Co-Founder Counseling
You’d be amazed how often business owners fight. Sparring partners can kill a business and wipe themselves out. Fighting with your partner is the opposite of what you need – your company will only survive and thrive if you and your partner get along. When miscommunications, mistrust and history build up until you can’t work together, you need help. You need intervention, tough talk, and clear-eyed counsel.
We help business people work out their differences or gently split up the business. We work quickly, with candor and fairness.
If you need help improving or saving the relationship with your founders, email us at readytokilleachother@seasongoodlaw.com.
We Have a 6-Step Process
- We talk to each of you individually. We learn your backgrounds, business history, goals and where it went wrong.
- One evening, we gather everyone together. We eat; hopefully drink a bit. We melt the ice and find the threads of friendship that still exist.
- The next day, we meet. Early. We talk. Then, we confront. We confront again. We identify the steps that must be taken if you can save your partnership. At that point, we plot a plan for how to go forward.
- You go back to the business, and follow our plan.
- 2 weeks later, you come back for a check-in. We make adjustments to the plan, if necessary.
- 4 weeks after that, we get back together to see how it’s going and make decisions for the future. If you plan to stay together, we write some rules of engagement. If you plan to split up the business, we write that plan.
Emotionally, this is a challenging experience. There is a reason why you and your partner(s) have avoided talking about the issues that bother you – because doing it sucks. To flesh out the conflicts, you either have to hurt or be hurt. We don’t pretend this is easy. But, here is what is much harder: waking up the morning after you’ve closed your business and lost everything, beginning the process of hunting for a job; strategizing how to rebuild your bank account; picking up the pieces of a ruined career. We think it is better and more productive to figure out how you can either work with your partner or split up the business so you can prosperously go your own way.
The Role of Your Lawyer
I’m not here to usurp your existing lawyer. I bring a special set of skills: I identify the roots of conflict – then I either dig them up or build a forest around them. Your lawyer – if you have one – will draft and carry out the agreements going forward. I’m just here to yank you off your current path of destruction and onto the road of productivity. Because I believe that your lawyer is the best person to guide you through the processes that come out of our work together.