The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - My Failure: Navigating a Brutal Partnership Fallout. Ep. #045

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Getting vulnerable here about one of my life's biggest failures and trials.---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: tkopod.co/p-all Scrape small business data: tkopod.co/p-os ---01:48 Meeting Jason: A New Venture Begins03:08 Introducing Omar: The Third Partner03:34 Omar's Lack of Contribution05:42 Scaling Up: Acquiring Parks08:47 Big Investors Enter the Scene12:32 The Silent Weekend14:34 Childhood Fears and Anxieties15:11 The Starbucks Confrontation17:25 Immediate Aftermath and Betrayal20:08 The Business Fallout24:50 Reflections and Lessons Learned27:17 Forgiveness and Moving Forward

The investors want to do a deal. It's a deal of a lifetime, and they want to invest a lot of money, but they need a lot of equity. And there's not a lot of equity left for us. And so this sucks. It's wrong. I know, but you're out. You're out of the company.

We are going to close this down. We're going to form a new entity. Instead of you having 33%, you're going to have 3.3%. There's something that really bothers me about business content that I want to get ahead of today. And that's the fact that business partnerships are hard and that they usually fail. and it is an extreme trial of life to go through a broken business partnership that fails. Nobody really talks about it. They're ashamed of it.

They're embarrassed about it. They don't want to tell the other side of the story or their side of the story. But I want to dispel that today. Today I want to tell you about the hardest business partnership experience I've ever been through. And frankly, this is one of the hardest things that I've ever been through that I want to talk about, that I think you want to hear about. But no one else wants to talk about. So let's get started. So I tweeted this story over a year.

ago, it was 1,700 words, which is a really long tweet and 1.3 million people liked the tweet. And they shared it and they commented and hundreds of people DM me and said, this happened to me, this happened to me. But no one's really talking about it. So I know there's a demand. So I want to tell you this story of what happened to me and tell you what I learned from it. And at the end of this video, I want to tell you the other side of the story. All right, Jason's side of the story. Because you're only hearing my side of the story, but I'm a firm believer that every story,

whether it's divorce or a partnership breakup, there's always another side. There's always another argument. We don't usually hear that side. Okay. So I'm going to tell you Jason's side of the argument against me that he told me himself in my truck that day once we finally talked openly about this. So let's get going. So about five years ago, my wife made a friend here in our local area and she was awesome. And they were talking one day and they said, what does your husband do?

Oh, he's a serial entrepreneur. What does your husband do? Oh, he's a serial entrepreneur. What else does he do? Oh, real estate. What about yours? Oh, real estate. Wow, we should get them together. So they did. They got us together. And I'm going to call him Jason, which is not his real name. So Jason and I had lunch one day. And I had just sold my business. I had some free time on my hands. And he was just scaling up his business. So he owned hundreds of single family homes around Texas. And he had wanted to start buying mobile home and RV parks because he had more

investor capital than he knew what to do with. And it was not very efficient to buy small single family homes with investor capital, whereas spending millions of dollars on an RV or mobile home park is much more efficient. But he needed help with operations and with marketing. And so we had lunch one day and we just hit it off right off the bat, like two peas in a pot. And he said, okay, let's do this. Let's start buying mobile home and RV parks. I'll raise all the money. You help find the parks and operate the parks. And I'll show you everything I know. I'll tell you everything I've ever done and ever learned with mobile home and RV parks because he had been to a seminar. He knew a lot about real estate. I owned a few rental homes, but he knew way more than I did. So we hit it off. We rented an office and we started going

into the office and cold calling mobile home and RV park owners. So early on, he said, hey, I have this friend named Omar. I'm changing his name as well. Omar knows commercial real estate really, really well. He's a good friend. We've been in business together for a long time. I think Omar should be a part of this. I think we should be equal thirds partners. I think he can add a lot of operational expertise. And so I thought, you know, let's meet him. So we met Omar and he seemed nice enough. And then we said, let's just see how this goes. Let's kind of trial run this three-way partnership and see how it goes. So it was very apparent from the get-go that Omar was not doing anything. He was very busy in his other commercial real estate business. And coincidentally, our offices were in the same hallway on the

same floor of the same building, but we rarely saw him at all. And he wouldn't really do much. And he came with three or four other partners as well. They were kind of silent partners. And he was the one interfacing with us. But he wasn't really interfacing with us. And so first month or two goes by, We're getting things under contract. We were looking at single family homes and mobile home in RV parks. And then I'll never forget one day we had breakfast at Starbucks, Jason and I, right down the road. And I had a very frank conversation with him. And I said, Jason, Omar isn't really doing much.

