I´m a romantic. I believe in love at first sight and I also belive that one day I will find "The one" and we will trust eachother and love eachother forever. A divorce after, that seems to be a little bit complicated but I´m a woman of faith.
Still, my dad used to tell me that a Company is like a Marriage. If you don´t trust your partners, you´d better be on your own.
I´ve never had partners, at least not in my most important ventures, because I know that if i fall, I fall alone, if I lose everything, I won´t hurt nobody else, and if I win, I don´t have to share (Only child syndrome, maybe?)
But I happen to have a very big defect. I have a huge capacity of feeling sorry for others who are not as fortunate as I am. And what´s worst, I try to help them.
I have a very good friend who I do business with. We are not partners, but we get along amazingly and together, we met a person, let´s call her Bridget.
Bridget was really cool at first. She was in the same tune as we were, she seemed to be a "girls girl" and she had struggle in the past. So had lost everything, she was living in a hell hole and yes, I felt sorry for her. Because this guilty based education told me I had to help the less fortunate. So I talked to my friend and asked her if she thought it was a good idea to help her develop some projects with us, because yes, she was less fortunate that we were.
BIG Mistake.
I was in a flight to Colombia to visit some friends and the problems started. She wanted to meet RIGHT NOW, for things that were not urgent. I used my lay over time that I had to sleep, to talk to her, things that could have been an email. She started being intransigent and pushy and that very nice lady that I met, wanted to do everything according to HER needs and she acted like she was smarter than us. She was a typical name dropper and in general, she was against everything I stand for, everything I believe in, and she turned into this monster even before we became partners. I´m not kidding that she used to send audios for minutes, and minutes and she expected us to listen to them (Who has time to listen to Whatsapp audios nowadays?)
Long story short, it was my fault.
I´m the smart one, and I´m the Compliance expert and I didn´t do a compliance research over this person who was clearly not in her right mind.
Someone obsessed with me and with my friend, someone who spends half of her day in my website ('Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.') trying to copy what we do.
Was it my fault? Absolutely.
As my dad used to say, doing business with someone must be based in trust, support, caring about eachother, leaving ego behind, being a best friend to eachother, and there must be no space for crazy behaviour. As simple as that.
I should have known better.
So my conclusion is, when you´re going to chose a partner in business, think if you would chose that person to be your husband or wife. If you can´t stand the possibility of spending 5 minutes with that person, it means he or she is not your right partner and you´d better do your project alone.
If the person has ego problem and goes against your belief, you cant marry that person and you definetely can´t do business with someone like that.
And finally, never marry or do business with someone out of pity. It´s not fair, and no good deed goes unpunished. If you do business with someone, it must be because that person can be an asset to your life, because you can rest on that person and you can trust that things will be correctly done and according to your lifestyle and your line of work.
And last but not least, run a background check, do your compliance and never, EVER, have partners if your gut feeling is telling you otherwise. Trust Me.
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