What (Good Things) They Don't Tell You About Starting A Business with Your Best Friend

Over the years, I have seen nothing but negative messaging around starting a business with friends and/or family. Whether it's advice from previous entrepreneurs, posts on LinkedIn, or business articles across the Internet, there is no shortage of content that warns against all of the downsides that doing so may bring. 

So today, as someone who has loved every minute of starting a business with my best friend, I am here to provide an alternative perspective on this topic.

And no, I'm not trying to convince you that you should start a company with yours. I simply want to shed some light on all of the great aspects of starting a business with your best friend(s) that are all too often left out of the discussion. 

So without further ado, let's dive in.

1. You already have a strong foundation of trust 

It's no secret that success in business is strongly tied to transparency and trust. In order to do your best work, you have to trust your teammates to deliver and ensure that your teammates trust you to do the same. 

This type of working relationship becomes even more important when you are building a company from the ground up. When you are a founder, your idea is like your baby - you are going to be extremely meticulous about who you allow to share your vision and help you bring it into the world. As such, it can be an arduous process to 1) find someone who you think you can trust enough to be your co-founder and 2) establish the right rapport and trust to begin making significant progress.

Unless, of course, you already have that foundational trust. Perhaps the biggest advantage to starting a business with your best friend is that you have spent years establishing an unbreakable bond built around mutual, deep-seated trust and understanding. When you start a company with your best friend, there aren't any concerns or questions around whether you can trust one another: you can simply get to work.

2. You can lean on one another for emotional support

It goes without saying that entrepreneurship can be a rather difficult and lonely road. You are constantly faced with tough decisions, run into unanticipated obstacles, and have to make sacrifices on a daily basis. 

But even with all of the tangible challenges that stand in your way - finding the right market, getting traction, generating enough cash flows, etc. - perhaps the most emotionally taxing aspect of building a business is maintaining your positive energy and self-confidence throughout the journey. From Day 1, you are facing odds that are overwhelmingly stacked against you, and you will have plenty of doubters and naysayers who don't believe you will find success. And when you inevitably run into failure along the way, whether a product launch wasn't as successful as you had predicted or you fall flat on your face in a sales meeting, it becomes easy to let those voices get in your head and start to lose faith in yourself. 

But when you are building a company with your best friend, the journey becomes a whole lot less lonely. Rather than confront these emotional trials alone, you have someone by your side who knows exactly what you are capable of and who has believed in you long before your startup began. You are able to pick each other up and feed off of each other's confidence, helping you sustain the energy and optimism you need to make it through the failures and shortcomings you will experience.

At the end of the day, the single most important key to success in entrepreneurship is willpower, and it is significantly easier to remain persistent when you have someone close to you to help weather the storm. 

3. You can handle heated confrontations

Whether you disagree about how to implement a certain tactic or don't see eye to eye on a strategic initiative, sooner or later, when you're in the trenches with your business partner and working on complicated, unchartered problems, you're going to have some conflict. And if that business partner is someone you haven't worked with before or someone you don't yet know very well, when these conflicts arise, they can cause tension and create uncomfortable, awkward situations that neither party really knows how to handle appropriately. However, this is an absolutely critical territory to successfully navigate when building a company - if you can't find a way to respectfully have heated confrontations with your partner(s) when you disagree, it will be nearly impossible to move forward and make legitimate progress. After all, the tough conversations are ultimately where the most important decisions are made. 

But if your business partner is your best friend, then you already know you can handle these kinds of discussions! You have undoubtedly already had to manage intense arguments and not let them impact your friendship in the past, so you can have the confidence that you will be able to translate this ability into similarly difficult discussions about your business when they rise to the surface. In fact, I would argue that as close friends, you will have a much easier time handling conflict than business partners who don't know each other as well because of your history together.

4. You can enjoy what you accomplish together

When it's all said and done, entrepreneurship is meant to be an exhilarating, freeing experience for those with the right mindset and who are willing to take the leap. And who better to enjoy your successes with along the way than your best friend? Celebrating wins is always great, but when you can share that experience with someone who you've known for such a long time and who has always had your back, it can make your victories that much sweeter.

And because of the chemistry you've developed over the years, the joy you experience together can become contagious across your organization, creating a collaborative, inviting, and exciting company culture where people are passionate and truly love what they do.

The Bottom Line

If you've gotten this far, I am certainly not expecting you to hop on the phone with your best pal and get started on creating a new company. But I hope that you come away from this post understanding that while people may warn you against doing so, there are some major advantages to starting a business with your best friend.

And I, for one, wouldn't have it any other way.