And we haven't really made this official. We haven't inked an operating agreement yet. So like, are you sure you want Omar as part of this? And he was, Jason was very upfront. And he apologized on behalf of Omar. And he's like, you're right. He's not. And I'm angry about it.

But I don't know what to do. I really think he'll pull through. He's kind of in a busy season right now. So let's just make this work. So I said, okay, you know, I mean, I was the guy that was brought in. I wasn't the one initiating all this. And so I probably should have been more bold in retrospect and said, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this full time, because he's already proven to not be adding any value. Now, we each put in the same amount of money. Omar did put in the same amount of money as Jason and I, but he wasn't doing anything operationally. Whereas Jason and I were working on this full time, more than full time. We're going into the office. We're driving around. We're driving around. We're driving. We're driving. around looking at parks, getting these under contract, getting rejected. He was raising money. I was hiring and managing people. And we had a real business going on. Also, real quick, before I continue this story, I really want to know, do you want to hear more business partnership failure stories like this? Because I know so many people that have had them. And I'd like to make it more of a recurring segment on this podcast to interview people that had them. And I kind of want to edit myself out asking the questions just so it's them telling their story. I think there's a lot to learn from

people like that. So if you think there's a demand for that, if you might find that interesting, please just email me, Chris at cofounders.com or comment below to tell me if you think that I should talk to people like that. And so we signed an operating agreement. We were equal Thursdays partners and we were off to the races. And so Jason did what he said he would do. And that was raise a lot of money. And he did. We bought a park in Oklahoma and we bought another park in Oklahoma. We bought a park in Texas. We bought a park in Kansas. We ended up buying 15, 16, something like 15 to 20 parks over the course of 18 months. And this entire time, Omar was not doing anything. And Jason was upset about it. And he would talk to me very openly about it. Dude, I'm sorry. You were right. We had that conversation. You were right.

He's not doing anything. What do we do? I don't know. I don't know what we do. And I'll never forget. I'm skipping a little bit, but early on when we first discussed this operating agreement, me, Jason, Omar, and then Omar's other partner got in this room at Omar's office. And we were talking about how do we keep track of our time or the value that we're adding. And Jason and I came up with this idea, which is annoying but effective that we should track our hours and we'll distribute the profits of the business based on how many hours we put into the business. And Omar and his partner did not like this idea at all, really because they weren't doing anything. And if they tracked their hours, it would not look good and they wouldn't make many distributions. And that was a huge red flag in the

moment and looking back that they didn't want to basically put their money where their mouth was. And they said, I remember they said, value add isn't about the hours you put into it. It's about the experience that you have. And it's like, okay, yeah, I can see that. But you're literally not doing anything. Like, the contribution that you're adding is you got the operating agreement signed. You filed the LLC in the state where we bought a park. That's it.

And so this entire 18 months, Omar wasn't doing anything. But it was kind of tricky because I didn't want to openly complain about Omar because Jason and Omar went way back. They owned a bunch of real estate in a different entity together. They went to the gym together. Their families went on vacation together. And I was a brand new guy. Jason and I had just met at that lunch meeting at the outset of all this.

And so I didn't feel bold enough to really press on Omar because Omar was a closer friend to him than I was. Now, over time, Jason and I became pretty dang good friends too. We went to lunch together every single day. Our offices were side by side. We drove all over the southeast looking at parks together, negotiating deals. Our families went on vacation together twice, just like he went on vacations with Omar's family. Our oldest sons had the same birthday. They were in the same class.

They were best friends. We lived three minutes down the road from each other. We were pretty close too, but we didn't go as far back as he and Omar. And so these 18 months go by and things start heating up. We're at break even now. We're buying parks with investors. Our rent collections are $80,000 dollars a month. So we're at a million dollar run rate just on rent collections.

and we had just started making enough to where we're able to pay all our overhead and maybe start making a distribution. The way we were structuring deals with investors was a little different. And so we didn't really have any fees. There were no acquisition fees or property management fees. We were just splitting the equity in the parks 50-50 and splitting the net operating income 50-50 and the investors were putting in 100% of the capital. And so we're buying all these parks. We had a bunch more parks under contract. And we started getting some attention from big-time investors. And so these guys from California flew out.

