The Pursuit of Partners - Part II
[Founding new firm update #2]
After my first two tactics for finding a founding partner who would lead marketing strategy failed, I decided to reach out and target specific people.
There was one person in particular that I really coveted. He is an architect, but also a writer and speaker on subjects related to collaboration within the building industry. He has much more experience than I, which I know will be crucial for credibility with potential clients.
We know each other through the blogging world, so I called him up and made a very awkward and fumbling pitch for pursuing a partnership. I wasn’t sure what his functional role would be with the new firm, but I knew he’d be useful somehow.
He agreed to meet with me in person the next time he was in San Francisco to talk about it. Luck was with us, it seemed, because he was coming into town the very next week. We met over dinner, and I showed him my vision for the practice.
But at the end of the meeting, he hadn’t committed to anything except to continue talking. The problem, he explained, was that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in his career next. He wasn’t sure he wanted to continue the traditional practice of architecture, but wasn’t ready to articulate what other role he would prefer.
Over the next few weeks, he did not express any further interest. So the hunt continued.
Meanwhile, an architect I was already working well with on a side project said he’d like to pursue a partnership with me. He and I already get along, and I trust him. He lives far away from me, which is less than ideal but not a show-stopper. I hesitated to finalize that partnership for two other reasons:
First, I knew he was already the prime member of a separate startup venture, and I worried his attention would be too divided. Second, I still hadn’t identified which market segment I wanted to target, so I hesitated to committing to any particular architect. We kept the dialogue open.
