Not all Money is Green
A very expensive mistake
When I began dating my wife, we had endless conversations about what we valued, our beliefs, hopes, and desires. Sometimes you get lucky and find an amazing spouse that shares the common values you want to see in your relationship, but you don’t know that without spending intentional time around those questions. A misalignment – or difference in values - becomes very evident when disagreements happen (and they do!). Disagreements aren’t bad; it’s how we handle reconciling our relationship that really matters. In my experience, reconciliation can only really happen when each party sees the other’s view, understands that view, and accepts responsibility for how their actions made the other party feel.
That’s really hard. But, that desire to reconcile with each other, believe that the other person has your back, and that they too want to come to a peaceful resolution, is crucial in marriage as well as business. Business partnership is kind of like a marriage.
Years ago when raising money for a venture, we had overfunded our capital round and were facing a decision about which investors we wanted in that deal. It was a dream position for us to be in. We picked a team that was operationally a “no brainer”, but culturally not a fit. We discussed it at length, and even though our guts told us that the culture was not a fit, we moved forward anyway because we thought it was just what you did: you pick the most operationally sound partners/investors because that is what will help you to grow the business…at least we thought. We thought we could keep the culture monster in a box and not let it out.
We learned a very expensive lesson – emotionally, physically, spiritually, and financially. You. Can. Not. Keep. Culture. In. A. Box. It is the pulse of a company, and when it is misaligned, it wreaks havoc like a spreading cancer throughout the organization in a way that spreadsheets, sales, and strategy can’t fix.
The Bible talks about being “equally yoked”, or teaming up with people who are like minded. The idea of being equally yoked gives reference to having multiple oxen working together, in sync, in the same direction, to plow their field. While I’ve never plowed a field myself, I can imagine how difficult it would be to scrape hard, dry dirt across acres of a field in preparation of a new crop. Sort of like building a business. It’s easy to imagine that if the cows aren’t pulling in the same direction at the same time, then the effort of preparing the field will be exponentially harder, taking days, weeks, or maybe months longer to accomplish the same goal that cows working in sync could accomplish in a fraction of the time.
That is how we view cultural alignment now. It sets the relationship for how we, as a team, will move forward together. My wife and I wouldn’t have made it through 9 years of marriage if we weren’t aligned in our values – and most importantly our faith. I’m sure of that. I think we need to consider this same approach to business partners and investors. (FYI: Investors are also partners).
As entrepreneurs, we are trying to plow fields to create something new. Even with the right team, strategy, and product market fit, the odds of us succeeding are still daunting. They are exceedingly worse if we don’t have partners and investors that share our values, our mission, and our core culture. I wish I would have learned this earlier in my career, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20. My hope is that you would consider dating your partners and investors prior to getting married, have those hard conversations about mission, vision, and values, and ensure you are culturally aligned in the same direction so you have the best chance of success in creating a new crop.