And they wanted to invest $50 million, which keep in mind, we were raising like $500,000 at a time. So this is a hundred times more money than we had been raising from one group. And we hadn't really talked to equity terms yet. We didn't know how much equity they wanted. We assumed it would be a lot more than we were comfortable with, but we were nevertheless willing to entertain them. And so Jason being the primary capital raiser, he was the one interfacing with these guys the most. They flew to Texas. They met with me, Jason, and Omar.

We met all day, a couple days straight. Jason took them around to see a couple mobile and parks. We met in a boardroom. They asked us a bunch of hard questions. We showed all our numbers. We had everything ready to go. And they really liked what they saw. And then they left on a Saturday.

So Friday night, we all went out to dinner together. One of our key investors, these two guys from California, me, Jason, and Omar. We went to this nice day cows and we were laughing and everything was looking good. And it looked like they were going to give us a term. sheet and that we were going to have $50 million to go off to the race with to buy to really, really scale a sophisticated team, an acquisition team, a hiring team, a management team, in-house property management, just start buying these mobile home and RV parks. Because we were performing.

We were buying a great cap rates. We were raising rents. We were turning them around. We were renovating the parks. Jason had a ton of expertise that he was teaching me and he was raising the capital. I was hiring the team, managing the team, finding the parks, implementing some tech systems to where we could mass text these park owners, mass email them. So I was kind of on the acquisitions operations management side and he was on the fundraising side.

And he just had the expertise, right? Whereas I had single family expertise. So this entire partnership, I was thrilled by how much work Jason was doing and I was just trying to keep up with him. And that's a great business partner to have. He went hard. He worked a lot. And I was always just trying to keep up with them.

And we were also distracted a lot, both of us. Like we were, we would launch these other side projects in the real estate space and see how they went because we're both very, you know, ADHD serial entrepreneurs. We're idea guys. But nevertheless, the main thing was always this mobile home and RV park acquisitions company. And so we had this meeting with the investors. And before they got here, Jason and I had this sit down. And we're like, all right, like, it's time for the rubber to meet the road.

We got to do something about Omar because it's about to get ugly. Everything's going to come to light if they invest this money. So we got to decide what we're going to do. We didn't really decide anything specific, but we had these hard conversations. And then Jason was like, I'm going to go talk to him. So he went and talked to Omar and they had conversations about, you got to do more. I need you to do more. And so it's pretty frustrating me because the investors came into town.

We sat down. And Omar presented himself as if he was in the weeds this whole time. So if he had this commercial real estate experience and he knew what he was doing and he was like the gray hair in the room, so to speak. and he was going to be the operator. And I felt that was misrepresentative, honestly, because he hadn't been doing anything. And on paper, yeah, he looked great. He had a lot of commercial real estate experience. But in practice, he had been doing nothing.

Okay. So it felt like to me, now that big money was coming in, Omar was like, okay, now that this is like a real thing, now I'm going to get involved. And he was playing politician, shaking hands and saying all the right things. And I felt very uncomfortable about that. And I don't sell myself very well. I can't. I'm not a good actor.

I don't fake things very well. If I go to dinner parties, I'm not. I just, I don't, I hate being fake. And I hate it when people are fake. And so I definitely spoke the least of the three in that weekend when the investors were here. And so we went to dinner and then the next day, and Jason was going to show them a couple parks and go golfing with them and kind of like talk terms. And then they were going to fly back to California.

And so Jason and I were in constant contact for the 18 months straight, right? Slack, text, phone. in person, like you name it. We were always, always in contact with each other. And over this weekend, which is like the most critical weekend of our partnership, he just went completely silent. I didn't know how it went. How did golfing go?

Do we have a term sheet? Are they going to send a term sheet? What are the terms? How much equity do they want? What does this look like? And it was Memorial Day weekend. I can't remember it was Memorial Day or Labor Day, but it was early September. It was early September.

So whatever day that is. It was a long weekend. So I get to the office on Monday, which was Memorial Day or Labor Day, and no one was there, which wasn't really surprising. And I hadn't heard from Jason at all or Omar. And I'm like, hmm, okay. So then Tuesday, no one was there. I'm like, okay, this is weird.

And I had texted him once or twice and he may have responded to that, maybe not, but he was being very standoffish, whereas like, this is a time when we're supposed to be talking a lot. What did they say? What is the deal? What are we doing moving forward? And then Wednesday, it was. September, it's either September 9th or September 11th. And I get to the office again and he's not there.

