Partnership = Marriage?

Now I am officially a busy man: a man struggling with my own business venture, a man trying to help my cousin with her academy for special children, and now a man busy to run a software business with partners.

Even since I decide to give a try on this software partnership thing, time is against me (perhaps I am trying to do too many things at the same time). I started to felt that partnership is like marriage, where I would want "good" and trustable partners. Yet there is so much fear in it, and yet so much trust is required. No amount of paper work or agreement could make a partnership work, not stop it from failing (though it would help to prevent it from departing miserably).

I would say the business is good, but the process and manpower sucks at the moment. The business grows too fast and it's backfiring, and perhaps further growth is a problem at the moment. I am required to run and streamline the business: to handle the clients, perform requirement study, hire a few good people (this could be tricky, and fun) and set the business up to handle more of businesses in the future. I am required to code at the moment, since the office is not up and thus we cannot hire people yet. The business is in a slight mess at the moment (and it could continue falling into deeper mess if we didn't save it in time), yet it had the potential to become a profitable and sustainable software business (in fact, it is already profitable and had more business that we could handle).

What do I like about this partnership? Partnership is a two-edge sword; it could bring us to greater height or screw us up badly. I had been a lone ranger most of the time and God knows when I am capable of employing people to work for me and find suitable and willing partners to grow my business together. Partnership equal team and I would like to try to work in a team environment. Secondly, the business is already there, we just need to complete the job and collect the cheque (one less thing to worry about). Third of all, the partners seem alright and it is possible to work together. Last but not least, I finally am going to get a taste of employing people, train some protégés and run a software business. Even since I work as a software developer, I had been criticizing the ways local software companies are run. Let's see if I could actually make a different, or sucks as much as the rest.

What makes me to hold back? Like I said, partnership is long term commitment, lots of trust, co-operation and understanding, and is definitely not easy. But neither is marriage easy, yet we still have to go through it. Is like for all or nothing, we have everything to gain or back to square one at the end. Time is of essence here, and I might have too much on my hands. I am not willing to sacrifice my current venture, yet I feel the need to help my cousin with her academy, and this new partnership is going to eat a big pie of my time. Perhaps this time thingy could backfire me later.

Though I do enjoy my lone ranger venturing period, but perhaps it's time to change slightly: to try something new, to take some risk, to have more faith, to be more realistic and start making big money, and start getting very busy. Sometimes it does make me wonder, to do the things we enjoy, or to do something which makes big money? Perhaps I need to money to fuel my "hobbies".

PS: Life has been too busy for blogging lately. I have to write this piece while waiting for the departure of my Gunung Ledang trip, and the computer at the Cyber Cafe got so badly hit with viruses that I can't even post/save my writing (luckily I use Writely which auto save). I finally find the time to retrieve it today.