My hardest buseniss lesson , what is yours?

[BaiAnrui]

Hello you all

I realy want to share this story with you, it is about my partner (who I really trust) and our company and a merge that didn't work out!!!

4 years ago We had a good growing company with a lot of potential. We wanted to create leverage by merging with another party, they also had two owners.
It was too good to be true, if we could put everything together, the sky was the limit, we thought.
But in the beginning of the merge there already were signs that we were very different from the other party, people warned us (red flag?). But we were blind to these warnings, we had a plan. We are going to run a million business, growth was our goal.

And we grew, within 3 years our revenue had grown 6 times, till 3 million euro. But something felt wrong, much of the growth came from the efforts of my partner and me, the rest benefited from our work? No , that is not happening, right?

Time passed and we lost control , more and more, if my partner wanted to go to the right, the other owners wanted to go to the left. The situation at the top got worse evry week, it was a stressful period
But finally, Our escape came last year, (we thougt and hoped) a big companie wanted to take over, they want to buy us. . But the other owners opposed, so the buy did not happen . This was it, the confidence was gone and our merge had failed.
A long way of negotiation did follow. We had to go a long way before we could officially leave the company. We had to take a big loss, but whe had our freedom back!

Lesson: "cooperation is indeed like a marriage", we had not taken the signals serious that this merge would not be an happy marriage.
It has cost us a lot of time, stress and money, but it was by far the best lesson we ever had!
Now that everything is over, I have more energy than ever, and we will once again put all our focus into our company, our own company !!!

 

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[flower_girl]

Mine is actually quite similar. Some years ago I went into business with a woman who was really NICE but I didn't do my due diligence - it also turned out she was unreliable, quite lazy, irresponsible and quite the fantasist. Big mistake and at the end of the day MY mistake for not checking her out properly and doing my due diligence.

I managed to disentangle myself with some damage - but it could have been a lot worst and it was a powerful lesson.

Now I've had quite a few employees and found out they range from brilliant and worth their weight in gold to - well - the other kind. I'm beginning to get a much better handle on whether someone is likely to be good or bad these days.

What I learned - be really careful who you go into business with, be really careful who you employ.

 

[BaiAnrui]

Mine is actually quite similar. Some years ago I went into business with a woman who was really NICE but I didn't do my due diligence - it also turned out she was unreliable, quite lazy, irresponsible and quite the fantasist. Big mistake and at the end of the day MY mistake for not checking her out properly and doing my due diligence.

I managed to disentangle myself with some damage - but it could have been a lot worst and it was a powerful lesson.

Now I've had quite a few employees and found out they range from brilliant and worth their weight in gold to - well - the other kind. I'm beginning to get a much better handle on whether someone is likely to be good or bad these days.

What I learned - be really careful who you go into business with, be really careful who you employ.

Thank you...yes so important. But sometimes we have to learn the hard way