And I'm like, okay, man, it's been like five days since we're supposed to know what's going on. I'm at this point, I'm kind of worried, but I'm not expecting the worst. I'm just concerned. So he taxed me around 8.30 that morning. And he says, meet me at the Starbucks across the street. I'm like, my heart just sank. I'm like, okay. What?

Why? Like, why can't you meet me in the. office. Your office is on the other side of that drywall. The conference room is on the other side of that drywall. That's where we meet. That's where we talk. Why are we meeting at a Starbucks across the street? So I thought, okay, maybe it's time for rubber to meet the road. We're going to talk hard decisions with Omar. Maybe they gave us a term sheet. And, you know, Omar's office was literally down the hall from us. So I assumed he was afraid that Omar would walk in when we were talking about him. So we wanted to meet across the street. It's like those like when I'm a kid,

So you're eight years old. Your kids go out to the movies or sorry, your parents go out to the movies and they don't come home for a while. They're late. And you start thinking the worst. Maybe they died in a car accident. That's what I would do anyway. Maybe that's not normal.

Like, but you know that's not normal in the moment, right? You're like, that's unreasonable. I'm being, and then you know what? They come home. Everything's fine. In the very, very, very, very, very back of my head, I'm thinking, maybe they're pushing me out. But no, they wouldn't push me out because like I was the one doing everything with Jason.

That's the guy not doing anything. for the last 18 months. That's the guy that he's going to want to push out. So it was like way in the back of my head. So I drive to Starbucks and on the way there, I'm nervous and I'm thinking, if Omar is there, I'm screwed. We're done. This is over. I'm going to know exactly what's going on if Omar is there. If Omar's not there, then we're probably going to talk about Omar. So I get to Starbucks, corner of Campbell and 75 in Richardson, Texas. And I pull up and Jason and Omar are sitting outside looking stern, serious. And I can just feel the tension. And they've got, Omar has sunglasses on and he just has his arms folded, just kind of looking, staring. And I sit down.

And it's like so awkward. Like not a word has been said, but you can just, you just know. I'm like, what's up? And Jason is very, very to the point. He's very direct. And he's just like, I don't remember exactly what he said. So don't quote me. But he's like, the investors want to do a deal. It's the deal of a lifetime, and they want to invest a lot of money, but they need a lot of equity. And there's not a lot of equity left for us. And so this sucks. It's wrong. I know, but you're out.

You're out of the company. We are going to close this down. We're going to form a new entity. Instead of you having 33%, you're going to have 3.3%. Instead of you having an operational role, you'll have no operational role. And you are going to have to sign a non-compete to where you can't buy any more mobile home or review parks outside of this. And we don't need your help anymore.

I know, it's wrong. It sucks. I'm sorry, but this is what we're doing. Like it or not. That's what he said. And Omar was not saying a word. He was just staring off in the corner. And so I said, okay, well, what's Omar getting? And I point to him. And he's like, oh, I don't even know yet. This is too early. And I'm like, guys, come on. Seriously, you think I'm stupid? And that's my biggest pet peeve is people assume that I'm stupid. And who doesn't hate that, right? It's like, you think I really don't know what's going on here. Of course, you know what Omar is getting. of course you guys have been talking all weekend of course this has been planned like and so

i was just fuming and i didn't know what to say i don't remember what else was said but i just i remember sliding my chair back and it was a metal starbucks chair against the concrete patio and it was like there are people out there and i just stood up and walk it away just shaking just my hands were just shaking and i got him my tundra and i called nick my best friend. First thing I did and I told him what happened and he was incredulous because he had been, I mean, we're best friends. And he had a front row seat to this entire situation for the last 18 months. He knew exactly what was going on. He was incredulous. He could not believe it. And so I drove across the street to our office. Our employees were there. They were on calls. I didn't say word to him.

I got all my stuff. I put it in a box. And I drove straight home. And I walked in and my wife met me right at the garage door. And she had this look on her face. Like, what are you doing? What are you doing home? And I told, I said, Jason, pushed me out. They pushed me out. And she could not believe it, right? It's like you have this perfect happy marriage. And then one day your wife has a second family, right? Or your husband has a second family with kids. And you had a perfect marriage. Like, what? There were no problems. Where did this? What? Where did this come from? You know, usually there are signs. You can see this coming. She was floored. And so I just kind of brushed by. I went in my room, turned on the fan, turned off the lights, closed the door, and I just started bawling.

