Business model questions and where to next, Partnership?

If you make him a partner and he doesn't pull his weight, you will still have to pay him a percentage of your earnings. If he has a heart attack and dies, you will have to pay his widow to get that portion of your business back. I would think long and hard about it. I think he would be valuable to you but you might want to come up with a different arrangement instead of parting with a hunk of your business. My dos centavos.

He reminds me of someone I know who has always seen himself as an organizer and administrator. He doesn't know AutoCAD or the packages, and thus can't do any of the actual work. Everything he handles is given to someone else to work on.

Is that the person you need?

For me it would come down to our relationship. You would have to be able to rust each other as much as any married couple. If not I wouldn't enter an agreement with someone you already told us is better at contract word-smithing than you...

My .02, Tom

>He is good at contracts, proposals and managing very large projects...

Hire a manager, partner with a rainmaker.

My experience with partnerships is one partner does all the work and the other partner gets all the money.

> >He is good at contracts, proposals and managing very large projects...
>
> Hire a manager, partner with a rainmaker.

:good:

Let him start his own business and remain friendly associates.

The only ship that doesn't float is a partnership.

Tried it with someone very similar to what you explain. Good guy, lots of respect, but in the end you have to take care of your own interests. It is a very unlikely scenario where it works out. Personally wouldn't give up anything that you explain.

I wish I had the luxury of sitting in an office answering the phone, talking with all the clients and promising them satisfaction without ever having to toil and sweat and run amok thru the briars and bramble that tears at my flesh.

When days come along and that person can not step up and get out there and help the company keep up with client's demands, they are same as a bag of sand in the soup, unwanted and hard to swallow.

good luck with that...

>
> A guy I used to work for is now unemployed and wants to buy in.
>

Hmmm - Used to work and is now unemployed?

Why is he unemployed? And, are there liabilities that comes along with this guy, from his past dealings? (I would bet yes)

You sound like a smart & hard working guy, why do you need him?

Could it be that you just feel bad for the guy?

I guess I should also say he has some valuable relationships with our state DOT that were very lucrative at his old job. These are the type of good projects I would likely be s long way from getting on my own.

He thinks my firm is too small to get on a project team the way we are and he's recommending trying to leverage a merger with the engineering firm next door, they don't have surveying. We have a good relationship and I do a lot of work for them. We would also likely be able to get DBE status which would help a gteat deal with everything if we were able to work out a merger. I'm not sure they'd even be interested, but if it works out we could go from half a mil to over a mil pretty quickly but I'd have four partners then.

I don't really need him. I just think he has a level of experience I don't. I've had to pay for my education in some instances by pricing projects too cheap, etc. Truth be told I'm ok learning from my mistakes a little.that's life right.

The big question is what do I want to be? A survey/engineer company or survey only. Its tough because my market is ripe for a full service firm that's actually service oriented

I don't know how old you are or if you were in business during the downturn of 07' to 09'

I was - and I can tell you it was bad, very bad.
As a matter of fact, I can't stress enough how bad it was.

For that very reason, I do not want a firm that has 20+ employees again.

I only have 3 full time & one part employee right now.
It scares me to my bones to think about making payroll for 20 again.

Those times almost broke me.

IMO - Lean & Mean is the way to go
You don't have to do a lot of work to make a lot of money.

I don't like the sound of any of this (for me at least). Right now my own business is a one man show, and I could picture hiring a few employees some day. (With a family to support I can only do my own stuff part time so I still have to do the construction gig 9-5).

Partnering with this guy and then merging with the engineering firm doesn't sound like something I would be interested in at all. You have to ask yourself why you started your own business in the first place. Was it so you could be in control of everything from the work product to how the company was run? For me that is the reason. Not that you would totally lose control but there would definitely be some loss of control and compromises over certain things. I also like being able to decide when and what to spend money on.

You need to be looking at this from a business perspective. It does not matter how much you gross or how many crews you are running. What maters is how much you net at the end of the year.

If a partnership or merger or adding more crews doesn't increase your net it is not worth it.

The profitability of a firm commonly has nothing to do with the size of a firm.

So, how long have you been married?

Is this person a lot closer to retirement than you are? If he is then you will be buying back his portion of the partnership at some point, or selling it to someone else if you can't afford it.

It sounds like you would be better off hiring him as an employee, with an option to buy shares in the company if his performance is satisfactory.