Finding Partners in Business and Life

Serial Auteur Failed Enterprise Syndrome—SAFE.  Yeah, it’s a thing.  Ok—it’s  a thing we just made up.  But it’s been very real in our lives. We are idea men. We have had lots and lots of ideas throughout our lives—many of them really great ideas.  The problem is, they haven’t gone anywhere. It seems the biggest problem was that we were trying so hard to hold on to them as OUR ideas.  We probably missed many opportunities to include like-minded partners in our grand schemes. The organic way that Coaching and Coffee Talks has grown, as an idea and as a business, has us thinking about finding partners in business and life. Following are some of the things that are working great for us, and some things we got wrong over the years.

How Not to Do It

Scott was a rock band leader in the 90s.  He was desperate for success, and pushing very hard to get there. In music publishing, the lyricist gets 50% of all of a song’s publishing. The other 50% is split between those that write the music.  So, since he wrote the lyrics and helped write the music for his band, he insisted on getting 50% + 16.6% (his share of the music) = 67%.The remaining 33% was split amongst three additional band members (11-11-11%). Sounds fun for the rest of the band members, right? By the way, that was 67% of nothing, because the band never went anywhere. Maybe if the band was an equal partnership, where everyone was invested equally in its success, it would have been different.  Who knows.  It certainly would have been more fun, and everyone involved would have felt valued and respected. Instead, the band ended with hard feelings all around. This story is pretty common in the annals of rock and roll band break-ups—Perry Farrell, the singer and leader of Jane’s Addiction, insisted on the same arrangement, which also led to his band’s demise. 

Complementary Skill Sets

As Coaching and Coffee Talks grew organically, we could see that we had very different skill sets that complemented each other well.  Scott has a degree in Journalism and Television Broadcasting, and a degree in Global Nutrition & Health. He also worked professionally in New York as a musician and actor, and in Denmark for the last 10 years as a personal trainer and product spokesman. It was immediately evident that he had a facility for words, and that he was very comfortable being on camera and being the “face” of the business. 

Lennart has a degree in Philosophy and a Masters in Economics. He is also very tech-minded (having created our website), but also has a creative background as a rock musician. It was obvious from the start that he had all the great ideas regarding a business set up, and his love of the Stoic Philosophers has been infused into the heart and soul of our business philosophy. 

We recently realized we needed a computer programming genius to help us execute some of the developing ideas we have.  Enter our third partner, Kristian.  He is a next-level tech genius who, among other things, was heavily involved with created the NEM-ID app (an identification verification system) for the Faroe Islands. He has created our app that we will be launching in 2021. 

If we had scraped together the money to pay Kristian to make our app, I’m sure we would have ended up with something really good. But in having him as a partner, we get something great—that he is really putting his full creative power into—because he is a part of it. It’s much better than playing it SAFE, and ending up with a bigger percentage of nothing. As a partnership, we are all working on this all the time—and all have the same to gain in its success.

Someone You Like to Hang Out With

Is this obvious? We don’t know, it wasn’t to us. We have spent long hours working with people we didn’t actually like that much—or worse.  Why? Life is short—we might as well work on things with people we actually enjoy being around, whenever we can. As we have talked about before, our friendship began over a post-training cup of coffee—and eventually Lennart said, “We should write this shit down!” 

Work Philosophy

This one can be a bit tricky, because you don’t really know if you work in the same way, or can agree on a mode of working, until you actually give it a try together. We were lucky to find out that we both like to work quickly, and that we aren’t interested in laboring over things in a perfectionistic manner. We are also both happy to hand things over to the other, if something is better suited to the other’s skill set. We think these two things are key to making progress in a creative endeavour. 

Trust

We are fortunate to have felt an almost inexplicable trust in each other from the start of our coffee talks. We think this really is the basis for any relationship, be it business or personal. With questions of trust out of the way, it frees up so much space in the brain to concentrate on more creative and constructive pursuits. 

We hope you found some inspiration to take into your own business and personal relationships.  

Until next time,

Scott and Lennart