Advisors to partners
Advisors to partners have many different backgrounds: they’re lawyers, accountants, executive coaches, psychologists, business consultants, and more. Those advisors who recognize partners’ need for a holistic type of assistance that includes both the personal and business sides of being partners find the Partnership Charter concept refreshing and helpful.
Advisors need a solid understanding of what being a co-owner of a closely-held business means in order to do “partner-design” work skillfully. They need a healthy respect for the many facets of partner relationships: interpersonal dynamics, money, expectations, personalities, etc. There are so many factors that can play an outsized role in one partnership or another: the power of ownership percentages, individual’s expectations of one another, decision-making authority. Every partnership is unique and there’s no way to know ahead of time which factors may be the Achille’s heal of a given set of partners. All the factors require some level of exploration.
Luckily, being a Renaissance woman helps but is not a prerequisite for this work! Expertise in all these areas is not necessary. Being open to creative possibilities and having an interest in helping a group of partners explore their arrangement is a prerequisite.
TPCI calls advisors who assist partners using the DYP tool “Guides” to capture the idea of facilitating the partners’ creative journey. It’s not about being an expert in the legal, financial, business, or psychological sense because there are few “right” answers for partners. It is about skillfully facilitating the partners’ thoughtful exploration of each others ideas and feelings about a very broad range of topics, help them come to mutual understandings and carefully memorialize those.
Many PC clients prefer to have “Co-Guides” work with them, i.e., two Guides from different disciplines. These clients appreciate the complexity of partnerships – the intricate mix of personal and business – and with so much at stake, they want to get it right the first time. TPCI incorporates “Co-Guide” training into their training offerings. TPCI also assists advisors in finding other advisors who wish to work as Co-Guides.
A few of DYP’s benefits for advisors
Greater Confidence
The tool gives advisors confidence they’re covering every critical business and interpersonal topic needed to thoroughly design a partnership. It removes the guesswork.
Partners Like the DYP
Partners were never trained in how to be partners and the PC Workbook functions like a short course in partnerships for them, allaying their fear they may be missing something
A Unique Drafting Experience
Designed from scratch, DYP has a unique drafting process that ensures each partner contributes their own opinions before they ever read their partners’ opinions. This ensures greater participation.
It Cullminates in a Signed Document
The steps progress logically and naturally to a signed document that memorializes all the understandings, commitments, and agreements the partners make to one another.
Tips on Facilitating Discussions
Whenever helpful the tool has built-in tips to make the discussions and negotiations easier to facilitate. Whether the topic is compensation or personality styles, the help is there when you need it.
The Joint Meeting Programming
DYP allows Guides reveal partner’s workbook prep one answer at a time, greatly enhancing their connection and participation during their meetings.
TPCI’s mission is to make it easier for firms to do more, and better, work with partners
- Some firms can expand into working with partners
- Other firms can enhance their existing partner services
- Partners can find firms easily through the PC Referral Network
TPCI’s Guarantee to Affiliated Firms
There is no shortage of partners who want to develop a comprehensive plan for both the business and interpersonal sides of their partnerships. However, there is a shortage in the US and elsewhere of Advisors who have a tool to make it easy for partners to accomplish that goal. So, if a Firm takes advantage of the PC webpages TPCI provides for at least 11 of the first 12 months, and the Firm doesn’t earn during your first 12 months more than they paid for the license fee,, then TCPI will gladly refund 100% of the Firm’s license fee.
Mobius Executive Leadership
Amy Elizabeth Fox, CEO
As a co-founder of an international firm on the forefront of coaching, team dynamics and emotional intelligence, I’ve had the privilege of developing and employing some amazing tools for enhancing both personal and interpersonal development in the business environment. Mobius Executive Leadership and The Partnership Charter Institute share a deeply-held desire to improve important work relationships. Both firms have invested major resources to develop processes and systems that can be taught to other professionals, creating a ripple effect – a virtuous circle – improving the lives of more and more people within companies as well as beyond them.
