Don’t Try with a Little Help from my Friends

What would you do if I presented you with a business plan? Would you stand up and walk out on me? Well, if we were friends (especially very close ones) that is exactly what you should do. Or at least walk to the bar, get me a drink, come back and give me a very firm ‘I love but...no’ as we click glasses and let the dream die. Were it not for the incredible lessons I’d learnt over the last two years, this is exactly how I would have wanted the conversation to go with my former business partner.

We’ve been close friends for almost two decades. We first met at Drama Centre London back in the autumn of 2003 and were pretty much inseparable. After drama school was done with, we both ventured into the profession to try and make our way in the world. Like so many others before us, it didn’t work out. We both discovered that drama school is basically the world's most expensive lottery ticket. So, I found the world of recruitment and photography (odd combo, I know) and he promotions; although he still keeps a hand in the world of acting whereas I do not. I didn’t get the acting career I wanted, but I did form some amazing friendships, including that of my former business partner. Fast forward to 13 years after we graduate, and we’re starting a business together making promotional films for companies to share online. We signed our first client in November 2019 and within the space of a month, we had a website, a bank account and a registered company. This was the beginning of Strategic Visual. It was the dream start. Over the next two months, we built a pipeline of over ￡20,000 worth of work. We spent hours on the phone every day going over concepts, ideas and strategies. We were on fire and felt unstoppable.

Then the pandemic hit.

I watched our entire pipeline disappear in less than an hour. It went from ￡20,000 to ￡0 like at the end of a cruel a gameshow and without the wry smile from the host to offer even a semblance of comfort. We felt defeated. Of course, we knew that out of everyone affected, we were by far not the worst. Being in our infancy, we didn’t need to lay anybody off or close down an office. It was more annoying than devastating in hindsight. In spite of this, we decided to push on and, against the odds, we actually had a pretty decent summer when the government let us out again. The clients were signing and we were moving things forward but it was around here that the cracks were starting to show. Shortly after this, we hit another slow period and we started noticing serious changes within the market. This meant we had to be very adaptive, come up with new ways to sign clients and offer new types of services. This is when I finally realised one of the major problems we had. My business partner was not entrepreneurial. That is in no way a personal criticism. He’s just not entrepreneurial or indeed that interested in business in general. The running of it, the nuts and bolts. He is creative, passionate about his work and awesome at what he does. Which, while being a valuable asset, is not the same thing. ?This seems like an odd thing not to notice but in the beginning, when we were busy and new to it all, his ONLY focus was the creative stuff. We didn't have any fallow periods until a lot later so this is something that never actually occurred to me in the beginning. I’d essentially gone to sea with a sailor that can only sail in one type of weather. We were not prepared for what lay ahead. We were both so happy to be doing what we loved that we ended up overlooking a lot of key factors. Another of which was the second reason we shouldn’t have gone into business together. Our long term ambitions for the business simply did not align. In his mind, he wanted to keep things small, make enough money to get by and only work when we had to. Mine was (and still is) to build a team, work internationally and expand. There is nothing wrong with either of these ambitions but it doesn’t take a McKinsey consultant to see that this is a fundamental flaw in a business partnership. He felt rushed and overworked and I felt like a dog on a lead that couldn’t walk fast enough. This could be wrongly misinterpreted as laziness from my point of view or greed from his but the point is we were not facing the same direction and ultimately just drifted away from each other, which in the end led us to lose sight of why we started in the first place.

The third reason the partnership was doomed is that being in business with friends makes it very difficult to take emotions out of the equation. You find yourself (or at least I did) making allowances and holding back truths to spare feelings. In the end, this doesn’t help the business and can set you on a path to ruin. The turning point for me was when I found myself thinking about the best way to say something or dress up an inconvenient truth. “Why?”, I thought. The answer was clear. It’s because I valued the friendship more than the business. Most business start-ups will fail. But going into business with friends will make the cost of that failure much higher. Once we’d had the conversation and decided it was best to call things quits, we went for a beer and discussed the handover. We got the boring stuff out of the way and in less than ten minutes we were back to talking about our favourite film scenes, our families and reminiscing about how we used to hit the West End in 2005 with barely ￡20 between us and somehow have the night of our lives. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d spoken like this. One thing was very clear to me that evening, I’d missed my friend. All we’d talked about for the last two years was shoots, client briefs and frame rates. In short, nothing that important in the grand scheme of life. We had fun with the business a lot of the time and achieved some great results. The greatest result was coming out the other end of it with our friendship intact. It could have been a lot worse. We realised we were playing with fire so decided to throw cold water on it before it got out of control. So, while we may think our friendships are invincible and can survive anything, the truth is the world of business is a whole other world entirely and, for my money, should be kept as separate as fire and gasoline. Even The Beatles broke up. ?