Treasa Edmond: 0:00

Welcome back to Boss Responses. Have you ever thought about entering into a formal partnership with another freelancer? Say, you're a writer and they're a designer, and you know that you could get bigger projects, more complex projects, if you worked together. Well, that's the question Sarah and I are dealing with today. Our answer might surprise you. If you're a freelancer, business owner or anyone who deals with clients, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Treasa Edmond.

Treasa Edmond: 0:32

I've been dealing with clients and running my business for nearly two decades and in that time, I've dealt with my share of doubt, imposter syndrome and not knowing what to say when a client asked a question I wasn't ready for, and not knowing what to say when a client asked a question I wasn't ready for. I created this podcast to empower you with the boss responses you need to grow your business. Each week, my guest co-host and I will bring you five episodes packed with practical insights. Monday through Thursday, we answer your questions, and Fridays, we dive deep to explore how our co-hosts embrace their role as the boss of their business. Welcome to Boss Responses, sarah. What is the question for today?

Sarah Greesonbach: 1:16

Today, sam wants to know. I am a content writer and I've been approached by a former colleague who's now a web designer. She would like to join forces to offer full-service branding packages to small businesses. We've successfully collaborated on a couple of projects in the past and the potential for higher-value contracts and shared workload is appealing, but I'm not sure how to, or if we should, formalize our agreement. I'm also concerned about potential disputes over creative differences. How can we create a partnership that protects both of us and clearly defines responsibilities? Go?

Treasa Edmond: 2:00

I have a strongly held belief on this one and I'm going to start with a caveat. I have worked very closely with a designer in the past and we have offered packages to our clients. We were not a partnership. We collaborated, but we did not form a partnership, and we did that intentionally. For a lot of these reasons, I want to touch on a couple of things Sam said here. They've successfully collaborated. They've already done that. That's great. The potential for the higher value contracts and the shared workload is appealing. Higher valued contracts great.

Treasa Edmond: 2:32

If you're working with a designer, there is no shared workload. You're doing your writing and they're doing their designing and they need to work together, but it's not actually a shared workload. So I would rethink how I thought that in my head. Sarah and I were just talking in the break about reframing, and I think that's one of those reframing situations the disputes over creative differences. If you've successfully collaborated, clear communication at the start of the project should actually resolve that. So I don't think that's a huge issue. The bigger issue to me is how we can create a partnership that protects both of us and clearly defines responsibilities, and I want to point out just a couple of things, and this is all a conversation. You need to have a conversation with this person about what the money looks like. So profit sharing or fees, who's going to set those? How are they going to set them? How's that money going to go out, client ownership who actually owns that client, and then what happens if one of you want to exit this relationship and not work together anymore. If you can talk about those things like two civil adults or business people, then you can talk about regular collaboration.

Treasa Edmond: 3:53

My recommendation on this is would be not to form a formal partnership. It would be to keep a collaborative relationship where you have made an agreement with each other that this is what you're going to do. Get it written down and then, on each project, depending on who brings the client in, the person who brings the client in is the lead on that relationship and they subcontract the other part of the work to the other person. And if you have everything set up ahead of time, it makes it a lot easier to do that and that's what worked really well for me. Some people might like a formal partnership, but partnerships get sticky. I've seen very few partnerships that didn't get sticky in this type of situation. But just make sure you have everything clearly delineated.

Treasa Edmond: 4:39

Say, sarah is the designer and I'm the content writer. If I bring in a client who came to me for writing, but they really want designing as well, then I could say hey, I know this designer. We could bring them in on this project and get it all done at once for you, and then make it one thing Would you like to pay them separately or would you like to pay one lump sum? And then I would go to Sarah and I would say, hey, sarah, I have this person. They want to use your design. Do you have availability? Yes, great, how much do you want to charge for this? Sarah gives me her rate, I put it in my package project and then I also add 10, 15% on top for facilitating everything. And then it's good to go.

