Have you ever considered going into business with a partner?  I mean business (in a loose sense of the word) in an online scenario, not a bricks and mortar business.

There's some good reasons why you should consider it;

• More people involved = less expense for each person
  If the business cost (say) $1200 to set up, and there are 4 partners, each lays out only $300.
• More people involved = more promotion
  With more partners, each partner would (hopefully!) promote the site to the extreme.  4 lots of promotion is better than 1!
• More people involved = more brainstorming of ideas
  It's nice sometimes to bounce ideas around - and having partners on board means you can do this without fear of someone else taking the idea and running with it.
• More people involved = more skills available
  If you have one set of skills, it's always nice to find partners with a complementary set of skills.
• More people involved = less work for all in setting up the business and running it.
  With more people comes more chance of being able to go away on holiday etc.  With a few partners, the others can cover whilst one is away.

There's also the downside;

• More people involved = less profit for each
  Well, this is true ONLY if the pie stays the same size.  More people should mean the pie being bigger, hence each "slice" shoudl be proportionately bigger.
• More people involved = sometimes hard to come to a decision
  There's nothing worse that making decisions by committee - so if you consider going down the partner ship route, make sure that 1 person is driving the project along.
• More people involved = more chance of falling out
  By this I mean that decisions taken might not seem right to the other partner(s) - with this in nmind, always make your communications completely transparent.

Would you consider going into partnership?

I have a couple of good partnerships up and running.  It's nice to have a small circle of people that you can completely trust to "do the right thing".

Recently, I went into partnership with a couple of online friends - we're yet to launch the product, but it will be launched quite soon.  The best thing about that project is that the three of us have similar aims, but a totally different skillset and mindset - so the flow of emails and ideas has been really good.

Also, just today, I was approached by someone else (new to me, but known well to one of my partners in a different business).  Looks like a new project is on the cards which should be very interesting.

My challenge to ALL the readers of this blog is as follows;

Have a think about your aims and plans, then have a think about your online circle of friends.  Could any of those friends help to push your idea along in return for a % of your business?  If you don't know your friends skill-set, then ask them outright!  The worst that they can do is tell you to F— Off.  And if they do, then perhaps they aren't a friend after all

Basically, what we should ALL be looking to do is increase the size of our pies - with bigger pies come bigger slices!  And bigger slices = good. I like pie.  Hint hint