Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

Dealing with a Rotting Team

Mr. Android was the first member to leave Six Million Development, known as 6M for short. Then we had some problems internally getting things done and other members were too busy to do them. Simon was a fantastic entrepreneur, and he was just too busy doing his own thing; I had to ask him to consider which project he would like to do and then stick with that one, so he decided it would be best to just work on his current set of activities. This is something that I'm learning to identify and actually prevent from happening—partnerships losing alignment, something that is key to productive, happy partnerships. Simon and I previously had started competing about Herbal Exports, a previous Asian herbal medicine start-up. We ended that project early because we saw after a few months that our goals were different; things weren’t working out the way we’d planned in the original agenda and the project was not worth the time invested.

I had a falling out with Mr. LadiesMan after a month or so; he had to deal with his job and at the time was having some personal issues. It seemed that the best would be to let him handle what he needed to do, so now we were down to basically me, Mr. TownSend, and Mr. PrintMan.

This is the nature of having a large team for business.  Life happens; we need to accept that our business venture is not the team members’ only project.  Another important note is not to let failure in business cause a rift in your friendships.  Business comes and goes, but good friends are hard to come by.  Given a choice, pick your friend over your business.  As you can see from the examples above, I tried to let each member leave tactfully because you never know when you will work with them again.  In Simon’s case, I had worked with him before and have worked with him again after 6M because I was able to handle him gently without hurting his pride.