Starting a biz with your best friend

What’s it really like to navigate entrepreneur life with your BFF? We’re sharing our start-up secrets.

Like all great ideas, HAVEN was born over a glass (or three) of wine. Could we turn our nerdy organizing addiction into a legitimate business? Could our style backgrounds (me: magazine editor; Jen: Burberry lawyer) bring a fresh angle to the home organizing industry? And, most important of all, could our friendship survive launching a business together? The answer to all three was an emphatic YES (this could have been the wine talking).

But the path from lightbulb moment to launch was l-o-n-g. It was hard not to get ahead of ourselves in the beginning. We were so energized by the idea of running our own show, and doing something we were passionate about. But we forced ourselves to slow down, to put in the research, to become experts in our field and to learn about our clients and competitors.

The single most important thing we did was to reach out to other female entrepreneurs for help. And once we started, we couldn’t stop. We were absolutely blown away by the talent around us. Why hadn’t we noticed – and celebrated - all these smart, brilliant women forging their own paths and blazing their own trails? And now, because we’re all in this together (a rising tide lifts all boats, right?), we want to pay it forward and share our advice with you.

Here are 4 lessons we learnt launching Maison Haven...

Get the tough talk out of the way. This applies no matter how long you’ve known your business partner/team. Launching a business with another person means there’s Nowhere. To. Hide. So define your roles. Discuss finances. Work through any hard stuff that could come back to bite you later on. Jen and I have learnt more about each other in the past nine months than we have in 25 years. Sure, we’ve seen each other through heartbreak and career highs, through weddings and the birth of our kids, but nothing takes a friendship to the next level like a grumpy 5.30am phone call to plan your business strategy. After witnessing my colossal ability to procrastinate – a two-month quest to find the ‘perfect’ font for our website is just one example - Jen nicknamed me Steve Jobs (after the famously obsessive cofounder of Apple). And while it’s illuminating to watch Jen flex her lawyer muscle (there is no better negotiator around), I’ve never loved my high-flying biz partner more than the moment she confessed she didn’t know how to take a screenshot on her phone.

Prepare to work your ass off. Launching a business is f*cking hard. Someone once told me you can work 40 hours a week for someone else, or 80 hours a week for yourself. Go in with your eyes wide open. And know that the business will only grow as fast as you do. So the answer is to put the time in, then put the time in again. With four kids between us, Jen and I snatch working hours when we can. This often means late nights and dawn starts (thank god for Touché Eclat).

Play to your strengths. Aside from both being uber-organized (a definite plus when you’re launching a home organizing business), Jen and I have very different skillsets. So we use the ‘divide and conquer’ approach. As the grown-up in our partnership, Jen handles the big-girl-pants side of the business: registering the company, opening bank accounts, drawing up contracts, becoming fluent in Quickbooks – tasks that make my brain melt down. As a former magazine editor, I handle the creative side: the branding, the website, the words, the logo. While we both have opinions, we’re also smart enough to know when to back off and let the other person do their thing.

Done is better than perfect. For all the perfectionists out there (yes, I’m guilty) resist the urge to tinker with every last detail. Do your due diligence, prepare as much as you can but know that sometimes you have to cross your fingers and hope for the best. What’s the worst that can happen? You fail? As Arianna Huffington once said: ‘Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of the success’. So adopt Maison Haven’s ‘better an oops than a what if’ approach and go for it!