Between our longer interview-driven episodes of the podcast, like the most recent with the owner of Graeter’s Ice Cream, we release a shorter “tactical” essay. In these episodes, we focus on a particular dynamic of business ownership. Now that we have a set of interviews to draw from, they will often pull a voice from a past episode that we weren’t able to cover in full.
In today’s essay, we explore the nature of partnership, with insights from London restauranteur Jeremy King and one of the brother owners of Fraíche Wine Group — John Kennedy.
In two weeks— we will return with a full episode centered on the founder of the home security company, Ring. We will delve into the ownership challenges in building out the company and his more recent philanthropic pursuits driving community development in a small town in Missouri!
The Complexity of Partnership
Close your eyes briefly, and let’s go back in time. Say you want to start a lemonade stand. You have a younger sister who is interested but, if you are being honest, lacks the right skills. Your neighborhood best friend has done it before, but in a different way than you want. Your mom and dad have the capital – or at least the lemons – but weren’t quite on their game in recent coaching of your youth league soccer. As such, you pause before stepping forward in partnership.
Ok… eyes open.
Whether in starting a kid's venture or taking the leap into full-blown adult entrepreneurship, what does it mean to partner with someone in a venture? How do you pick the right person? When is that partnership life-giving and supportive of the business, and what is it strategically complex or even destructive?
Maturing Past the “Illusion of Wholeness”
London Restaurateur Jeremy King is the consummate gentleman. He is also a dear friend. I got to know Jeremy years ago a few years back when I was asked to spend a weekend with a group of leaders in the hospitality space, discussing the “great resignation” and its impact on the industry.
Since then, what I have most appreciated about Jeremy are his insights on intuition, partnership, and entrepreneurship.
Let’s revisit one clip from our initial conversation in 2024 (full episode here). Here, Jeremy discusses how a partnership with a business owner is, in many ways, akin to a romantic partnership.
There's a wonderful book, I believe it was called The Happiness Quotient, where it showed on a graph the evolution of a romantic relationship. At the moment that you fall in love, they're just the most amazing person. Happiness and love is right up the very, very top of the graph. In this momement, you believe you’ve met the perfect person. But, as the author said, be careful, as this is the most dangerous time. In many way, it's because it's a passionate love as opposed to an emotional love. That passionate love goes along for a time, but then it starts to drop off. Meanwhile, a relationship that started with emotional love, though it might start at a lower height, is now starting to slowly rise up on the same graph. At some point, they cross over. In many ways, I think that's what happens in business and in marriage. We have to take time to find out whether we're right for each other.
So, how do you find the person who complements you just the right way? On the one hand, we have to find someone who balances our weaknesses. But, as you hear from Jeremy, we also have to make sure we don't idealize someone whose differences are almost idealized out of the rich soil of personal jealousy.
Returning to romance, I love the concept of the "Illusion of Wholeness,” first introduced by Katherine P. Ewing and brought to the masses by psychoanalyst Esther Perel. Perel writes that to feel that you are "completed" by another person is to romanticize love in a way that sets people up for disappointment. No partner can fulfill all your emotional needs. No person can resolve all your personal insecurities.
The same is true for business partners. Each of us has to be wary of making someone into an idealized version of themselves. This is a goal that they could never meet.
While two individuals can vary on a number of dimensions, one of the more interesting ones specific to business is one’s appetite for risk. When one person wants to go all in, so too, another might be more of a hedger.
My wife Kelley and I talk about this a lot. The fact that both of us are people who tend toward the hedge side of the lever means that we have been much less likely to start something, either separately or together.
Let’s go to another guest from Season 1 – John Kennedy of Fraíche Wine Group. Here, John talks about how people in the same business – in this case, two brothers– are likely to experience risk differently. All of this can and likely does influence when they are ready to jump all in. In John’s words, this difference in initial risk profile created tension with his brother Michael – something they had to work through early in their business relationship:
I think if we had tension, it was that comfort with risk. As one example, as Michael was starting this business, our initial conversations were that he was going to continue on with his day job and we build this thing on the site. But, one day, he came to us and said, I can't do that. If we're gonna do this, we're gonna do it all in. And at the start, the very, very practical me said, “what about this risk and that risk”? But as I look back now, I understand that had that not happened, I really don't think we'd be here on this podcast with you today because I don't know that we would have had the success.
The ability of partners to bring and then resolve their different appetites for risk helped generate the business.
Joint Ventures Tools in a Variety of Relationships
A few years back, I worked with a group of real estate and retail entrepreneurs who were starting to explore formalizing their shared work into a joint venture. A good part of their upfront discernment centered around these kinds of discussions.
How similar are we?
How aligned are the cultures of our two firms?
If we start to do more things together, how do we know who owns what of the process?
In helping two of them through this process, I reached out to friends like Jeremy to mine his wisdom. I also stumbled upon a short piece from Philip Zanfanga and colleagues in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance titled "Decision-making in 50:50 joint ventures."
What I liked about this article was how it identified a set of strategies for doing partnerships together, given the real differences we just discussed. The list included tactics like a "Golden Share" where, for certain decisions, one JV shareholder retains a tie-breaking vote. Another was the "Sole Risk Provisions. " In this approach, for major projects prone to deadlock, the interested shareholder is allowed to pursue the investment in question independently.
Outside of contracts alone -- which can feel so formal -- they also talk about the importance of finding alignment on a set of JV Guiding Principles. This document clarifies the shareholders' expectations for growth, investment, or use of resources.
Might this also be helpful in other areas of partnership in our lives? How clearly might we walk through what it means to better partner with someone in life's biggest ventures -- whether professional or personal? When we move past the “you complete me” phase of romantic love, we realize very quickly that we will inevitably have very different ways of moving in the world. That can be just as joyful as it can be a source of significant tension.
So, what do you think? Can you name three guiding values in your own romantic and family partnership? Can you identify a set of shared decision rules for navigating differences? Stepping into this reality with eyes wide open -- and the right set of tools in hand -- can truly be a gift.