that’s inspiring all the dark and shadowy parts of you to come out. Part of what therapy and executive advising for business partners does is help you both to learn how to manage yourselves better as individuals and work together as partners. You’re never stuck. And if you need help figuring it out, contact me here.