Solo vs Partnered
March 26, 2023
by a searcher from University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School in New York, NY, USA
Hi! First time searcher here.
Curious if anyone has a pov on going it alone vs finding a partner.
And if partnered, how important is it that you have a long personal history with that person? How important is it that you have different skill sets? Etc.
How should I be thinking through this?
Thanks for the advice!
from University of Calgary in Calgary, AB, Canada
Partnered with an individual ~18 months ago that I had met through mutual connection on SME PE fund buyout concept that morphed into self-funded search, got a deal under LOI, failed to attract capital to the story, lost momentum, considered funded search together and parted ways as he chose to find FT employment, am continuing solo.
Like others have said above, the decision of whom to partner with isn't striaghtforward when you have little history. In my case, I had joined a realtively new PE Fund in my late 20's, bought minority interest, on paper founders had overlapping industry backgrounds, complimentary skill sets, one MBA/CFA, the other had industry field experience and then been a sell side analyst. Short version is that egos, different work ethics, their lack of ability to self assess and communicate candidly with eachother given limited personal history was amplified when market conditions in the portfolio declined, I exited at yr###-###-#### so took that observation into the partner conversation on my own journey.
Once you get past the common interest in building and buying business, go deep on what you respectively want out of it, what your good at, where your gaps are, "hold up the mirror" in terms of your need for control, how you handle stressful situations, even brief convo on politics and religion. There was a 8 year age gap in our case, both had PE experience, but his was expontentially wider industry wise, and had done control investments with far better rigour than my experience. I left the PE fund explicitly seeking operating company experience, initally as Corp Dev, later President role in a succession situation backed by private equity, personal preference to be operations/strategy/BD in our journey, so for the most part we weren't after the same roles, but common financial backgrounds made for easy flow on all things numbers related. To Shail's point above, in several prospective investor meetings, we were pushed on the relatively limited time working together. think we could credibly address. In hindsight, delta in age and experience was causing friction as we faced headwinds; one wanting to just get started, the other being more particular that starting in the wrong platform just for the sake of getting a deal done would be detrimental to value creation. Size of the deal also comes into consideration on partnered endeavour post close, as there naturally has to be enough scale for a division of duties.
Solo obviously requires no outside input, but you lose the ability to converse on themes, split the lead gen, talk through diligence etc. Can be supplemented with a formal/informal group of advisors depending on funded or self funded search. DM if you want any further thoughts.
from Stanford University in Honolulu, HI, USA