Chapter 2: Business Partners
When starting a new business, it’s important to know your partners well, and establish clear boundaries. In 2018 I started a window tinting and car wrapping company with a partner 10 years older than me that ended up blowing up in my face. The falling out ended up costing me thousands of dollars, and I ended up leaving the business and moving across the country. Check out the video below for the story on how things went down and what I learned:
I have had a couple of bad experiences with business partners. Hopefully you can learn from these stories and avoid some of the mistakes I made.
In 2020 I was brought in as an equity owner of a clothing production company in Los Angeles to help save the company from bankruptcy and scale into new markets. I was sure the founder was a creative visionary, but he turned out to be grossly disillusioned with reality. Over the following year he stole over $20,000 from the company business account for personal expenses, and refused to relinquish his equity to the majority shareholders even after he had fled across the country. This story is why it’s so important to have incredibly detailed operating agreements that account for all types of contingency no matter how unlikely the outcome. Check out the video below for a detailed account of how what looked like a diamond in the rough ended up horribly wrong: