JUNE 11, 2003

ENTREPRENEUR'S BYLINE
By Sandy Lish and Wendy Spivak


Making an Equal Partnership Work
Launching a startup with a friend demands the honesty and trust of a good marriage. Without them, it's a business on the rocks


By Sandy Lish and Wendy Spivak
Castle Group co-founders Sandy Lish and Wendy Spivak

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Seven years ago, when we founded The Castle Group, our Boston-based public relations and events-management agency, we were determined to do so on a footing that everyone said wouldn't work. We wanted to build the company as equals, each with a 50% stake. Our lawyer, our accountant, and the consultants we retained all pointed out the obvious: strong-willed entrepreneurs bent on exercising control often fail as partners over the long haul.


And we were hardly naive. We had each risen up corporate ladders, gained significant skills in our fields -- Sandy in public relations and Wendy in events management, where she produced events from concept to completion including promotion, marketing and logistics. Having met in 1995, when Wendy, then communications director at a healthcare company, retained Sandy's public relations firm, we had spotted a niche in New England for an agency that offered both specialties.

In our seven years, ours has been a partnership that hasn't failed. In fact, The Castle Group's revenue has soared fivefold, to $2.5 million, and the company has been profitable since the first year. Our client roster now numbers 20, vs. 2 when we opened our doors, and we've built our staff to 19.

INTERNAL NEGOTIATING.  What has enabled us to stay the course in building a company as equals, we believe, has been our ability to negotiate. In short, we have taken a skill typically associated with dealing with outsiders, such as financiers, vendors, and customers, and applied it to ourselves. In doing so, we have been able to survive and thrive working in a relationship with the closeness and potential for conflict that is second only to that of a marriage.

Our negotiating prowess has permeated dealings as elementary as what to have for lunch. In the early days, we would yell at each other from across the hall in our cramped quarters -- and, yes, we still shout out lunch suggestions today.

In a particularly difficult situation, negotiating was what enabled us to turn down a client that would have been our largest, but that came with stipulations we couldn't accept. We both wanted to take on the client, but we both decided -- eventually -- that it just wasn't right.

In our ability to negotiate, we draw upon a trio of principles -- namely, balance, trust, and skills. You should as well, if you are an entrepreneur considering the less typical path of not going it alone. What follows is a look at each.

A QUESTION OF BALANCE.  Deciding to work together in an entrepreneurial setting, we both knew that we had a lot in common: our personalities "clicked," our professional aspirations meshed, and we stood equally for values such as honesty, fairness and thinking things through in business settings.

Just as important, however, was that we also had complementary skills and temperaments. When making a hiring decision, for example, Wendy might see the necessity of providing for future growth, while Sandy is likely to turn her eye toward the decision's effect on the bottom line. Although we are friends -- and do socialize occasionally -- we differ personally as well. Sandy, with her home in the suburbs, husband, and two children, provides a counterpoint to Wendy residing in an in-town condo and favoring exotic travel.

The point here is that the yin and yang -- in our set of skills, our temperaments, even our divergent personal interests -- makes for the balance necessary for us to negotiate as equals. Indeed, it was balance that enabled us to ease our way into a partnership in which we would need to share control, breaking from our previous relationship as contractor and employer.

Some tips for bringing balance into an equal entrepreneurial relationship include the following:

• Understand your partner's perspective -- and that it may differ from your own.
• Put yourself in your partner's shoes so that you can provide support when necessary.
• Spend time together – but also spend time apart.
• Be open, flexible and fair, all the while understanding that it's OK at times to have different needs and objectives.
• Find humor in situations, for not everything is a serious as it seems.
• Trust

Continued on next page>>  | 1 | 2




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