How to make partnerships work

Great business partnerships tend to trip off the tongue, like Hewlett and Packard, or Page and Brin. These guys started out together and built hugely successful companies with two things, intelligence and a complementary set of skills.

When you build a company on your own, it can be different. The idea of entering a legally binding business partnership can feel intensely uncomfortable. Why do you need other people? How can they share your vision? Will they screw up and burn your reputation? Or will they steal the glory and most of the money?

However uncomfortable for a newcomer, business partnerships are inescapable. They are often essential for overturning the normal barriers to expansion. In construction, or telecommunications they are part of the air you breathe. It’s how you share risks and pool expertise to build new airports, cable or mobile networks, mass transit and housing projects.

In November 2019, we signed contracts with Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar for a Public Private Partnership to deliver high speed broadband to 1.1 million people — the single biggest investment in rural Ireland since rural electrification.

Some challenges, such as connecting the four billion people in the world with poor or non-existent access to the internet, are difficult and complex and they require state involvement. Public-private partnerships are increasingly the way forward, especially where incentives from the state are required for the project to be viable.

For a business this can be a fraught area. The nature of politics means almost every government initiative is condemned by someone. If you’re going into a public-private partnership you have to be prepared for the scrutiny and competition. Both are valuable in some ways, as they create a very high standard, and that’s not a bad thing.

Partnerships at any level take a certain level of skill and experience to get right. Trust is fundamental.

From early on, I followed the advice of my mentor and business partner Walter Scott, the former CEO of Kiewit Corporation, one of North America’s largest and most respected construction and engineering organizations. We went into partnership to create McCourt Kiewit International — the largest designer and builder of telecoms systems in Europe.

In business and life, you need to work hard to be a good partner. We’ve been partnering for over 30 years and along the way have learnt what it takes. It’s not for everyone, but we thrive on it.

Walter infused me with the importance of trust. For instance, if you enter into a partnership, don’t do side deals. If you do side deals you’ll gain a reputation for putting your interests before everyone else’s and then nobody will want to go into partnership with you.

Trust is a fundamental requirement and not always easy to establish. My partnership with Walter continues to be successful because we get on and can put our faith in one another.

You need a good set of instincts for people, because for all the process and due diligence, you’re doing business with human beings, not machines.

As well as trust, any partnership should be built on shared values and complementary strengths. That latter point is important. Together you need to be greater than the sum of your parts. Good communication is also vital in order to create effective co-ordination and avoid mutual suspicion. Firm legal foundations are also essential, however much you feel lawyers just get in the way. This not only gives everyone more confidence, it helps establish clear expectations, which is another prerequisite for a fruitful partnership.

All of us — at any level of business — have to accept that entering into a partnership requires sharing both information and control. Collaboration comes more naturally to some than others, but if you take a simultaneously hard-headed and fair-minded approach, you stand a better chance of coming out with a great deal more than when you started. The upside for me, these relationships have lasted most of my lifetime at this point, which is another true measure of success.