The smartest partnership decision we ever made happened at a kitchen table, interrupted every five minutes by shrieking toddlers.
We were about to walk away from fat corporate paychecks to start Clermont Partners. Before we jumped, we did something most people skip. As we wrote in the book, “we decided to stress-test our decision by writing down in black and white what we stood to gain (and lose).”
Two columns each. What we were willing to put on the line. What we hoped to get back.
“Our lists were eerily similar. But when it came to what we each hoped to gain? That’s where things wildly diverged.”
Victoria’s gain column was all about what she could build for her family. Beth’s looked nothing like it. And that mismatch didn’t kill the partnership. It confirmed it. Because the column that has to match isn’t the dreams column. It’s the losses column. What you will each risk. What you won’t.
Ten years, two exits, and nine kids later, we sat down to decide whether to do it a third time. Not another firm. A book.
Writing it together almost didn’t happen. We had our ending. Two businesses built, two businesses sold, one friendship intact. A book meant two more years locked in a room together, arguing over whose memory of the acquisition was right. Plenty of partnerships survive the business and die in the epilogue.
What got us to yes was the same exercise from that kitchen table. We each wrote down what we stood to lose and what we hoped to gain. The loss columns matched again. Neither of us would risk the friendship, our families’ privacy, or the credibility we’d spent twenty years earning. So we set the rules before we typed a word. Then we said yes.
That’s the story. Now the part most people get backwards.
The Standard Advice Is Wrong
Ask anyone how to pick a business partner and you’ll get the same answer: find complementary skills. She sells, you deliver. She dreams, you run operations.
We had complementary skills. Beth spots a threat before anyone else in the room. Victoria grinds a strategy until it works. As the book puts it: “Beth is the one to push the alarm signal first and loudest when she senses something isn’t right. Victoria’s special sauce is making tweak after tweak to get a strategy to work.”
That’s real. It helped. It is not why the partnership survived two exits, a lawsuit, a cash crisis, and a pandemic.
Complementary skills are the resume. Aligned values are the marriage. And after twenty years together, we can tell you the values that matter come down to three questions. Not ten. Three.
Question 1: How Do You Handle Money?
Not “are you good with money.” How do you behave when money gets tight, and what are your rules before it does?
The kitchen table exercise was our first money conversation, and it set the pattern. In Power Move #3 we wrote it plainly: “Knowing your financial parameters keeps the decision intentional, not emotional.”
We tested that the hard way. In Clermont’s early years we bought out two other partners, one of whom hadn’t been actively managing cash flow, and found ourselves a few payrolls from running out of money. We slashed our own salaries. Both of us. No negotiation, no scorekeeping, no “but my household needs more.” We’d already agreed on what we’d sacrifice, so when the moment came, the decision took minutes.
Compare that to how we’ve watched other partnerships blow up: one founder wants to reinvest every dollar, the other needs distributions to cover the mortgage. Neither is wrong. But if you discover the difference during a cash crunch, it’s too late.
The test before you partner: each of you writes the two columns. What you’ll risk. What you won’t. Compare the loss columns. If they don’t match, no amount of complementary skill will save you.
Question 2: How Do You Handle Failure?
Failures don’t fade. As we wrote: “Unlike childbirth, business failures tend to stick in your brain like white on rice.”
Our first year at Clermont was a failure stress test we didn’t order. Our former employer sued us and went for the jugular. Victoria “was deposed on the Friday before she gave birth to Kate and Vivi the following Monday.” The legal bills and settlement ate a painful chunk of our startup capital.
What mattered wasn’t that it happened. It was what each of us did next. Neither of us hid. Neither of us hunted for someone to blame. We processed it the way we still process every setback: feel the feels, then file them. Write down three things you wish you’d done differently and three things you nailed. Take the lesson. Move.
Here’s why this question belongs on your partner checklist: a partner’s failure response stays hidden until it gets expensive. Some people go quiet. Some rewrite history. Some need a villain, and the nearest candidate is you. You will not learn this over coffee. You learn it at 11 p.m. when a client fires you or a key hire implodes.
So before you partner, ask for the story of their worst professional failure. Not the polished version. Listen for two things: do they own their part, and can they name the lesson. If the story is all villains and bad luck, walk.
Question 3: How Do You Handle Disagreement When the Stakes Are High?
Anyone can disagree politely about the logo. The real question is what happens when life-changing money is on the table and you’re on opposite sides.
We know exactly what that looks like. Twenty-four hours before our first acquisition offer was set to “explode” (yes, that’s the actual term), we were a mess. Fighting each other and shadowboxing the deal at the same time. Life-changing money, and neither of us could sign.
We didn’t settle it by out-arguing each other. We went outside the partnership. Beth called her private equity friend. Victoria sat down with her attorney. Both, independently, said the same thing: too much risk in the payment structure. Hold out. We did. The final deal came in 35 percent higher.
That worked because we’d agreed, long before the fight, on how fights get settled. Not by whoever argues loudest or holds out longest. By outside advisors we both trust, and by data.
We even have a rule for slow-motion disagreements. From the book: “if we have the same conversation, ‘Why isn’t our current plan working?’ for more than five consecutive weekly strategy meetings, it’s time to deploy the ‘Do the Opposite’ method.” Five meetings. Then we stop defending our positions and change the play.
The test: before you sign anything, agree on your deadlock rule. Who breaks ties. What evidence counts. How long you’ll circle a problem before you act. If your prospective partner says “we’ll figure it out when it happens,” that is your answer. You just watched them fail question three.
The Inverse Rule
So that’s the whole system, and it’s the inverse of the standard advice. Don’t start with skills. Start with the three questions: money, failure, and disagreement under pressure. Skill gaps you can hire for. Values gaps compound quietly for years, then detonate at the worst possible moment, usually the one with a term sheet attached.
In the acknowledgments of Entrepreneur Like a Mother, we wrote the truest sentence in the book: “We are each other’s Kitchen Cabinet, co-conspirators, and best friends. Our relationship made it all worth it.”
Two exits later, the second at five times revenue, the numbers get the attention. But the partnership was the asset. Choose yours like one.
Entrepreneur Like a MOTHER comes out September 22. The full story of both sales, including the parts that still make me wince, is in the book.
P.S. If someone you know is in a hard week right now, forward this to her. No pep talk attached. Just this.
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