A business partnership is like a marriage. Here’s how to make a successful one.

Starting a new business might inspire visions of launching the next Microsoft or Apple.

But the image of the heroic solo entrepreneur, though often romanticized, is largely a myth. The reality is that success more often comes from working with a business partner or a team of partners. Bill Gates had Paul Allen and Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak, after all.

So, you, too, probably will be better off in any new venture with a business partner. It could be someone you’ve worked with, someone in your network, a customer, a supplier or even a competitor. Someone you went to college with or met at an industry event or entrepreneurship club.

Whoever that turns out to be, know that getting into a business partnership often is compared to a more personal type of relationship, according to John Stavig, director of the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management.

“It’s like a marriage,” Stavig said. “It’s a long-term commitment. It’s contractual. If you don’t do it appropriately, it can be very hard to undo. It’s a lot of hard work as well in terms of effort on both sides, respecting each other and tolerating some mistakes. It takes an investment and trust and forgiveness.

“When it works, it can be beautiful.”

For those thinking of launching a new startup, here is advice from experienced and emerging entrepreneurs and others who have studied the subject on how to find a business partner and what qualities to look for in one.

Serial tech entrepreneurs Dan Mallin and Scott Litman are two of Minnesota’s most successful and widely known business partners.

They’ve enjoyed several significant acquisitions or exits through the past 35 years. Most recent is Lucy, their AI-powered enterprise knowledge-management platform. Beyond that, the pair partnered with the U to found MN Cup, the largest statewide startup competition in the country, now in its 20th year.

Neither was looking for a business partner when they met. Mallin was a pioneer in technology at 3M who had a lead role in designing and building the company’s first public website; Litman was a vendor who provided technology and prepress solutions to 3M.

“Once we had built that first 3M.com, we started to find opportunities to collaborate beyond that, and that was really the beginning of forming a partnership,” Litman said.

Working together is the best way to, in Mallin’s words, recognize a business partner. As evidence, Litman points to the more than $400 million in exits that people who had worked together in their companies have had from ventures they went on to start on their own.

“This concept of how to find a business partner, if I had to reword it, it’s how to recognize who your partners are and then maturing into business partners,” Mallin said.

The two didn’t really figure out they were business partners, Litman said, until they had sold their first business together.

“We did good stuff together, we riffed and created together and improved each other’s ideas,” Mallin said. “I don’t think there was a conscious moment where I said, ‘I’m going to be Scott’s business partner.’ It just morphed into that.”

Complementary skills also have fueled their partnership.

“I’m a wild visionary, a 20-ideas-a-day kind of guy,” Mallin said. “And, you know, of the 20, some of them are even good. Scott is details, organized lists, crossing things off, driving the outcomes until it happens. In some way, his job is to help me, help us, select the one good idea from the 20 ideas, five days a week that might have a value in the outcome.”

Two people with technical expertise in engineering or biosciences, for example, might have success in the initial stages of developing a product. But they’ll have to see they need partners or team members with skills in marketing or patenting or seeking funding, said Kanhaiya Sinha, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Labovitz School of Business and Economics.

Sinha also recommended seeking diversity in business partners: people who hold different worldviews, who come from other social and economic backgrounds, who speak different languages, who might be immigrants. Those perspectives can lead to better solutions. Diversity also should mean making a conscious effort to work with people who are different from you and not only those who share characteristics like age, ethnicity or beliefs.

That said, you also should look for compatibility.

“You want to be working with people whom you enjoy working with, who can help you relieve your stress at times when it is required,” Sinha said. “You should be looking for someone who shares your values, who shares the goal and is equally passionate about it, who is willing to be working with you in times of stress or any other psychological issues.”

Characteristics of founding partners also can influence a company’s potential, Sinha said. According to his research, founders with more industry experience are more likely to see a greater performance variability, a greater upside or a greater downside in how their company does.

The same holds true, Sinha said, for companies whose founders have higher education levels or are native-born Americans. Companies with founders who are serial entrepreneurs, who have started a number of ventures or who are immigrants are more likely to take fewer risks. They likely will experience higher general mean performance through time but face lower boom-or-bust odds.

Morgan Kerfeld, Steven Bleau and Beth Urbanski were students in the Carlson School’s two-semester Entrepreneurship in Action course in 2020 when they founded health tech firm Telo.

While other students focused on service- or software-based businesses, Telo’s founders “bonded over this kind of love and desire to make an impact in the medical device space,” Kerfeld said.

Telo’s business plan for a reimagined rollator walker made the venture a division winner in the 2022 MN Cup competition. The company now is working to bring to market Y-Canes, a patent-pending update on the traditional cane that features y-shaped handles designed to improve posture and increase stability.

“It’s incredibly socially minded, even from day one, in terms of what we want to build,” Bleau said. “That gave me the confidence to say, ‘These are people I want to work with, because our values align in what we want to do with the businesses that we start.’”

Complementary skills among the founders also are important at Telo, where Bleau heads product development, Kerfeld oversees business operations and Urbanski is on marketing.

“For me, it was an understanding that I don’t want to work with someone who has the same skills or mindset as myself,” Kerfeld said. “I want to work with someone who complements those skills. That allows us to move faster and be more successful.”

They also grow together.

“As we continue to develop our skills, there’s more overlap in what we do while still recognizing, you’re the specialist at this, or I’m the specialist at that,” Bleau said. “We learn from each other as well, so it’s a really great dynamic.”

If a business partnership is comparable to a marriage, founders shouldn’t overlook the equivalent of a “pre-nup” — a partnership agreement that spells out the ownership and compensation structure of the venture.

“There is a whole science of how you structure the partnership so that as time passes, people’s ownership is not simply because at the beginning of the company, they were 50-50 partners. But [instead] as the business progresses, how they contribute, financially, time-wise or capability-wise,” Sinha said.

Simply put, don’t start a business without a partnership agreement, said David Deeds, Schulze professor of entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas’ Opus College of Business.

“No matter what, I tell my students every time, I will hunt them down if they do this,” Deeds said. “Never, never start a partnership without a signed and agreed upon partnership agreement.

“Negotiate it out so that everything’s on paper, and everybody understands what everybody is getting, what everybody is promising to do.”

The agreement should cover what the equity split will be among co-founders and could address things like titles and roles, Deeds said. Without an agreement, if your business partner stops performing or leaves, that could leave you with 50% of the equity and 100% of the work.

“You can get partners that check out, that quit showing up,” Deeds said. “It’s hard, and they get depressed. You’re not hitting your numbers, and suddenly, they’re showing up at 11 and leaving at 2.”

To help forestall such difficulties, communication is the key, Deeds said. Partners should meet at least once month or weekly for the first few years.

“I mean sitting down quietly away from others talking about how are we doing, where are we at, what are the big challenges,” Deeds said. “And if there are disagreements, figuring out their way through them. You’ve got to keep communication open, and that is simply the number one tool to keep a partnership together and on track.”

Todd Nelson is a freelance writer in Lake Elmo. His e-mail is todd_nelson@mac.com.