Finding Great Partners As A Designer

finding the right partner to work with is like finding your your soulmate it's yeah it's important as if you're getting married to this person actually your partner is somebody that you might see more hours every day than your wife or husband so I think it's really really important to find the right people to work with and I've been getting a lot of questions lately as to how to find the right partner to work with as a designer so I'm going to give you my perspective around it and also what I've been seeing from from friends and people that I know around me first of all I'm so lucky to have really amazing Partners working with me um at the new school so I I can really tell you how that makes a difference to work with people that you love working with and you contribute to each other's you know strengths and that really creates you know a group that can achieve amazing things and I think the first thing that really matters to me but I think really makes it work is that you all share the same values as as people and you you all want to strive for the same thing because if one of you for example is his goal is I Don't Know What To Be A Millionaire and he wants to work 20 hours every day to achieve that and you kind of want to take it easy and work on your art probably you're not sharing the same values and you're going to have conflicts and it's not going to work that well together so having you know shared values is super super important and I also think that if you know the person like for a period of time before you partner up it will contribute to the success it's like you're not going to marry somebody on the second date you probably want to date for a while before you go into kind of a committed relationship and being a partner with somebody starting a business with someone uh which has a lot of responsibilities together I wouldn't do that with somebody who I just met like two weeks ago because we both want to start a company so for me for example I knew leor for about a year or even two years before and we were just like we worked together on project and then we just kept in touch drinking coffee from time to time until we we've decided at the same time that we want to start a company and I didn't know AAL a our developer the third uh partner at the new school but leor knew him for a lot of time so it's kind of like he's the bridge between us but because leor knew both of us for a lot of time that partnership it kind of helps to bridge the trust go in that relationship works really really well a lot of people want to if you're a design I'm a designer and you're a designer so a lot of people think that starting a business with another designer is is going to be cool it's going to work out let's start you know a studio together a design studio or something like that but I think there is something that you really want to think about and that is if your strengths are both the same thing as designers for example there's a lot of other aspects of the of the business that some somebody else is going to need to do and it's best if each and every one of you has different strength so that each of and every one of you can do the different parts of the of the of the business but if both of you want to work at the creative you're going to you know step on each other toes and nobody will want to do the other things in the business for for example for us it's great because I'm doing the creative leor is doing the whole the management Finance marketing and a is doing the development each one has their own core strengths and we have like clear boundaries and for example I was working in a branding agency where the two partners who set it up was one was the creative side and one was the the business side so they gave each other real real freedom because each and every one of them had their own thing but when I had two friends who were both both designers starting a studio together that didn't end up very well now I'm not saying that it's not possible a lot of great Studios were uh founded by two creative people but it's really hard because the boundaries are not clear and you want to tell the other guy what to do and so on when I did the internship in Mexico though the studio was founded by two creative people and that was each each of them has their own creative space and we doing their own project so actually the partnership was more like just to share the brand and the marketing in the in the rent space but every one of them has their own space and kind of creative freedom I'm not sure if that's what I really would call like a partnership that's you know the real major benefit of partnership is that 1 + 1 equals 3 that together you're stronger than you would have been um alone so I'm not sure that kind of partnership really leads to I don't know a great uh partnership where you achieve much more together but again I think you have to understand what's right for you but think about that if you want to start a business with another creative person what are your boundaries what are you going to do versus what are they going to do and who's going to do all the other stuff that none of you um want to do so the three takeaways would be one to have shared value with the person that you're partnering with to have at least some experience of dating before your partner up and three really Define the boundaries of what each of you is doing in the partnership it's actually a client day today I'm working for a client but I'm going to use my lunch break right now to have a talk with my partners around a new idea that I have for Prospero when I use the talk as an excuse to walk for a little bit since I didn't leave the house the whole day [Music] [Music] so I'm done working for today and I'm heading to my client's office to show them what I've done but a funny anecdote I want to share with you um I had to edit a short video uh for my client today where one of the employees kind of shot uh video of him explaining how to use the system and I edited the video and I send it to them over email but uh when I send it over them I kind of wrote a funny email because uh this week I was at a premiere of a movie of my friend and I was kind of inspired by all the you know the movie posters and all the quotes about the film and so I kind of wrote like a funny email like this is a you're invited to the premiere of the movie of this employee and kind of wrote funny quotes about the movie and just send it to them and they were laughing so hard and they were just like cracked and they loved it so it's just like to show you that sometimes you can do the job but also kind of be funny or be amusing about it and your clients just love you for it so it's just just a funny thought anyway hope you guys have a great weekend I will catch you next week