A Grain of Sand In My Shoes (Partnership Gone Bad) | part 8

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
~Mark Twain

I’m not sure how much I should even share about this.

In fact, I might legally have to come back and take this whole thing down altogether if things get ugly.

But… since the point of this series of posts is to be a memorial of sorts for myself (and hopefully for the two or three of you learning something/anything from our AwesomeGuests™ journey) I feel compelled to share at least a handful of thoughts about this significant challenge our fledgling company is facing.

In all of my past business partnerships; I’ve adhered to a rather stringent set of criteria regardless of how well I previously know each respective partner.
In hindsight, it’s clear where I skipped some steps and also very clear why I did. I think I’ll be able to be more forthright and detailed about these two things in the future but for now suffice it to say that I messed up.

And it’s clear that it wasn’t a little misstep at this point but rather something that could sink everything we’ve built to this point with AwesomeGuests™.

The as of this writing, we’ve been actively trying to divorce one of our co-founders. There were three of us that started this endeavor as an official company after the initial ideas had been stewing in my mind (and heart) for over a year or so.

It’s clear that one of our partners has been putting in part-time hours even though they are receiving a large percentage than the other two of us. The actual hours aren’t really a big issue for me so long as the quality and output of work is what is expected for a startup company like ours.

In all of my companies, every single team member knows that they can have all the flexibility in hours, vacation time, etc that they want/need so long as they get the work done the way they’re expected to — I don’t think I’d ever lead a company any other way.
Well, it’s been clear in output, results and quality of work — that this particular partner of ours hasn’t delivered in the slightest. This is exascerbated by the fact that I’ve pieced together the reality that they’re barely putting in part-time hours on this lovely company of ours.

W! T! F!!!

Me and the other partner are routinely grinding away to the tune of 80+ hours a week so this is obviously impossible for us to stomach at this point. Especially since all the work that this partner is supposed to deliver hasn’t materialized at even some semblance of an acceptable level.

Sheesh man. Growing a business is hard enough; it’s this kind of stuff to the left and the right that can wear down even an eternally optimistic dude like me.

I’m equally flabbergasted and straight-up, royally pissed-off since we need aggressive marketing lift and yet this person has set us back at least a year with their ho-hum, slow-drip, no-bang-for-buck efforts. It’s clear they don’t have a realistic understanding of how much blood, sweat and tears are required to build a company to the magnitude that we’re aiming for.

I’ll also note here that the vast majority of this partner’s equity in the company (again, the majority share between the three of us…) was based on their possession of a carefully culled list of thousands of highly enthusiastic, “ideal” prospects for us. We were led to believe that these were well cultivated and primed to buy into our new and innovative tool…

Well, if you read the most recent post before this you’ll recall the alarmingly low response to the ridiculously low-ball price point of $7 a month.
Turns out this list was not cultivated very well or often at all.

At our most conservative estimate, our multiple sales efforts with this list was going to make us cash-positive almost instantaneously. Even half of the expected volume of sales were going to easily help us recoup expensive programming and other vital startup infrastructure costs.

So it’s not to be and so this partnership is done. I don’t think it serves anyone to grind away at this kind of painful axe here in this medium or otherwise.

I got us into this mess so I’ll lead us out of it.

This isn’t an ideal situation by any stretch of the imagination and I hope to have very little to report on this front going forward and hopefully mostly positive outcomes to boot.

Later skaterz!

This is part of an on-going series — you can check out other entries here.

If you want a super duper, ridiculously sweetheart deal to become a special lifetime member of AwesomeGuests™ — sign up here under our current promotion while it lasts my friends.