How To Start (and Sustain) a Successful Side Hustle With Your Bestie
Business partnerships, when built and nurtured well, become life-lasting bonds. Your business partner is likely to become family (or maybe they already are!). Still, many people shy away from working with a loved one for fear it will ruin the relationship. We’re here to tell you it can work, and it can become a beautiful thing.
We’re Tess and Alisha, best friends and business partners. We met nine years ago at our then jobs. We became fast friends: spending our days together at work and our evenings together over Prosecco. Amidst those hustling days and bubbly nights, we dreamt up a plan to create our own company, brought the business to life, held down full time jobs, became mothers, and navigated all the tricky beautiful challenges life threw our way.
Moving from besties to business partners has been a natural transition for us, but we absolutely work at it. Every. Single. Day.
A critical component to making this business work so seamlessly is the operating principles we created; they dictated how we would work together. These principles have allowed us to move fast, align quickly, challenge each other, work together flawlessly, and most importantly, launch our business.
It’s easy to have a great business idea, but to execute? That takes strategy, thought, and an intentional plan on how you will achieve maximum workability between the founders.
If you’re in a similar scenario, take the time to pause, reflect, and design an alliance on how you will work together, including a plan for what you will do when things get tough, what you are committed to above all else, and the lens and values you will filter decisions through. It may just be the most important planning your business does.
The following are our Top 6 Operating Essentials and how they support us in our partnership.
1. CLEAR IN THE MOMENT
So what does it mean to ‘clear’? It simply means bringing the unsaid into awareness.
Imagine the following scenario: you’re in a meeting with your business partner and you are not moving forward; you’re butting heads, not agreeing on anything, and not seeing things from each other’s perspectives - is there something to clear? Ask yourselves:
Is there something holding you back from being fully present? Are you holding on to something from the past that is getting in the way of your listening? Is there a belief you have that is getting in the way of your ability to be in the headspace of possibility?
Clearing gives you access to the present moment. When you are in the present moment you have the maximum ability to make impact.
We Clear - in the moment, with vulnerability, with our truth, and without judgement.
2. KNOW WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
Success looks different for everyone. Create a clear vision of how it looks and feels for your business and for you as individuals. In addition, it is so important to understand how your partner defines success.
At Eleven Eleven Talent Collective, we set a 10 year vision—this vision is created from the place of pure possibility. We have four core pillars of this vision:
Global Business
Freedom + Choice
Innovation
Philanthropy
We also have specific goals and objectives in each of these buckets that are clearly defined. We then break down the 10 year vision into our 5 Year Strategic Priorities—all of our decision making today is filtered through this lens.
We always ask ourselves, “does doing ‘xyz’ support our 5 year strategic priorities?” If yes then we do it, if not, it’s an easy no.
We stay laser focused on what moves us closer to the vision and we hold each other accountable to making that happen.
3. EXEMPLEMARY COMMUNICATION
Our communication with each other is next level.
We are constantly in a cycle that goes something like this: connect —> align —> connect —> align —> pivot —> align again.
We maintain and restore integrity - if one of us will be late to a meeting, miss a deadline, or be unable to deliver what we said we would, we are 100% responsible for communicating that to the other partner.
We ask for what we need, we don’t sit in unclarity, fear, or let ourselves become swamped or overwhelmed. We pick up the phone and say, “hey, I need support with this”.
We check in. We offer support before we think they might need it. We don’t wait for the other person to drown—we stand for each other.
4. CLEAR FINANCIAL GOALS
We aren’t afraid to talk money, and we do it every week: we go through our accounts, budgeting, and forecasting line by line. We understand what is coming in and what is coming out. We set goals around income and how we want to use our financials to advance our community and our team. It’s important to us to have a sound financial structure in place that allows us to contribute to our future growth, the present moment, retirement, and our passion projects.
We approach financials through the mindset of abundance. We believe money and value go hand in hand.
5. PRESENCE + PROSECCO
This is our precious time to connect. We sit down, light candles, pour a glass of Prosecco, and don’t talk business. No matter what is going on we commit to being right here, right now.
This is when we connect on life, love, loss, and everything in between. We talk about our children, how we are doing individually, what’s keeping us up at night, what we are excited about. Sometimes there are tears, a lot of the time there’s laughter, prosciutto, and a ton of brie cheese.
This is our sacred time to be present for each other and simply be friends, and it’s a critical part of keeping the partnership strong.
6. TIME IS PRECIOUS
We use the phrase “time is precious” a lot at Eleven Eleven, and we mean it. We mean it above all else.
When something is going on we ask each other the question, “Where or who do you need to be with right now? Go do that.” We understand that performance and productivity is actually improved when our lives include time for renewal, wisdom, wonder, and giving.
Most importantly, success for both of us means that our whole lives work in harmony. Fulfillment in our lives outside of our business is just as important and crucial to us as the business growing in profit and global reach.
One cannot thrive, nor survive, without the other.
Of course, we are always learning, growing, and figuring things out. The above framework has supported us in the first few scrappy, early start up years. We hope it inspires you to create some principles that will support your businesses with strong, healthy partnerships that last a lifetime.
Tess + Alisha
Eleven Eleven Talent Collective