A gentleman named Craig called in very distressed because his business partners are having a meltdown. After 12 years of getting along in a successful business, they were shocked because they lost their biggest customer. None of them saw it coming. Worse yet, the four partners, usually friends, blame each other, get into loud fights, and behave in a way that until now was totally foreign to this “ideal partnership.” He had heard that I bailed out trading companies and he implored me to bail out his.

I spent a day on site, interviewing each one separately, and brought them together as a team in the afternoon. Each shared with me and then with each other their grievances, concerns, and resentments toward the other partners that they kept hidden all these years. There was a basic trust and respect between them, but the little hurts and annoyances over the years had festered. As a result, they gradually avoided regular meetings to discuss anything. Losing his biggest client was the last straw that made it impossible to keep quiet.

The client had been forgotten without anyone noticing the signs that he was considering leaving. Who was responsible? No one thought it was himself and with great conviction he blamed others.

There are a number of advantages to having a partner in your business. One of them is that the work is divided according to the strengths of each partner. It’s great to be able to tap into someone else’s creativity, knowledge and skills. It’s a relief to have someone else working in an area you don’t like, but too often partners believe they don’t have to know anything about the other areas, especially when they trust each other’s skills and work ethic. It is a great mistake to take such an attitude.

This is what Tom, Craig, Lenny and Ray (not their real names) had done. Each of them had their own area of ​​expertise and was responsible for managing it: finance and IT, marketing, inventory and fulfillment, and customer and employee relations. They had more than 40 employees divided among their departments.

All partners need to be “on top” of all areas of the business, including project statuses, milestones, key vendors, team and budget coordination, etc. This has nothing to do with not trusting your partner’s experience. Too often, I have seen business partners discover that they know nothing about the company’s marketing strategy, hiring processes, and even cash flow because it is the “responsibility” of another partner. They find out when something catastrophic happens.

Not only is everyone responsible for knowing all areas of your business, but without coordination and discussion across departments, the business could not function optimally. And the bottom line, even with the big client on board, is at least not as solid as it could be. All partners are responsible for knowing what is happening in all departments, actively evaluating, generating ideas and making decisions that affect the whole.

My rescue plan was successfully concluded with the reinstatement of regularly scheduled meetings where open communication would always prevail. Annoyances, misunderstandings, and disagreements would be raised the moment they occur, avoiding the acrimony that leads to disastrous results.

For the business to thrive, each partner committed to being responsible for the big picture as well as their particular area of ​​responsibility. Blaming others was no longer an acceptable part of their culture.