With the Partnership Charter process, TPCI has given Mobius and other firms the ability to transform the lives and relationships of co-owners of private companies in almost magical ways. The Design Your Partnership tool makes partner collaboration nearly inevitable – unless, of course, it wasn’t meant to happen, which is also critical for partners to discover if that’s the case.
There’s been a dearth of conversation about the interconnectedness and intimacy of business partner relationships, but the DYP tool makes it relatively easy for coaches and other professionals to not only discuss partners’ interdependence, but actually design their partnerships to positively sustain it. The PC process enhances our capabilities as professionals, as well as the competencies of our partner-clients, which by natural extension makes their companies more valuable
The DYP tool makes it easy for advisors to provide partners the level of service they need
The online DYP platform is available exclusively through firms licensed with TPCI
Interested partners secure access to the DYP online platform by finding an advisor through the PC Referral Network. Partners may request either Guided or Partially Guided assistance.
Guided
Either one or two “Guides” (advisors who manage the entire process from start to finish) keep the partners progressing, make sure they don’t skip over any sensitive or difficult conversations, document their understandings and agreements, and write and revise the Charter drafts.
The Guides also ensure partners thoroughly understand the complexity of their partnership, and the connections among the 13 critical elements.
Partially Guided
Partners with limited financial resources, or a “do-it-ourselves” flair can elect to do some or all the work on their own. Partners use the same Workbook and templates, but may choose to facilitate their own discussions and negotiations, and be responsible for drafting their Charter.
With a licensed PC advisor in the wings, partners have the option of requesting facilitation with some of their negotiations, or converting to a Guided Charter if they get bogged down. The DYP allows that to happen seamlessly.
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”
Albert Einstein
And the partnerships that entrepreneurs create are a function of their combined thinking. With three amazing, informative assessments (personal values, personal styles* and conflict-handling styles**) integrated into the DYP tool, advisors are able to facilitate fascinating conversations partners rarely, if ever, have. Those structured discussions foster greater understanding of oneself and one’s partners, culminating in numerous valuable behavioral commitments to one another. Those aren’t just words. They are thoughts and actions, which advisors carefully capture for the Charter document.
* DiSC (“Everything DiSC” by John Wiley & Sons)
** TKI by Myers-Briggs Company
If you’re interested in offering your clients this innovative methodology and the one-of-a-kind DYP tool, now’s the time to have a conversation
TPCI welcomes the opportunity to discuss how to become skilled at helping partners design their partnerships.
Business Partner Training Program for Guides
TPCI offers a series of webinars for advisors who want to become more knowledgeable and skilled in guiding family and non-family partners to design their partnerships. Advisors who wish to be Guides will learn all the ways closely-held companies are unique. They’ll also learn how to effectively facilitate co-owner discussions and negotiations. In addition to the webinars, TPCI offers mentoring and hosts a moderated online Guide Discussion Group for all licensed Guides.
Guides with solid training in the many nuances of partnerships can provide partners with more choices and foster more creative discussions. While the Guide role does not include giving expert advice on financial (legal, or any other) subject, it’s immensely helpful when Guides can raise the right questions or caveats. In the end, partners make their own decision about the design of their partnership, but they can learn a great deal when designing their partnership that they never knew before.
With training and a deeper appreciation and understanding about the both the psychological and business sides of partnerships, Guides are able to facilitate all the discussions partners need to have to comprehensively design their partnerships. As an added benefit to advisors and their clients, TPCI matches up advisors with deep experience in one area of expertise with Guides who have deep experience in other content areas.
Webinars for advisors – “Guides”
- A Breakthough in the Way Partnerships Are Formed
- The Design Your PartnershipTM (DYP) Tool
- The Four Critical Partner-Content Areas
Business
Law
Psychology
Finance - Facilitating Creative Partnership-Design Work – The Guide Role
- Guide Co-Facilitation
- Mediating Differences during Partner Negotiations
- Drafting and Reviewing Charters
Our objective isn’t to hand partners some abstract, “ideal partnership” document, but to help them…
- Discover what makes, or breaks, partnerships
- Creatively design a partnership that captures exactly what is true for them and no other partnership
- Document their understandings, agreements, and their commitments to one another so they have a document they completely understand and that serves them well both day to day and for years to come