How Do People Factor into Your Business Decisions?

The following is adapted from Discernment.

I’ve learned a lot from building and selling companies, but perhaps no business principle has consistently proven true more than this one: you must be willing to see other people’s point of view and compromise with them. 

In running a business, finding ways to make everyone with a stake in the company happy often yields the best outcome, for you and your business partners. If the person with a majority stake instead tries to force their vision for the company on the others, you’ll inevitably create conflict and slow the company’s overall growth. 

If I hadn’t sought ways to compromise with my business partners, one of the first businesses I started, co-owned, and eventually sold, AdvantaClean, would have never grown from a single operation into a nation-wide franchise. Here’s how we did it, and how you can apply the same collaborative mindset to your business. 

Starting a Business Partnership

In 1992, I made the decision to go down to Florida to help with the cleanup after Hurricane Andrew. I started doing emergency cleanup and demolition—drying in roofs, helping people protect their property—and picked up decades of knowledge in seventeen short, intense months. 

As the recovery work was winding down, my buddy Tom and I decided to go into business with two older guys doing insurance repairs and reconstruction. Our business partners were planning to split 51 percent of the new company, AdvantaClean, between them and divide the remaining 49 percent between Tom and me. 

They were our mentors and had much more experience plus advanced degrees, but even then, I knew what that one percentage point meant: we wouldn’t have an equal say in the decisions. This was the first point in the partnership where everyone would agree to compromise. Tom and I wanted a greater stake, but what did our partners want? We had to get creative to make the deal worth it to them. 

Compromise Leads to Mutually Beneficial Outcomes

Instead of accepting the minority ownership stake, I offered our business partners a trade. They loved their alma mater, the University of Florida, so I said that if we were all equal partners, we could brand the company with Florida Gator colors. The company colors were something our business partners wanted, and they could see how much we wanted an equal stake.

That’s how AdvantaClean ended up orange and blue, and how I ended up with a full quarter of it. It turned out to have been a smart move for everyone, and just a year later, three of us bought the fourth guy out. By 2004, I owned the company outright. 

I had a vision of AdvantaClean as a national company and was pushing us to try new things and to invest more in the brand. My partners didn’t share that vision, but rather than creating conflict and trying to force the issue, we all compromised once again. I offered them a generous buyout, and they took it. I was able to expand the company the way I wanted, and my former partners were able to invest their money in new ventures. In the end, franchising AdvantaClean turned out to be highly profitable for me, if not a bit of a gamble. 

Business Is All About People

The moral of this story isn’t that I knew AdvantaClean would eventually be as valuable as it was. I didn’t. 

I did know it would always be about people, and for any partnership to work, people must be willing to compromise. Compromise was the reason my partners traded Gator colors for half of one percentage point. Compromise was the reason I bought my partners out when they didn’t want to share in my gamble. Had we stayed together, they wouldn’t be any richer now than they are. In any alternate scenario that included them, AdvantaClean would never have franchised. 

It was only by focusing on what each of us wanted that we were able to find a positive, conflict-free outcome. I had to think about what they wanted, what I wanted, and where the two overlapped. 

Put People at the Center of Your Decisions

The ability to compromise and work well with other people led me down the path to ownership, profitability, and long-term success. If your business is struggling, I suggest you ask yourself, “How do people factor into my decision-making? Am I willing to compromise?”

If the answer is “they don’t,” and “I’m not,” you probably want to consider changing that. As long as other people are involved in your business, you have to consider their motivations, wants, and goals, otherwise, you risk putting them at odds with you. By keeping them in your decision-making process, you work with them, not against them.

Working with other people means you can’t control the outcome of every situation. But by considering what your business partners want, you can find situations that work for everyone. 

For more advice on running a business, you can find Discernment on Amazon.

Jeff Dudan is a seasoned business builder, Undercover Boss, and former college football player. He went to Florida to paint in the wake of Hurricane Andrew and two years later launched AdvantaClean, a national restoration franchise that had 240 locations in 37 states when Jeff exited the company in 2019. He’s since joined up with his brother, Mike, to start Dudan Partners, a catalyst for enterprise growth in the franchise industry. Jeff recently retired from coaching his kids’ sports teams—thirty combined seasons in the past twelve years—and is a top Forbes contributor.