no major decisions made unless all three want to go in that direction. maybe not the best formula. maybe they should have one person that they agree is, if there is a stalemate, that one person is going to make the overriding decision. and also, we always say get ready for the divorce at the beginning of the marriage basically. so have a contract? yeah. i mean, i think whether you re friends with a person in advance or, you know, it s somebody that you ve recruited through another source you still have to be very careful about creating a partnership agreement and figuring out what happens to that person s equity should they need to leave the business early. i think in this case it looks like they have kind of followed, you know, what you re talking about, which is to define roles early on. one seemed to be kind of the cfo. the other one seemed to be a coo and then, you know, the other partner had maybe more of the idea and a ceo visionary role. so they seemed to be executing that a
tweet up to talk about harnessing the power of twitter. tweet, tweet, tweet from social media gurus to leaders of major companies to small business owners twitter is transforming the way people do business. takes the core value proposition of the business and makes it even better because it can notify people right in the moment to a specific place and specific time when to get the best experience. we asked for customer testimonials. we can survey folks, ask them what they like or don t like about our service. business owners from all over the country gathered at twitter con in new york city. there they learned from experts and from each other how to better leverage social media. as a piece of research, it s accurate. it s informative. it s certainly to the point. martha stewart shared her advice for connecting customers via twitter. look, i think it s really worth trying for any business. you want to be where your customer is so if there is a
i thought they were contacting him about the problem, yeah. in that case, it s best to address the whole group. if you re going to address the whole group, there are ways to say it. be careful of how you word it. we want to let you know that every person counts and this is what you re doing. make it positive. we have a question from a bread maker. we have a business that has strong local brand recognition and are interested in trademarkitrademark ing our logo and name and so forth. not sure how to start it. uspt.gov. you don t need to hire a lawyer necessarily to do this. the trek that you can do is take a look at the logos, the materials, and send it to the g mail account and it s archived, time, date stamped. if there s a issue of first use, he can go back to that. a lot of websites out there will do it for you for a
pros and cons of running a business with friends? let s turn to this week s board of directors to ask them. we have a former venture capitalist and a serial entrepreneur who has founded five, six different every time i say it. five companies. looking older than i am. great to be with both of you. i asked if you had started a company with a friend. you both said yes. did it work out? not so well. first off these guys show tremendous passion so i love the business, they re having fun, having a good time with it, but things don t always go as smoothly as you think they re going to go. there s usually going to be, in my experience there was a stress point where i wanted to go one direction and my partner wanted a different direction very early on in the business and it really hurt the business. we survived but there were i had a lot of lessons learned in going through that experience. like? well, first you need to have one, clear leader in the business. so these guys, i respe
agreement right now and that means let s value what we think the business is going to be valued at, create a formula based on how the business grows so if somebody wants out or two of the guys want somebody out they ve got a way to do that. the thing too is you need to think so beyond, so think about if somebody gets married. i mean you can always revisit but if somebody gets married and something happens to that person how does their partner get involved in the business or not? and there are just so many what ifs. a lot of unknowns right now. that you need to think about and try to account for as many as possible. i did like, though, when it works, it s brilliant. right? when it works, it s terrific. there is nothing like going to a place every day that s your job with your buddies. there is nothing like that. all right. thanks so much, you guys. twitter. we hear about it all the time. often by people saying it s a great way to help your business. well, we wanted to learn