Build the partnership as deliberately as you build the business.
You have a strategy for growth, a plan for your people, and goals for your business. But what about the partnership behind it all?
Joinerii helps business owners build the trust, clarity, and shared ambition to make better decisions, move faster, and build something extraordinary together.
How healthy is your partnership?
Explore your health across Tone, Terms and Trajectory, alongside your satisfaction. Start a conversation about what’s working, what needs attention, and where to begin.
See how Joinerii works.
A partnership left to chance can become your business’s greatest liability.
Built deliberately, it can become its greatest advantage.
Of failures in VC portfolios were attributed to people problems in an analysis cited by Noam Wasserman, including tensions between co-founders and between founders and employees.
Your business doesn’t have to be failing for partnership friction to cost you. Unclear roles, awkward money conversations, and different ambitions consume energy that could go into building.
Decisions stall
Choices wait for the two of you to agree, and the team waits with them.
The same argument, again
You have had this conversation before. It never ends in a decision.
Tension about money
Pay, profit, reinvesting, risk. Each of you keeps score differently.
One of you wants more
One partner wants growth. The other wants a business that fits their life.
Three kinds of partnership. The same hard conversations.
Two to four partners who own and run the business together. How you became partners shapes where the friction shows up first.
Friends
Friends or former colleagues who started the business together, and now it’s a real company.
You may be feeling- What you used to figure out over coffee now touches roles, authority, pay and strategy.
- The early handshake deal no longer fits who does what.
- Saying the hard thing feels like risking the friendship.
Families & couples
Spouses, siblings or relatives who own and run the company together.
You may be feeling- Business decisions can’t be separated from family, fairness and lifestyle.
- Succession and who gets what stay unspoken.
- The argument at work comes home for dinner.
Professionals
Partners in an agency, consultancy, accounting practice, engineering or recruiting firm.
You may be feeling- Contributions differ, and the pay split no longer feels fair.
- Who brings in the work and who delivers it keeps shifting.
- Authority and future ownership need clarifying.
Practical experience. At meaningful scale.
Our last project offered practical methodology for business fundamentals like business models and value propositions. Now, we’re turning to the basic human unit of the partnership to make it equally practical.
Users of the Strategyzer method, home of the Business Model Canvas
Books sold, including Business Model Generation, the book behind the Business Model Canvas
People trained in the Strategyzer method
Coaches certified in the Strategyzer method
We’re taking our learnings in tools, content, training and coaching and applying them to help partners transform their relationship into the business’s greatest asset.
We’ve got the business side.
We co-founded Strategyzer and built tools that millions use to design business models and value propositions.
- Co-founders of Strategyzer, home of the Business Model Canvas
- Strategy, value proposition and business model work with leadership teams
- Co-founded companies, led retail and e-commerce operations across North America, and built AI-native products used by 1.2 million people
Your agreements on money, roles and direction are built around how your business actually works.
We’ve got the coaching side.
17+ years of combined experience coaching founding partnerships and leadership teams, with the partnership itself as the client.
- Across technology, healthcare, nonprofits, the public sector and global enterprise
- Faculty with the Systemic Team Coaching Institute
- Supervisors to other team and individual coaches
- Facilitation of high-stakes executive conversations
The hard conversations get easier, and what you agree holds when things change.
- ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC)
- ICF Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC)
- Certified Senior Practitioner, Systemic Team Coaching
- Coaching Supervision, Oxford Brookes Business School
- Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching
- Certified Working Genius Facilitator
“Like many founders, we were moving forward with a lot of goodwill, but also with assumptions, blind spots, and things left unsaid. The result was greater clarity, faster decision-making, and a deeper level of trust in our partnership.”
Great partnerships aren’t luck. They’re built on purpose.
Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger
Buffett has described Munger as a partner whose thinking changed and improved his own.
Build a partnership where being corrected is welcome.
Melanie Perkins & Cliff Obrecht
They started together with Fusion Books, then brought in a technical co-founder to build Canva, a design tool that made creation accessible to far more people.
Know when your partnership needs another partner, and agree on their role.
Ben Cohen & Jerry Greenfield
In 1978 they took a $5 ice-cream course and opened in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, on a $12,000 start.
Start small together, and grow the business you both want.
We’ve built partnerships like these. We can help you build yours.
We’ve founded companies with friends, family and strangers. We know what it takes to agree on the hard things and keep growing together.
Build the partnership as deliberately as you build the business.
We believe extraordinary things are built together. But goodwill alone cannot carry every decision, disagreement, and change that comes with growing a company.
Avoid the hard conversation to protect the relationship.
Protect the relationship by learning to have the hard conversation.
Let roles and rewards become a test of loyalty.
Make money and power explicit, so fairness doesn’t depend on guesswork.
Assume you still want the same future.
Keep choosing a direction that fits the business and your changing lives.
Rely on the understanding you had when you started.
Renew your agreements as contribution, capacity, and ambition change.
Give the partnership whatever attention is left over.
Make its development part of how you run the business.
Settle for a partnership that functions.
Build one that helps each of you become better than you could alone.
The people carrying the business deserve as much care as the business itself.
Three phases to turn your partnership into your greatest asset.
We start with the biggest thorn in your side, strengthen your Tone, Terms and Trajectory, and keep building as your business and lives evolve.
Our client is the partnership. All meaningful owner-partners participate. Typically, you have two to four partners and $2M–$20M in annual revenue, or are growing quickly from $500K.
Lift the pressure.
Each partner does an intake, then we work with everybody together to identify the highest-value issue. We all agree your first six-week outcome, and choose the projects and practices to get there.
That might mean clarifying who decides what, revisiting partner pay, or working through a conflict that keeps coming back.
Strengthen your Tone, Terms and Trajectory.
With the first priority addressed, we map a plan tailored to your partnership, pairing business practices with the communication and leadership skills to make them work.
The foundations stay consistent. The work reflects what your partnership needs next.
Turn the partnership into an advantage.
Every six weeks, we identify your next constraint and plan the next sprint. Weekly practical training, coaching and office hours help you install systems and get unstuck.
We track two sides of your progress: from Draining to Elevating personally, and from Liability to Advantage for the business.
Tone, Terms and Trajectory, with the partnership at the centre.
With the first priority addressed, we map a plan tailored to your partnership.
Raise difficult issues, repair conflict, and restore connection, with practices like the Same Page Meeting.
Clarify pay, ownership, contribution, roles, and decision rights, with agreements that take weight off the relationship.
Align ambition, strategy, wealth goals, and personal capacity, with a shared vision and agreements for changing seasons of life.
The foundations stay consistent. The work reflects what your partnership needs next.
A different stage calls for a different kind of support.
Building your foundations?
Our startup course is for partners in businesses below $500K in annual revenue. Get clear on how you’ll work, make decisions, and build together.
Explore the startup courseIs your partnership fractured?
Our urgent care service provides focused support for partnerships needing critical repair. When continuing together isn’t viable, our off-ramp service helps you work toward a graceful exit.
Explore urgent and off-ramp support
Find out where your partnership stands.
Book a call. We’ll look at your partnership together and tell you which option fits, if any.