E763 | How To Find The Right Partner

The Importance of Choosing the Right Business Partner

When entering into a business partnership, it's crucial to approach the decision with the same care and consideration you would when entering a marriage. A business partnership is, in many ways, a form of business marriage—an entanglement that is legally and logistically complex to unravel if things go wrong. At PT Biz, we've seen firsthand how partnerships can falter, having supported several clients in unwinding their business relationships over the past six months. These situations often stem from partnerships that were formed based on friendship or familiarity rather than strategic alignment.

The Common Pitfall: Similar Skillsets

A typical partnership story begins with two friends from PT school who share an interest in starting a business. They like each other and think that joining forces will make the venture more enjoyable and less lonely. However, these partnerships frequently face trouble because the partners share similar skillsets. For example, two people who excel at sales and client acquisition can be a dynamic duo for bringing in business but may struggle with the operational aspects—things like billing, scheduling, and compliance. If neither partner is inclined or skilled in handling these responsibilities, the business can suffer.

The Need for Complementary Skills

When forming a business partnership, it's vital to assess your own strengths and weaknesses and compare them to those of your potential partner. Are you both strong in sales but weak in operations? Are you both detail-oriented but lack vision? These are questions you need to ask early on.

A well-balanced partnership usually consists of complementary skills: one partner may be the visionary, focusing on big-picture goals, growth, and driving the team forward, while the other acts as the integrator, managing day-to-day operations and ensuring that services are consistently delivered at a high level. Both roles are equally important and must work in harmony for the business to succeed.

Vision Alignment: A Must-Have

Beyond skills, aligning on your vision for the business is essential. Imagine one partner wants to build a small, sustainable lifestyle business while the other aims to grow a company to $10 million and sell it. These conflicting visions will lead to friction down the road. Before entering a partnership, make sure you and your potential partner share a similar long-term vision for the business.

Tools for Success: The Rocket Fuel Framework

If you're considering a partnership, the book Rocket Fuel is an excellent resource. It breaks down the concept of the visionary and the integrator and explains how these roles work best together. There is even an online quiz to help you determine which role fits you best. This insight can help you evaluate if your potential partner complements your strengths or if you’re both too similar to sustain long-term success.

The Consequences of Misalignment

When partners share overlapping skills but lack the ability to offset each other's weaknesses, one of them often ends up taking on tasks that feel unnatural or stressful. This leads to frustration and, eventually, a breakdown in the partnership. Dissolving a business relationship is not only difficult emotionally but also comes with financial and operational challenges. To avoid this, take the time to understand your skillsets and those of your potential partner. Ensure that you both bring different strengths to the table and align on your long-term goals.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: Hey, real quick, if you're serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country. And it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matta and over the last 15 years I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT I've been an active duty military officer physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because i'm here to help you

What's going on? Dr. Andy here with the pg entrepreneur podcast and today we're talking about We look for in a partner, right? We look for in a business partner and in a lot of ways. It's funny because this is a Uh, it's, it's a, it's a business marriage, right? If you bring in a business partner, you are getting very involved with, uh, with another person and, uh, in, in many ways that are legally and logistically very challenging to unwind, uh, very similar to a business, right?

And I bring this up because we've had a handful of business partnerships. Over the last, I would say six months that we've really had to help, um, unwind. And it's unfortunate because, you know, these are clients of ours that, uh, they formed a business partnership before we even started working with them is usually it's like two friends from PT school is what it usually starts out as, or something like that.

They know each other and they just like each other, right? They like each other. Uh, they don't want to do something alone. And then. It turns out that they actually are like really not a great fit to work with each other on a business. And here's why. In most cases, the people that folks want to partner with are people that are very similar to themselves, right?

It's your buddy. It's your, your, your friend. It's somebody that you trust because you know them. Um, but if you have two people that have the same skill sets, it eventually you end up stepping on each other's toes. And. And not to say that it can't work, but you, you then have to bring somebody in that is different than you as far as a skill set is concerned.

So let's talk about it this way. Let's say you have two people that are really good forward facing kind of sales and marketing, right? Okay. They're going to get out there. They're going to get clients in. They're going to be good with them. They're going to be personable. That's great. What they're going to suck at is.

Actually like getting them a super bill, getting them scheduled, taking their payment, uh, remembering to pay taxes, you know, like, uh, getting a business license, all the, all the things that are operationally important, consistency, client success, um, like that stuff that they're not good at. Neither one of them.

So then what happens? Well, one of them has to try to take that on and maybe they're not very good at it. And the alternative, the only other alternative is they grow enough to where they're able to then hire somebody that's going to be, you know, an operation sort of manager. And this could be administrative assistant, but oftentimes they need more than that.

They need somebody that can grow into more of a, you know, operations role. So that could be somebody that can hire as more of an office manager. Or, you know, you have to bring another partner in, uh, that's good. That's going to be, you know, like a COO sort of role. And on the flip side, let's say you have two people that are like very operationally driven, uh, but are not necessarily great on the forward facing side of things, because it's rare.

You have both. Then they're going to really struggle to grow their, uh, their new patient volume. They're just not going to do a good job getting people in. They're going to be less inclined to want to do marketing. Um, they're not gonna be as good as sales and I get as much passion package conversion for people that are going to grow their schedule much slower, right?

So if, if you were to look at this from a standpoint of what would work best, it would be defined, uh, two people, one that's like very forward facing and leans into that, and one that's a bit more operationally driven and they work together. Uh, to grow the company and there's less friction associated with these roles that maybe want us to take on that.

They're not comfortable whether they don't naturally feel like they're very good at and it's very hard for them to to do. So, you know when you form business partnerships, if this is something that you're even thinking about doing you have to really look at this as what inherent skills Do you have, what do I have?

What do I like to do? What do you like to do? Do we have the same vision or we're going the same place, or do we have different visions for what we want? Let's say you have one partner that wants to grow a company. It's a small lifestyle business. You have another partner that wants to grow a 10 million company and sell it.

That is going to be a problem. Right. So alignment in your vision and having complimentary skills to each other is really important. There's a great book on this. It's called rocket fuel. I've actually talked about this a few times. There's even a quiz you can go take. So rocket fuel, uh, I forget the website, but if you look up rocket fuel, uh, you know, business quiz, you can see if you're an integrator or a visionary.

And it's so funny because visionary sounds cooler than an integrator, but they're both incredibly important. Important and just as important as each other to be able to have the two together. Because when you have two people, one, it's more of an integrator and keeps things organized and consistent and can deliver services at a high level at scale.

The other one that can help drive a team forward and can, can be more of that, uh, figurehead kind of role. More of that forward facing sales and marketing role can get people, you know, really excited about a future vision. Like those two together work really, really well. Um, and if you can be intentional about it, you'll save yourself some of that, that really just frustration and challenge of trying to, uh, value a business is to have somebody else being bought out by it or dissolving it and starting other ones.

And I've seen it enough now where consistently it's very common. We run the same thing of similar skill sets. They get started. They're, they know each other, they like each other, they trust each other, which is important, but they're, they're too similar. And as they grow, if they can't find that key person that's going to be able to offset them and, and bolster their, their lack of skills somewhere, then it usually ends up with one of those people having to take on a role that they just really are misaligned with.

They don't do a good job with, it's hard for them. It's very incongruent with what their natural skillset is. And eventually they get frustrated and they want to, you know, sever that relationship. And that is a very, very hard thing to do. So keep that in mind before you partner with somebody, make sure it's the right fit.

Take a look at this rocket fuel quiz. See which one you are. If you're thinking about partnering with somebody, see what they are and you can get a better idea if this is a good fit or not.

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