Importance of partnerships in running a successful business

Every single time someone quotes a successful business, it is always attributed to one person. Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sam Walton of Walmart, Richard Branson of Virgin, the list is endless.

Occasionally, the success of a business is attributed to the entire team rather than a single person. Semco Partners from Brazil is probably the best example here. They were one of the earliest companies to move from corporate autocracy to corporate democracy, where the decision making was left to the employees.

Back in 1980 when Semco underwent this transition, they had many skeptics, but they have proved they could be like a bunch of ants working towards to a common goal of building an anthill, without any direction from a single leader.

One could argue that there indeed was a leader in Ricardo Semler who laid the foundation with a motivating vision, and this brings us back to the first point of attributing the success of a business to an individual.

A motivating vision is the driving force behind several companies today, in some cases that vision has surpassed a century of its existence. Unilever is a prime example here where despite divesting their margarine business a few years back, which was the basis of their origin (Uni was the margarine brand and Lever was the soap brand that formed the company 134 years ago) they continue to uphold the values setup by the founder, Lord Lever.

Unilever and Semco are great examples of a team working efficiently despite their founders being long gone. Apple and Walmart are great examples of companies that continue to be quoted in the same breath as their founder. However, in all cases, success is either attributed to an individual, or a team that has embraced the vision of an individual. Very rarely is any credit given to one important element of all these companies, which is the person who first partnered the founder.

This is about Steve Wozniak partnering Steve Jobs, Paul Allen partnering Bill Gates, and possibly even Helen Walton partnering Sam Walton.

This person is the inspiration, the execution, the pragmatism, or sometimes just the capital, behind that visionary. But there is usually that single entity that compliments another in a manner that it snowballs into something much larger than anything each individual of that partnership ever deemed possible.

We never give this second person much credit because our brain remembers in stories, and stories are best told with one hero. It was just Neil Armstrong or Usain Bolt. Nobody ever remembers or at least cares too much about who came second.

There are exceptions through. Wright brothers were a partnership, and so were Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay. But these are exceptions because their stories were always written and shared with both members together.

The importance of a partnership should not be underestimated though. Steve Jobs may have almost never made Apple if it wasn’t for Steve Wozniak, or at the very least, taken a much longer route or found much lesser success than becoming the world’s largest company in 2019.

The importance of a partnership can be found all around us when we break things up to its lowest form. Every single piece of software code breaks down to either 1 or 0. Every single atom contains a proton and an electron (the neutron is just a good friend of the proton sitting tight in the nucleus).

There is always an entity of a complimentary nature to make another entity as big and successful as we know them to be. Partnerships are therefore vital to the success of a business as much as it may be to a relationship.

Finding that single right partner is the key to ensuring you’ve taken that vital first step towards creating something of value and leaving a legacy. Attempting to do this alone or attempting to directly start with a team may make that effort a lot more arduous.