Period. Business is freaking hard. It is chewing glass and staring into the abyss, as Elon Musk said. It was hard. I just bawled. I just felt so betrayed. I wasn't thinking about the money or the equity or the opportunity. I just felt so betrayed.

This was a guy that I had lunch with every single day for 18 months. I went on vacation with him. This is the guy that had been complaining about Omar to me for 18 months. What just happened? How did this happen? Omar wasn't even a good operator. He had proven himself to not be a good business partner and that's the one he chose. What is going on here? What did I miss? I was in a dark place. The next thing I did was I went to our guest bedroom with my MacBook and I opened our Dropbox and I saved all of our folders to my personal computer. All of our data, all of the mobile home park data, the owner contact info, everything. I didn't know what was going to happen. I wanted to know that I had all of our data. So I saved all that. And then I called a lawyer and I kicked things into gear. And it got ugly and it got nasty.

And we got lawyers on the phone. And we ended up, like the deal ended up dying. The deal with those investors, the $50 million that died. And Jason told me it was because their due diligence was too thorough. And he was just getting really annoyed by how many documents they needed to send, yada, yada, yada, but I don't think so. I don't think that was the real story. I think that they got wind of what was happening between this partner.

And it looked like a really messy situation to invest $50 million into. That's my guess. I don't know. So that deal blew up. And then Jason stopped going to the office altogether. We had employees there. We had people managing parks. We were collecting rents.

But I was the operator. And instead of like filling in my shoes, he just stopped going to the office. And so we had all these parks that stopped getting collected. I'm not going to collect on these parks. Right. I just got shoved out. And so these parks started. performing poorly immediately. And it all just fell apart. And so we ended up retaining a broker and

selling off the parks bit by bit, paying off investors. And we just kind of wound it down. We wound it down entirely. And then Jason and Omar, they had a third business deal. So they had our deal. Then they had a real estate deal with some single family homes. And then they had a health care deal that completely blew up. They ended up suing each other. And they got kind of at each other's necks. they fell apart. And then Jason ended up barring against his single family home portfolio to buy crypto that crashed in the 2021 crash. So he lost most of his single family homes, kind of had to start from scratch. So all of Jason's investors, not all of them, many of Jason's investors lost money. His previous investors from the single family homes lost their homes and a bunch of money.

And then Omar's original business was doing fine, but their health care deal fell apart and they sued each other and it was kind of every man for himself. And then I just started writing about mobile home and I reparks on the internet. That's what I did. I stopped buying them myself. I was never the fundraiser. And so we everything fell apart. There was not like a big chunk of money that changed hands like I sued them, but then it all kind of fell apart. And there was really nothing much left to collect. So it all just kind of died. And some of the parks we sold at a profit. Most of them met a loss. It just got really ugly. And it all happened because of one, stupid conversation at a Starbucks that really never had to happen. And so Jason and I talked about

this afterwards. And I'll never forget this conversation. And I was like, dude, what happened? Like, what were you thinking? And he said a couple things. First of all, he said, that was wrong. That was wrong. And Jason is an impulsive person. He's probably the most impulsive person I've ever met. And I can tell you a dozen different stories about him being impulsive, but I won't out of respect for him, but he's very impulsive. He makes big decisions very quickly. Knee jerk reactions. And so that's what he did here. He was impulsive. And he was greedy. He wanted more equity. I don't know what the deal was. I don't know how much equity that these investors wanted. But now to the other side of the story, right? What's his side of the story? If he were sitting here next to me, and I would like to interview

him on this podcast one day because we are acquaintances. He still lives nearby me. His son is still close friends with my son. I see him around at school activities. And I have no ill will against him. I'm just not going to go into business with him again. And so I would love to talk to him on this podcast if he'd ever be willing. But what's his side of the story? So he was, um, angry or upset that we were trying to buy all these parks. We had more parks under contract, uh, than we can fund than we could fund at some point. And I was not trying to raise money. And I wasn't at all. And he thought that he was doing everything he could. He was opening his rollodex to every friend and family member he'd ever met. And he was calling a lot of people. I heard

him. I could hear him on the other side of the door, calling friends, family members, doctors, lawyer, people he'd worked with in the past trying to raise money for these parks who got under contract. I was not. Okay. That's his side of the story. It was that he was pulling out all the stops. I was not. And so I deserved less equity. Now as to why he chose Omar, I don't know. I don't know about that. But my argument to why I wasn't raising money was because that wasn't the deal. I didn't have money to raise. When I bought my first home, I used student loans for the 3.5% down payment. When I bought my second home, I used Obama's $8,000 tax credit plus student loans, plus a couple grand in savings from waiting tables. When I bought my third home, that was like savings from my iPhone repair business.

