Business partnerships

[Brian Turner]

So I started a business partnership with someone in the US...

The aim was to set up in computer electronics for the USA market - he has good IT knowledge, and I have the marketing prowress. So I figured on him setting up a company and dealing with the business side, and I'd deliver marketing skills on a revenue share basis.

We've known each other for a few years online and get on great - laid back people with no attitude problems - but there have been some interesting challenges and difficulties so far.

The first is that I appreciate so much more the difference between someone who has an interest in a subject, and someone with a commercial interest in the subject.

The second is that it's easy to overestimate the skills gap between expectations and reality. Most merchants I work with have learned how to resize images and post up product text as a matter of necessity, but I'm finding myself having to take up the slack on a lot of what should otherwise be remedial work because of the skills gap overestimation.

The third is that deadlines are guidelines - push for them, but be aware that errors and issues can really easily make a product overshoot.

In this specific instance, the website is now live but quite over-deadline - a key problem being my time is limited at the best of times, but I've had to do extra development work that I not only did not account for, but has been far more laborious than initially expected.

I'm also finding that although I offered to do the online marketing, I'm really going to have to give the partner a push on local marketing so that we can open up another sales front.

Key points overall is to push each other to ensure work is done, and that you never presume that another person shares similar skills to you, no matter how simple you believe they are.

Anyway, hopefully we should be much more ready now - will see if he can push on developing some content according to guidelines I've pushed on, while I get some search marketing organised.

[brooke2]

er, copy and paste... er, yeah, put the mouse to the far left of the text and press down the left mouse button holding it the and then whilst keeping your finger down move the mouse from left to right over the text and then release the... what? Its asking you if you want to delete what? Which window are you in? er, yeah, window, the square thing, er, ok, so your looking at the screen, and the window is open right? is it fully open? you see the three icons in the top right, three sqaures? the first has a flat line at the bottom and the third has a red box with an x? yeah? you see it? huh? what do you mean it went away? you shouldn't press that unless you want to close the window. .... I know lets start from scratch. You see at the bottom left hand corner of the screen? a button that says START, ok, so next to it, do you have a blue letter e? no? OK, er, can you find the desk top? no? um ok, somehow you need to open internet explorer but we need to call in the engineers for that. They'll be over shortly.

[Brian Turner]

Copy/paste is even more of a problem if it requires some HTML formating of the text - for someone who'se never done HTML at all in their life.

Still, it's a learning curve.