Should You Avoid a Lone Wolf in Business?

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

CapForge Founder and Owner Matt Remuzzi reacts to business advice being shared on the internet. In this video, he reacts to if partnerships are for business. 

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video:

No.3 lessons the richest man I’ve ever known taught me about business. Never work with lone wolves because they will eventually burn you. Many entrepreneurs fall into this category at some point myself included. The problem is that you get so married to the idea of doing everything yourself, you fail to recognize when someone else is helping you, investing in you, taking a chance on you. You see everything as a result of your own labor and because of that

these type of people give you no reciprocal energy gratitude thanks. They end up being takers. They’re also the first to cut and run when things get hard. They will never save your butt because they don’t perceive that you have ever saved theirs. They’ll cut you out of deals and they’ll do all of this unintentionally. That’s what makes them very dangerous. They don’t think they’re being nefarious, they have tunnel vision on. Doing everything themselves. They have no space for anyone else, but it still ends up in you getting burned.

Matt’s Reaction:

Okay the lesson here, we missed the first two lessons, but lesson 3 is don’t work with lone wolves. I’m not sure what that means. I think anytime you go into business and you work with other people you wanna make sure you understand who you’re working with and what their motivations are. And I think partnerships a lot of times can be problematic. It’s very hard to get two people to go into something and work well together over the long term. Things change for one person or the other person, motivation, financial situation, even marriage or living arrangements. Things like that can cause stress on the partnership. It’s nothing to do with the business but causes things to fall apart. So I’m very wary of getting into partnerships. I think the best partnership you can get into is where both people are required for the thing to work. Right, it’s like a lock that has two keyholes. You need both keys to turn to open the lock. You need both partners to work. Or another analogy I sometimes use, if you imagine you’re sitting, you’re both sitting on a seesaw, right? But instead of balanced over 2 feet over sand in a playground, that seesaw is sitting on top of a giant cliff, and if either person gets off everybody dies. In that kind of partnership, things are, everyone’s motivated to keep it working and to stay on the same page. And to make it, you know, be successful. But if you got a seesaw where one person is sitting safely over the ground and the other person is the one out over the cliff and the person over the ground gets up and walks away one person dies. But if the other person gets up and leaves then everyone’s fine, you got an unequal balance there. And it’s very easy for it to quickly tip out of balance and not work out. Just like in any relationship, if one person has all the power then it’s probably not gonna work out long time. You need things to be balanced and reciprocal and fair. So I think that’s what she was getting to but the whole lone wolf thing and people walking away working by themselves, I kinda lost me on that. But I agree in the general sense that partnerships are tricky. And if you’re not 100% sure that your partner is equally balanced with your interest and it’s a great fit for the long term then you’re probably better off not being in a partnership and figuring out how to do it on your own.