Until Death, or Some Other Sticky Problem, Do Us Part
The best advice on partnership is: Don't. But if you must, here's what you need to know.
Photographs by Ken Collins
Ariane Daguin was a 20-year-old student on loan to the U.S. from her family of Gascon chefs when she met George Faison, a mustachioed Texan with a temper and a taste for French food. It was 1979, and they were students at Columbia University, living in the international dorm. They sealed their friendship over rowdy outings to New York City bistros, where they'd pool funds to split a bottle of good wine among seven students. That is how their story begins.
When Daguin joined a charcuterie company, she suggested that Faison, who had just completed his M.B.A., come run operations, which he did. Then a New York farm announced it would start raising ducks for foie gras. Although foie gras--fattened goose or duck liver--had never been produced or imported fresh in America (the importing of raw meat was prohibited), Daguin had grown up on the stuff in Gascony, and she and Faison believed Americans would devour it. The charcuterie owners disagreed, however, so Daguin and Faison decided to start their own foie gras distributor out of New Jersey in 1985. They were in their twenties, they were full of energy, and they named it D'Artagnan, after Alexandre Dumas's musketeer--all for one and one for all.
They began by distributing foie gras and other local-farm-raised delicacies to chefs. Soon they were selling prepared products to retailers, too. Their partnership was strong: She knew the food and could talk in chefspeak (her father had a renowned restaurant in France) and he ran the business side. And their timing, it turned out, was sublime. Young and influential chefs, trained in "nouvelle" techniques and inspired by the local and seasonal ethos of northern California, were just landing in New York, and they started signing on with D'Artagnan. By 1986, the company was profitable on sales of $2 million. Those were the golden times, those honeymoon months of late nights and tough work and driving that clanking delivery truck around town. That was when they worked in the same office and propped each other up and argued each other down and would uncork a bottle of Armagnac to despair over or celebrate it all. It was going to be forever.
Of course, partners always think their partnerships are going to last forever. (We're talking about partners who are co-owners of a business, whether it's a legal partnership, an LLC, or a corporation. Also, we mean people with roughly the same stake in the business.) Teaming up seems like an easy solution when an entrepreneur needs support--financial, operational, moral--to get a business going. But the problems start when the problems start. That's when the entrepreneurs realize they're not in charge of their own company and they have no choice but to compromise. As the experts say, it's like a marriage. The arguments can be large, such as whether to expand globally. Or they can be small, the what-were-you-thinking variety about expense accounts or a mystifying hire. They can be personal, with one partner becoming bitter because he thinks he works harder than the other. At worst, a bad partnership can sink the business (see "The Worst-Case Scenario"). Even when it works, there are always fears that the partners will develop different goals. "I would never, ever, ever advise someone to go into a partnership," says Clay Nelson, a Santa Barbara business and life coach who works with partners, "unless it's necessary."
And sometimes it is. Whether entrepreneurs are considering a partnership or are already in one, they can take simple steps to preserve the partnership and to protect the business even if the partnership fails. That is exactly what Daguin and Faison attempted to do. Along with presenting their story here, we also shared it with six experts
The Marriage Coach
Susanne Alexander is a marriage educator and relationship coach in Euclid, Ohio, and is co-founder of the Marriage Transformation Project.
The Lawyer
Andrew J. Sherman, a partner at Washington, D.C., law firm Dickstein Shapiro, works with fast-growing companies.
The Finance Guy
Zachary Shulman is a managing partner at Cayuga Venture Fund in Ithaca, New York, and a senior lecturer of entrepreneurship at Cornell University's Johnson School.
The Mediator
Esther Carson Bleuel is a business conflict-resolution specialist in Westlake Village, California.
The Partners
In 1997, Todd Park and Jonathan Bush co-founded Watertown, Massachusetts- based Athenahealth, a two-time Inc. 500 company that helps health care practices manage bills and claims. They remain partners and close friends.
who offered their comments on the steps taken by Daguin and Faison. You'll find those comments annotated throughout the piece. On balance, they suggest that it's never too early to start saving a relationship.
In the early years of D'Artagnan, Faison and Daguin, underpaid and subsisting on sample products, took a tag-team approach. When one was begging farms to produce free-range poultry, the other was frantically sorting 12 poussins for this hotel and 16 rabbits for that restaurant and jumping in the truck to make deliveries at dawn. "There was not one day when one of us did not tell the other, 'I'm quitting,' and the other one would say, 'One more day, okay? Just show up tomorrow morning," says Daguin, who wears no makeup, a plastic watch, and sensible shoes like clogs; she smiles only when something's actually amusing, and she retains a heavy French accent ("soupairedoupaire," or superduper, is a favorite adjective). Still, "it was an incredibly good feeling. We felt part of a group of people who were changing the food world." As chefs learned about the new products D'Artagnan could provide, it almost seemed as if business was doubling on a daily basis. "When she first arrived in the U.S., Ariane was quick to realize no one was focusing on high-quality terrines and pâtés," says Daniel Boulud, the chef who owns Daniel, a four-star French restaurant in New York City. "She also focused on sourcing excellent game and poultry farmers. Now we take them for granted, but [D'Artagnan] was one of the first to familiarize American consumers with these products at a very high level of quality."
