It is often common for people to choose business partners who are fairly similar to themselves. And you can certainly see the benefits of doing so. If you find someone who is similar to you, you’re more likely to get along, enjoy working together and have similar goals for the company.
However, there can be some problems with a business partner who is too similar to you. Let’s look at what two of these problems are and why it may be better to look for someone a bit different.
Conflicting roles
First off, the two of you might run into conflicts where you both want to have the same role within the company. Maybe you both like to manage people or maybe you both are interested in sales. On the other side, perhaps both of you like to do design or come up with ideas for how the company should move forward. All of this can be beneficial, but you can run into conflicts if you are both essentially trying to do the same job.
Lack of skills
The second problem is that your business itself may lack certain skills that would be beneficial. If you are both great at product design but neither one of you are naturally talented at sales, for instance, you could wind up with excellent products that no one buys because they don’t know those products exist. It is best to have complementary skills so the business as a whole has a wider range of things that can be accomplished and ways in which the two of you can work together.
After choosing a business partner, creating a partnership agreement is an important step to take and you need to know about your legal options.