Treasa Edmond: 5:22

That's all it is. It's subcontracting. It's so much easier than a formalized arrangement. But because we do it all the time, sarah knows that it's going to be a well-run project. Or if Sarah's running the project and I'm just coming in to do the writing, I know that we work well together. And when I say, hey, sarah, how many words do you need for that page? She's going to say 456, no more and then we just move with it. A huge amount of this is communication and making sure that you can work with the person, and you've already proven that. But I draw the line at formalizing. That creates a partnership where both of you have kind of equal liability on everything as well. And formalized partnerships change tax codes, they change all kinds of things, and I would rather just run my business and subcontract. What about you, sarah?

Sarah Greesonbach: 6:15

Sorry, that was the sound of everybody cheering in response. It's overwhelming over here, so we need to let it settle down a little bit. But I completely agree, which is not a shocker. I do think there are some scenarios where a partnership could make sense, and it's mainly if you have the impulse to creatively meld souls with someone else and you just want to be up in their business creating new, amazing art. Yeah, that's a partnership. I've seen some things like that Gosh Creator Kitchen with Jay Akunzo and Melissa something Braid Creative is something like that. But I think what happens in those partnerships is that they aren't getting together because it's convenient and it's going to help them sell stuff. They're getting together because they have this creative mission to change something about the world.

Sarah Greesonbach: 7:02

And I'm not really getting that vibe from you, Sam. I'm getting the vibe that everybody has the business they like and they'd love to collaborate on some projects to make it a little less lonely and maybe get some more clients out of it. So I think the best way to do that is absolutely with a collaboration where one person takes point, maybe gets an extra fee for it, something like that, and you know that when they have point on that project they're kind of the final word. So you might have creative disputes or disagree on something, but you both have agreed in advance that person is a 60-40 vote instead of 50-50. I think that's what happens, Because a partnership doesn't have to be 50-50 or 100-100.

Sarah Greesonbach: 7:40

Like a marriage, a partnership can be whatever you want and I think you just want to have that conversation and communicate that going into it so that you have a way out and that there is a decider who can decide without causing bad blood.

Treasa Edmond: 7:54

Yeah, and that's the whole communication thing. There will be disagreements and you need to know ahead of time, even if you're not forming a partnership as collaborators, what's the tie-breaking decision in this. So yeah, we really disagree about this. I wrote this spectacular piece of content and I think Sarah only did kind of a half-hearted job on the design. What do I do about that?

Treasa Edmond: 8:19

What happens when one person doesn't? Don't tell her off. What happens when one person doesn't understand what's going on fully, or isn't willing to commit to that project or just isn't working right? You know what happens and you just have to buy a car that morning.

Sarah Greesonbach: 8:34

Oh my gosh.

Treasa Edmond: 8:35

Yes, it's really involves real life involves real life, yeah, so there has to be a plan in place to deal with situations like that, and people often think, well, we're just going to do this thing and we'll figure all of that out later. You're going to be much more successful if you figure it out ahead of time. And I will tell you those magically chemical creative processes and partnerships that Sarah was talking about. They sat down and had conversations or they worked on enough projects that they were so in tune with how the other person worked that it just made sense. But they still sat down and had conversations and said, okay, if we're going to do this, let's figure some things out. Let's figure some things out and make sure that we're both really going to be happy in this situation.

Treasa Edmond: 9:22

And that's what it comes down to. So it's not about and I know this sounds wrong it's not about the higher value contracts. It's about can you work together to create a great thing and then the money is actually worth it? The money is kind of the secondary part of it.

Sarah Greesonbach: 9:42

It introduces really interesting questions about like solopreneur service offering partnership, agency scaling, like it's to take you down that road where it's like, is it worth charging an overhead and potentially building a bigger machine than I can really handle, just to quote unquote secure higher value contracts or even longer term contracts. And I think right now in the creative and marketing spaces, agencies are really experiencing some transition, like in an alien movie, where a remnant like attaches to someone and they just start like growing in weird ways. I think people have a lot more insight into how agencies and overhead works and so they're much less excited to take a cut or give up a cut of what they're doing. So I would just put it all out on the paper and make sure you're headed in a direction that you actually want to go in. I want to go big picture.

