Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants.

So guys, I want to talk about partnership, and Andrew and I talk a lot about this. We talk about it from a couple stages. So there are a couple different stages, I would say, of partnership or not stages. But really types would be a better word and better language. So there are a couple types of partnership.

First, I would say that you have partnership just within a client to service provider or client to product relationship. So when somebody chooses to buy your product, they’re choosing to partner with you. They’re choosing to trust you. They’re choosing to trust the product. Have buy into it, so and so forth. Same thing with services. You offer services in a business cool people have decided to partner with you. Then you have what I would call Level Two Partnership, which is where you are actually partnering with another company. So company to company, right? So you actually have another company that you’re partnered with that you either help supply or you’re working together for or through to a unified goal, right?

And so you have that sort of partnership to where you are both offering things to each other, and you have a mutual agreement, mutual partnership. Both companies are growing, and then you’re both splitting the work, so it’s more than just a service provider. There’s an in depth level of trust and things like that. Then you have a level three Partnership, which is what Andrew and I have. We’re partners, we’re business partners. We both have ownership. We both have an agreed upon relationship for how to run the business, and then there’s a deep buy into the vision. Now here’s where I’m going with all of this. Okay? And by the way, if you are, if you want to get married, or you’re looking for relationship with somebody cool, you’re looking for partnership. And I think most people like cool, do I love them? Yes, that’s true. But as I’m talking about this apply the things that I’m saying to this, because if you get the wrong person in life, you marry the wrong person, it will royally screw up your life in a lot of ways.

I’m saying this because my wife’s an attorney and does a lot of family law, and thankfully being blessed in my ignorance and looking at things you know, back like from the past, in hindsight, 2020 I really got blessed with a lot of stuff. So and even Andrew and I, when we first started business, we were young in business and idiots and didn’t know what we were doing. We’ve got Harvard degree in stupidity, both of us. And it’s like, oh, wow, yeah, cool. We really got blessed with our partnership with who we were, and so knowing what we know now is like, Wow, we had no idea.

And so anyways, walking through that, I want to talk to you about it from this aspect, because we’ve, we’ve talked to a lot of people over the years. How do you find a good partner? How do you find somebody? And here’s where you actually really need to stop. If you’re looking to partner with somebody. You want to partner in business, you want to partner in life, you need to pause and go, am I a good partner? Am I somebody that is worth partnering with? Andrew and I talk about this on all three of those stages in business. Level one, which is just customer like client to business relationship. Level two would be business to business. Level three is business partners and in that way.

And we talk about that, okay, we talk about that. And we talk about cool. Are we somebody that somebody wants to partner with for a business do people want to partner with us as friends? Do people want to partner with us as business partners? Do people want to partner with us? Does Andrew want to partner with me and so a few things from my side that I think make a good partner. First is integrity and honor. Are you honorable and do you have integrity? Because if you’re sitting thinking, oh, what makes a good partner awesome, you don’t want to sit down and partner with somebody who’s going to lie, cheat or steal.

But the next question is, are you that person? and by Lie, Lie is a big one, because most people are like, well, you know, I’m not really lying, but then there’s not really transparency. Andrew and I talk about transparency a lot, where we’re transparent about everything, and it doesn’t matter what relationship we have, it doesn’t matter who is in charge and who is not, and even our teammates, where it’s like, no, we need to have transparency to where if somebody is failing, we’re not going to sit there and lie, or we’ll openly come through like, Hey, I screwed up, right? So honor transparency. That’s a huge one.

The other one, I would say, is ownership. Do you have agency of yourself? Do you take responsibility for the decisions you make. Do you take responsibility for the decisions and actions you’ve taken? Are they yours, or are they somebody else’s? And then blame is shifted, because when blame is shifted, that makes a horrible partner, because then you can’t actually have honest conversations, and if nobody owns the problem, you can’t solve the problem.

Another one I would say too, is, do you actually have grit to work through all the crap that’s going to hit the fan when you enter partnership? You have grit? Are you willing to actually work through and have the humility to work through the things that are needed in order to have healthy partnership? Any relationship takes work, and I’m over guys, but I’m going to keep talking for a little bit. Any relationship really takes a lot of work, and it takes grit and determination to get back up when stuff sucks and it gets hard.

The other thing is, are you focused? do you have the same goals? Are you aligned? Do you have that? Is that actually going to occur? And then the last one I would say is, are you willing to learn and continually improve and change? Do you have the humility to do that? And those are the characteristics of what I think make a great partner. And you need to stop and ask and go through like, cool, Is this me? Is it really me? And if it is, you cool, you’re in a good position, because then you’ll attract somebody like that.

But if, if it isn’t you, you got work to do before looking at a partner, because you need to be a good person to partner with too. It’s same thing for a relationship. Take this and apply it to a personal relationship. Would you make a good partner?

Anyways, guys, I’ll catch you later. Peace.