Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

How to Screw up a Partnership

At the end of my contract for Nurun, I was working full time on PrintOnlineNow; the contract ended January 15th and I went out full time from January 15 to April, and during this time, we put up all the sites and set up a new office in Mr. PrintMan's factory. I was working on this constantly, making improvements, chasing down customers, doing Web-Ex conferences, and redesigning a lot of stuff. Now that I was not working full time anymore, I wanted Mr. PrintMan to give me my share of the profits.  At the time, I didn't realize that I had a crippling fear of poverty.  Mr. PrintMan was hesitant and slow, though later I realized a couple of months earlier I had been the same when he wanted his split of profits.  At that time, the team decided we should just keep it in the pot for the time being.  Upon reflection, I did it to him first in a sense, but he did it to me and delayed; he was delaying and also I didn’t know if he was doing it on purpose or not but basically just not doing it, not helping me ease my fears really hurt our relationship.

I ended up working on PrintOnlineNow full time for a month and a half or two months without getting any money out of it. Fear of poverty was constantly on my mind during this time. It affected my ability to make decisions that were good for business. I put pressure on Mr. PrintMan to release my share of the profits. I was getting impatient at his excuses and delays for giving me money from the company. At first he was doing this out of spite because I also had denied pulling the funds out from the pool a few months prior. However I realized later that the problem lay with the customers.

Customers who pay with credit cards are flaky. If the credit card company does a clawback from payments, the merchant actually has to pay back the money. I was so hasty, but I realized later that if Mr. PrintMan gave me the cut or took a cut himself, we would actually be putting his own company at risk because the money from those things would be at risk if these customers were to do a clawback on the amount they paid. I understood to some extent that there were no payments for those reasons and, at the same time during those two months, I managed to convince Mr. TownSend to quit work and come over to Toronto and work on some stuff, too. During that time, Mr. TownSend actually did end up quitting, and he also bought a house, too, so that he could work on a side sustainable income. I knew that there was a problem at this point, so we cut Mr. TownSend in by 20%, so Mr. PrintMan’s and my shares were lowered to 40% each.

Another mistake I made was outsourcing billing and accounting.  I let Mr. PrintMan control the accounting; to save time, we would let his department process all payments and credit cards and all the transactions. This gave Mr. PrintMan complete control over the money, effectively making him the boss.  Mr. Princeton taught me this trick when I asked him how he managed over 20 companies with their own fields.  His answer was simply “accounting.”  I learned from PrintOnlineNow never to outsource the accounting unless you don't care about the control and cash flow of your company, which means you don't care about business.