Sarah Greesonbach: 10:40

It could also be really informative to ask yourself, Sam, why you're doing this and see what decisions are you making out of fear and what decisions are you making out of excitement and fun. Because if you are doing this because you are afraid that you can't offer bigger packages or you want to secure clients because things aren't going well, I feel like that's a very different decision from my colleague contacted me. I'm excited about this. It would be so cool to do blank. I want to do blank. I think those are two very different things and I'm getting the sense when we say we want to join forces to offer these bigger packages, we want to protect both of us. I don't know Now I talk myself into like 50-50. I'm not sure if I see any fear in here, but it could be a good question to ask yourself.

Treasa Edmond: 11:26

Yeah, sure if I see any fear in here, but it could be a good question to ask yourself. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mentioned talking about the money. That's an important. This is one of the reasons I don't like to work for an agency. So they're willing to pay my fee, that's great, but they market up 200% for the client. I mean that feels like they're shortchanging me. Even if I agreed to that rate.

Treasa Edmond: 11:42

My best clients have always been the clients who said we don't think we're paying you enough. We'd like you to up your rate. And if you think clients like that are unicorns, they are not. They happen if you form a good relationship with your clients. So if you are going to work with someone, you need to upfront tell them hey, what's your fee? Just to let you know. I'm going to add 10% on top of this to cover my communication with the client and my being a go-between between the two of you. If you'd like to take on that part of the process, then I won't add that to the top. You just have to be in agreement. It's an agreement. So even if it's not formalized as a partnership, you do need to formalize it in some sense so that you at least have the things written down and both of you have agreed to them. It's CYA, it's the freelancer's version of corporate.

Sarah Greesonbach: 12:29

And it could also reveal some attachment issues that you have. It kind of goes parallel with therapy.

Treasa Edmond: 12:36

It does Working with other people, even people you absolutely adore or people you just mesh well with. There are always going to be moments where you're like I just wish she'd get her head out of it and get working on this. I don't care that she has 20 other projects that are due tomorrow. She promised me she'd have me this one today. You get to. When you're working with another person like that, you get to experience some of the headaches that your clients experience, and it's not pleasant that your clients experience and it's not pleasant.

Sarah Greesonbach: 13:06

So do you know your Enneagram type I don't.

Treasa Edmond: 13:09

I've always been interested in that and I've always wanted to take it, but I've just never gotten around to it.

Sarah Greesonbach: 13:14

I know I'm an INFJ in.

Treasa Edmond: 13:15

Myers-Briggs.

Sarah Greesonbach: 13:16

I can almost guarantee you're an eight. I'll send you that afterwards.

Treasa Edmond: 13:19

Okay, sounds good.

Sarah Greesonbach: 13:20

But we can make this relevant for Sam by saying go ahead and do an Enneagram test with your colleague and see how you can better collaborate.

Treasa Edmond: 13:29

It's never something you should enter into lightly and you should look at all possible permutations. Would it be better just to continue with the collaboration? Should we formalize this? Do we want to do that mini agency thing and create a formal partnership where we only work with one another, or are we still going to have clients that are outside of the? Create a formal partnership where we only work with one another, or are we still going to have clients that are outside of the realm of this partnership? So all of those things need decided. It's complex, but whatever you do, I wish you the best and I love people who collaborate. So go, sam. All right, that is the end of day three. Tomorrow we're going to talk about hitting a plateau, and what do you do when you need to make more money but it's just not working out All right, thank you, and my gluten-free waffle recipe.

Treasa Edmond: 14:13

I love gluten-free waffles. All right, see you tomorrow for day four with Sarah.