constellex

The correct answer is one, but he should be able to hop on one foot and rub his belly at the same time… The point to take from that probably not too humorous statement is that you should not have a business partner who specializes in changing a light bulb, unless of course your business is in changing light bulbs.

This topic, like most business-related ones, is filled with gray areas that depend on your situation. I plan to talk about a lot of business ideas as time goes on and am simply sharing my thoughts and our situation, so don’t take anything as absolute.

Overspecialization is a problem that I have seen in corporations, but it is also something that the little guy should really watch out for. A waste of space in a corporation most likely won’t cause any terrible effects, but if you’re starting a small business then it could really hold you back. A fun little fact about our company is that we started out with three partners. Marc and I have technical backgrounds, so we wanted someone else to handle the business side of things. Sally, in case he wants to remain nameless, is our very smart friend who came on-board to do just that.

There were other attractive aspects to having a third partner that included more capital and some good contacts, so we signed him up. Sally handled our taxes for the most part, which was nice, and also did some other administrative things. However, there just wasn’t enough work for Sally to remain a contributing member of our team. The amount of business tasks were few enough that Marc and I could handle them without a problem, so we had to let Sally go.

Since we are using this business as our source of income, we couldn’t have Sally taking a third of our profits if he wasn’t doing much. We fell victim to overspecialization because Sally handled business tasks, but couldn’t contribute in other areas. If Sally was also a programmer, then there most likely wouldn’t have been a problem. Since we are a small company, there just wasn’t enough activity for Sally at this point in the game. Sally, being the great guy that he is, completely understood the situation and accepted a check for his share of the company on his way out. Marc and I are still great friends with Sally because he understood that business is nothing personal, it’s just business… but I will get more into that next time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 2:35 am and is filed under business, constellex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.