Partnerhips
Tag-teaming the Internet marketing world
Many stay-at-home moms form partnerships to start an Internet business. There can be several advantages to working with another stay-at-home mom who shares your visions, ideals, goals, and work habits.
The biggest advantage to partnering is that you won’t be going at it alone. It’s always good to have someone else to rely on when you can’t handle everything yourself. A good business partner can help to ease the isolation of running an online business.
Another advantage to partnerships is the ability to partner with someone whose skills complement yours, rather than compete with them. For example, if you have solid, well-developed products but no clue when it comes to creating a website or navigating the Internet, you could partner with another mom who possesses strong Internet skills. Good partners fill the gaps in each others’ skill sets to form a well-rounded and viable business.
Most Internet marketers kiss the idea of sick days and vacations goodbye—at least for the first few years of operation. With a partnership, you have someone to cover for you if you need to take a few days off. Solitary business owners don’t have that luxury, and often end up outsourcing work when life’s unavoidable delays catch them unawares.
However, before you determine that partnerships are all sunshine and roses, you should be aware that there are disadvantages and even dangers to forming a partnership. If your partner loses interest or fails to pull her own weight, you could end up shouldering the majority of the workload and still splitting your profits. Also, partnership breakups are notoriously nasty affairs for many people—think divorce here. Partners have an equal stake in the business, and when they’re forced to part ways, the division can get ugly.
For this reason, it is important to be cautious when entering a partnership. Don’t agree to partner with someone you don’t know. You should only enter a partnership after you’ve built a strong relationship and you’ve both had a chance to become familiar with each other’s work habits, interests and dislikes, personal styles, and skill levels.
With the exception of spousal teams, family members rarely make good business partners. Disastrous disagreements between family members are practically inevitable. Unless you are intimately familiar with a family member’s business acumen, it’s a bad idea to partner with a relative.
In all partnership cases, it is imperative that you legalize the partnership
before you begin the business. You need a contract that spells out exactly who
controls what portions of the business, what the profit split is (usually 50-50),
and who gets what in the event of dissolution of the business. Be sure your
partnership contract is reviewed by a legal professional, signed by both parties,
witnessed and notarized, and make sure each partner has a physical copy of the
final, signed contract.
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