September 7th will be 20 years of marriage for me. If marriage was easy, there would be no divorce. You need the right partner to make it work. The same is for business.’

Whether it’s a partner in your business or a business partnership with another plan provider, it needs to be the right fit. I worked for two third-party administrators (TPAs) where partnership mismatches helped doom them. I’ve seen other partnership distributions that fall flat because of bad pairings. Partnerships need to complement each other, have the same values, and have the same goals. That law firm where I worked for 2 years which has given me 13 years of writing material, was a bad partnership when the biggest billing partners were former solo practitioners and didn’t understand the need to share clients for added growth. One of these partners pretty much closed down the NYC office because the profit margin wasn’t there, even though it had a large political influence because it was led by political stalwarts like Harold Ickes and Basil Patterson.

I’ve been on my own in my own practice for 13 years now and any involvement in other organizations has been bad because I didn’t find partners that had consistent values and views to make things succeed. Talk is cheap, you need business partners that do and do what’s best for the partnership.