Launch! by Scott Duffy

Author:Scott Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

The Perfect Marriage?

Think of the greatest partnerships of our time: Lennon and McCartney. Jobs and Wozniak. Gates and Allen. Ben and Jerry. Jagger and Richards. Hewlett and Packard. Half ended in divorce. Half lasted a lifetime.

A business partnership is a lot like a marriage. It’s an everyday commitment, and in the early stages of a new venture you will probably spend more time with your business partner than with anyone else.

Potentially the most important decision you will make in these early days is whether or not to bring in partners to be coowners alongside you. If you do choose to go that route, you need to give as much thought to whom you take on as a business partner as you did to whether or not to marry your spouse. It’s that big a deal.

Some partners seem to have been made for each other.

A man named Irv Robbins grew up working in his father’s ice-cream shop. Irv’s brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, also knew ice cream pretty well; he had enjoyed making it for the troops while serving as a lieutenant in the navy during World War II.

After the war, Robbins started Snowbird Ice Cream in Glendale, California. Baskin, who had married Robbins’s sister Shirley before the war, ran a menswear shop in Chicago. When he and Shirley moved to LA, Robbins convinced Baskin that selling ice cream would be more fun than selling clothes. Baskin agreed and decided to open his own ice-cream store.

As Robbins once told a newspaper reporter: “I was about to sign a lease on a store in Pasadena, and I said, ‘You take it. You go into the ice cream business and do the same thing I’m doing. And as soon as we have enough stores open, we can open up a little ice cream factory.’”

So two people in the same family opened two ice-cream stores in the same neighborhood. They decided to compete rather than becoming partners because both felt that if, as capable entrepreneurs, they joined forces, the compromises required of a joint business venture might get in the way of their creative ideas.

Over the next few years, however, as each built a successful business, Baskin and Robbins started to recognize that there might be significant benefits in banding together rather than competing against each other. They shared a similar vision. They agreed wholeheartedly to sell nothing but ice cream but make lots of different flavors. They also realized they had complementary skill sets, as one excelled in operations and the other in sales and marketing. They both had unique business networks that, put together, would enable them to reach out further and faster when trying to grow.

They decided to become business partners in their new ice-cream venture and selected the order of the names of their new company, Baskin-Robbins, with a coin toss.

They also created one of the great retail concepts of the past century: franchising. Because they both were well versed in what it meant to operate a store and understood the pride

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