"Are You a CEO Interested in a Feature Interview?"
All Interviews are 100% FREE of Charge
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The solopreneurial journey is a lonely one. It’s all on you, there’s no one to bounce ideas off of, and it takes incredible personal drive to push through the rough waters. That’s why finding a business partner for your new venture is commonly considered a smart move to minimize risk and spread the challenges. Two brains are better than one, right?
But finding a partner is easier said than done.
Where do you find people who have complementary skills, a willingness to take on the risks and responsibilities of a start-up, and perhaps most importantly, the integrity and loyalty required for purposeful collaboration? For some, the first reaction is to look to people they are familiar with, with whom they already share a strong bond and trust deeply – childhood friends, for example.
That’s what I did. I started a business with my friend Rehaz, who I’d known since elementary school. I sold my first business for six figures and now run a consumer goods startup called Supliful. Would I want to do it with anyone else? No. But was it always smooth sailing? Again, no.
From my 15+ years of experience running a business with my childhood friend, here are three advantages and the biggest disadvantage.
3 Benefits of Starting a Business with a Childhood Friend
Usually childhood friends are close people and vice versa, which brings several advantages to a business partnership.
1. Realistic expectations and synergy
You’ll know what to expect. You’ll know each other’s strengths, weaknesses, limitations, talents, and motivations. Bringing a friend into collaboration early on can have drawbacks from a business perspective. But if you know what the drawbacks are, you can deal with them effectively.
While an external partner may be able to offer a more direct and immediate benefit in the form of hard skills and experience, it can be hard to gauge what’s missing, which could lead to unexpected surprises later. With an external partner, it can take time to develop synergy and get on the same page.
Of course, finding the perfect synergy with a childhood friend also takes time. That said, the foundation should already be there, which helps avoid growing pains. Especially for first-time entrepreneurs, there is a lot of learning, pivoting, and reorganization, and you need flexible people on your team who are willing to adapt, change roles, and respond to new developments. In my experience, this is easier to achieve with equals, i.e. friends, than with people who are very specific about what they bring to the table, i.e. external partners.
Related: 5 Valuable Lessons for First-Time Entrepreneurs
2. Simple and open communication
All entrepreneurs encounter adversity. Dealing with it in the most effective way possible is important to moving forward. In my experience, honest communication is key to this.
But honest communication is not something to be taken for granted. The business world in general, and the startup world in particular, has a very peculiar culture where failure is seen as a learning experience, challenges as opportunities, and setbacks as just experimentation.
That’s true, but sometimes failure is just failure. And the best way to overcome it is to be brutally honest. This is easier to do with friends as business partners than with anyone else. You can say things to each other that you might not be able to say to anyone else, and as a result, you can cut through the formalities and get straight to solving the problem.
This freedom and ease of communication (and lack of pretense) extends to every aspect of the business and helps keep things down to earth and fast.
3. They’re on the same team
Never underestimate loyalty in business. Working together and knowing you have each other’s back will get you through anything – for example, knowing you have someone you can trust without worrying about it working against you, and trusting each other completely to make decisions independently for the benefit of the whole company.
A level of trust is built from the start with childhood friends that can take years, even decades, to build with an outside partner.
RELATED: I co-founded a company with my best friend, and 10 years later, our partnership is stronger than ever
The biggest downside to starting a business with a childhood friend
As anyone who has ever started a business with a friend will tell you, one of the biggest downsides is the effect it has on the friendship. In some ways, it can make your friendship stronger than ever. But it also completely changes the dynamics, and not everyone may be ready to accept that.
Business challenges, financial pressures, and differing visions can test friendships in unexpected ways. No matter how synergistic, aligned, and close you are, disagreements can become personal, and personal issues can affect business decisions.
Of course, in business, the good times are really good, and few things compare to the euphoria of celebrating a big win with the people who are such a big part of your life. But the bad times are really bad, and in those times, when everyone is down and feeling free to be honest with each other, the blatant honesty that would otherwise be a huge positive can come back to bite you later.
Ultimately, there’s certainly a risk that the partnership will take precedence over the friendship — the reality is, both need to be nurtured. It can be a tough balance to strike, but no one can do it better than you and your childhood friend.