Years ago, I had a small business manufacturing and selling leather-working tools. After I had it for a few years, an old friend, Nate, called me to say he had retired too early and was ready to go to work again. (I think the truth was that he had been terminated at his last job and his “retirement” was his way of saying he was out of work. Years later, I did the same thing … only I called it “my consulting period.”)
He came to see my business, got all excited over it and asked if I was interested in his becoming a partner. At the time, I thought it would be great having an old friend as a partner in a business. (A partnership is the absolute worst legal form of a business but that’s the subject of another column some day.)
So we formed a partnership and we called it Gemini Engineering and we started to work together. Nate had many great business talents and so did I. I thought that they would complement each other and we’d be a great team. Nate had good organizational, managerial and negotiating skills. He was also a good hard worker who loved to do a lot of the shop work. On the other hand, I was good at manufacturing and production development and designing new products and the tooling needed to make them. I also had a flair for artistic design.
One of our first decisions was to create a catalog of the tools we were making. Then we would mail the catalog to craft stores, leather-working clubs and individuals. The job of creating the catalog fell to me.
This was back in the “stone age” before we had computers or the Internet. Back then, the term “cut and paste” meant exactly what you think it would mean. To create a catalog page, you literally cut pictures or text out of one place and pasted them into your new copy using — you guessed it — paste. The catalog would eventually come to 36 pages, including a front and back cover and each page took me about two days. (Today someone with computer skills could easily create three pages in one day.)
Now here’s where the friction began. I was always willing to let Nate “do his thing” when it came to negotiating or organizing or running the day-to-day operations. But he could not reciprocate and let me do my thing without making some sort of criticism or comment. One day he finally got to me when he looked over a just-finished catalog page and commented, “I don’t like it. It looks all chopped up.”
When I asked what “all chopped up” meant, he answered, “I don’t know. It just looks all chopped up.” Great! It doesn’t look right but you can’t tell me why or what to do to fix it.
The next morning, I taped a new, blank sheet of paper to the drawing board and called Nate over saying, “This is Page 23. It’s all yours to do.” and I walked out into the shop. Of course, I knew he didn’t have the faintest idea where or how to start and that was almost immediately confirmed when he admitted, “I don’t know how to do this stuff.”
And I said, “Fine. Let me do what I know how to do and stop criticizing the work that you can’t do.”
There’s a lesson here somewhere.
Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business but he is a small business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of the Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE).