People ask me how my co-founder and I have run a company together for over 18 years without falling apart the way most partnerships do.
The honest answer is that we almost did. And the two things that saved us had nothing to do with business.
Years back, we hit a rough patch. Differences of opinion on core parts of the business that kept turning into arguments. So we sat down with a mentor we both respected to sort it out, ready to lay out our grievances point by point and have him tell us who was right.
He let us go back and forth for a while. Then he asked a question that had nothing to do with anything we'd raised.
"Gentlemen, when last did you two go out for a drink together? When last did you sit and talk about life, not business? When last did you actually hang out?"
We looked at each other, then back at him in surprise.
We were living in different countries by then, had been for almost two years. We talked regularly, but mostly about business. He heard that and told us everything we'd brought him wasn't really about the disagreements at all.
What he saw were two people who had grown apart, maybe because we'd literally grown apart, physically, for a long stretch. The friction was just the symptom of the distance.
Then he said the thing I've carried ever since. Partnership is like marriage. There has to be intimacy. There have to be moments you spend together away from the work and the noise, just connecting as people. Lose that, and you stop being partners. You become two people who happen to share a business.
Distance had made us intentional about everything except each other. We planned meetings and deals and deadlines. We never once planned to just connect.
But he wasn't done. He gave us a second thing that day, and it has held just as long.
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No issue is ever big enough to lose respect for each other or speak to each other with disrespect. We were friends before the business.
We knew each other before the issue showed up, and we'd still be here long after it was gone. The disagreement was temporary. The relationship wasn't.
Hold on to that, he said, and everything else takes care of itself. You attack the issue, never the person. Because the moment you make it about personality, you forget you're both working toward the same goal.
The opinions and approaches may differ. The goal doesn't.
He's gone now, such a wise man. But those two lessons outlived him, and they're some of the truest advice I've ever been given.
So we changed how we operate. We started meeting up a few times a year with no agenda, protecting time together the way a couple protects date nights. And we made respect the one rule we don't break, no matter how heated it gets.
A lot of those issues resolved on their own after that, or just stopped mattering enough to fight about. Years later, the business keeps growing stronger.
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