Yesterday Carolyn Zepf and I were invited to be guest speakers at a GoodLife training session with 150 Personal Trainer attending.  I want to talk about what we covered and then how it relates to all entrepreneurs, business people, energy workers…etc.

It was a fun session, lots of great trainers who are motivated to help their clients and keep developing to become better trainers.  Which is such an honour to be able help these professionals of all levels of knowledge and expertise.

The talk was mostly about continuing their education through courses, reading, watching video’s…etc. Plus we talked about how important it is to build a team of professionals that you can work with. How working with experts in different professions can really help the learning curve in nutrition, rehabilitation, energy workers…etc.

We did cover a little bit about Niche Marketing but we didn’t have a lot of time because they had so much more great information to cover from other speakers.

In this post I want to go over the Business partnership and really show how important it is to understand when you are in business.

Business Friendships

Over the years I have heard all different terms of working with other people, be it “Joint Venturing”, “Business Partners”…etc. Which in my mind it divides the relationship to just business, we don’t really use these titles with the intent to being entirely invested. There is a slight reservation of fully being invested personally to the business partnership. I find that people have a F.E.A.R. of being all in to the relationship so they don’t say what is on their mind. Now there could be different reasons for this; they are working on other projects separate from this business partnership, they don’t feel they can trust the person they are working with but want to see if there is a way to make money…etc. There are numerous of reasons why people don’t fully invest themselves into business partnerships which is completely understandable.

Here are the top reasons I feel why business partnerships fail

1. The business is focused on making money first and not about helping people. Where one business partner(s) understand this key principal of helping people must be first, but the other person is only focused on making money and doesn’t care about helping people. The relationship start to struggle and the business starts to be affected
2. Communication – people have an underlining F.E.A.R. that if they speak up they might cause issues and the business could be affected or…
3.  Expectations are not set from the start of the business partnership. This causes turmoil later when people feel they are not being heard, they want certain things and they feel they are not being treated fairly.

There are many more I am sure, I just feel they are the top 3 that deal directly with the business relationship.

Having had the opportunity to coach people worldwide and take courses from numerous amounts of experts I heard a term that came up when relating to people when you decide to work with them. Eban Pagan called it “Business Friendships”, which at the time I felt I understood and connected with the term. It really hit me when I started to assess my own Business Friendships. When I looked through at myself and the people I was working with:  how I was relating to them; how I was holding them back and keeping them at arms length; and how I could see a lot of my actions were causing challenges in the business itself. That’s when a light turned on and I realized a simple analogy for me, relationships of any kind, dating, friendships, business are all just relationships. There is a courting period, I would have to communicate my expectation, have respect for myself and the person I was building that relationship with. Be compassionate, caring, really listen to what they wanted and needed for us to grow.

Once I started to really incorporate this concept into my Business Friendships, sadly a few relationships, business and personal were broken because they weren’t healthy. What was amazing was my new relationships both older ones and brand new ones were so much stronger. The growth was even faster then what anyone expected.

That is why I write this post today because I know there are a lot of people that are working with several people in their business: business partners, referral network, suppliers, distribution, be it co-workers, …etc. Whatever they maybe they are all still relationships.

When you work on building a strong Business Friendships with them both relationships will grow, personal and professional. Which will make it so much easier to grow.

Here are some tips on how to set your relationship up from the start and go in with the right foundation.

1.  Make sure you know what you are looking for in a business friendship
2.  Have your core expectations already set so that you can communicate what you need
3.  Listen with understanding and compassion
4.  If the relationship doesn’t fit with what you are looking for be honest and tell them. They might surprise you
5.  Most important make sure it is FUN! Nothing worse then going into a relationship that it is all work and no play

These tips can be implemented if you are a Personal trainer working with a clinic, online marketer working with other online marketer, Energy healer working other light workers, the list goes on and on. They are all just relationships.

With all the changes that are happening I believe we need to start coming together to help each other out. No more competition, comparing ourselves to others for an illusion of success. In reality we can all be successful in what we do there is so much abundance for all of us we just have to learn how to work with each other.

You guys are my Business Friends and my goal is to keep providing articles like these ones.  What I ask is if you could do me a favour and share my articles in your Social Networks, which I hope will help you and your Business Friends achieve success Personally, Professionally and Spiritually.

Love & Chi

Brandon Krieger

www.BrandonKrieger.com