A Working Arrangement

A consultant I once knew used to talk about a very common scenario among entrepreneurial types: person A has a great idea, starts some kind of enterprise. At some point he needs help so he contacts person B to help grow the business.

Person B does a great job and all is well for awhile; but at some point person B gets restless and wants something to change. But if person B has done a great job, by now person A is probably pretty dependent on him (her), therefore likely to resist change. Tension!

In all too many cases, at some point things go badly from here: person B leaves, frequently to start some kind of similar enterprise based on his experience with person A. This can lead to bad feelings or worse: all kinds of legal complications, lawsuits, on and on. Non-compete clauses get invoked, and once again the main winners are the lawyers.

I don't remember exactly what this gentleman said could be done to help this kind of situation, but I have my own ideas. As is the case so much of the time, I think a good start toward improving this kind of thing consists of a lot of good honest communication -- from the very beginning.

I would go so far as to say agreeing on possible progressions of the business, how things might evolve -- based on what the people involved want -- could be part of the original setup, possibly even viewed as part of the compensation.

Here's a hypothetical: let's say you become an assistant to a successful seminar promoter. If you want to eventually do your own seminars, rather than be assistant to the person you're working with now indefinitely, why not discuss that early on? Part of your compensation could consist of his agreeing, probably after a reasonable time period for focusing on the original business, to support you in your endeavors to move into your own seminar productions. More than likely you would come up with some kind of offshoot, subcategory etc that you'd be especially good at and wouldn't compete directly with him anyway.

Now here is the key (IMHO) to making something like this work: you could ALSO agree early on that you would begin finding and training (grooming?) YOUR replacement, so that when the time came for you to go off on your own, he would have someone else ready to pick up where you left off.

Of course, by leaving on really good terms like this he would have ongoing access to your fine brain and all the things that you'd figured out for him; you'd have access to him and his networks, etc etc to help as you get your version of it going.

Win-win, as opposed to lose-lose. How cool is that?!?