I didn't have access to capital at the time at all. Not from my parents, not from family members. I had no way to raise money. And that was never the deal anyway. From day one, the deal was Jason raises money. I work on marketing and operations. If he would have told me on day one, I'm going to need your help and raising money. I would have told him, I can't help with that. Right. Like I can make cold calls. I can do that, but I don't have a network. He already had this big network that he had raised tens of billions of dollars from to buy single family homes. He had a network ready to go. I did not. And so that was never the deal. That's my argument to his counter argument. That's how it ended. But he ended up saying, I was wrong. I apologize. I

shouldn't have done that. And he's not in real estate anymore. I think he still owns a few rental homes, but he's doing something completely differently. And we've kept in touch somewhat, but not a lot. And that's what happened. So my learnings, my takeaway from all this, don't get into bed of someone right when you meet them. Don't marry someone right after meeting them. That was dumb. That was stupid of me. That's what I regret. I regret just signing an operating agreement with someone that I didn't really know the history of. But at the same time, if I could go back in time, I don't know. know if I would have changed it because I started writing about this experience on the internet. I started gaining Twitter followers talking about mobile home and RV park investing,

never having a plan. I didn't have this grand vision where I'm going to raise a fund to start doing this all over again. I just knew that there was strip mall guy and hotel guy and restaurant guy and self-storage guy and I was a consumer of all this real estate content. And I thought, hmm, there's no mobile home park guy. I can be that guy. I'll start writing about being that guy. So I did. I played that role. And I enjoyed it. And I grew followers just like strip mall guy did. But I never really had this grandmaster plan of using that following to raise this fund.

Okay, until two years later, I got approached by a fund that already had an established track record that were buying mobile home and RV parks. And they said, hey, we like your audience. We like your experience. You speak the language. You're able to source off market parks through your audience. You're able to raise money for off market parks through your audience. How about we try something? Let's try a deal together.

And so we did. We shook on it. We did one deal together in Louisiana. And it went really well. And now I'm a co-GP on that fund. And we're buying one to two parks a month. And I'm helping source them. I just sourced a park for them in Montana that's going to complement our other Montana park. I'm helping market the parks. I'm helping write investor updates because I love writing. And I'm helping raise money for these parks. And that's providing an income for my family. And it's helping me build my net worth. And so that two year experience. And it was really two years when it was all seven done. There's a very expensive education in real estate. But all of those learnings, I was able to leverage into what I'm doing today. And I'm grateful for that experience. I'm more hardened. I'm more self-aware. And trials, it's the refiners fire. Trials put us through the refiners fire.

And we become better men and women because of these trials. And I wouldn't be where I am today because of them. So I wouldn't have changed the thing. But if you're listening to this and you've had a partnership nightmare like mine, forgive. right? When you don't forgive people, you are punished more than that other person, right? Not forgiving people is taking a poison pill and expecting the other person to die. That's not my quote, something I heard, but I love it. You will be sick to your stomach.

You will be angry all the time unless you forgive. How do you forgive? I don't know. I don't know. Appeal to a higher power. Meet with the person face to face. Hear their side of the story. Strive to have empathy for them and why they made their decision.

because people do make these decisions for reasons, for specific reasons, but you have to forgive or you'll drive yourself crazy. At the end of the day, business partnerships are as hard, if not harder than marriages. And they're very hard to end. They're hard to wind down. Depending on how big the business is, it is hard to wind down a business. You have to fire employees. You have to sell assets.

You've got lawyers involved. It is tough. So know who you are going into business with, period, end of story. I've had other business partnership horror stories and I've had some amazing, beautiful stories that I could and will tell in the future, know who you're going into business with, have a solid operating agreement, have an unbiased third party look over it, have an unbiased third party mediator throughout the whole term of your partnership that you can both appeal to to help resolve disputes.

But I promise you having a business partner is worth it. So I definitely advise for that. Thank you for listening.