Why your best friend is probably a bad business partner | Miki Agrawal | Big Think

Why your best friend is probably a bad business partner

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Social entrepreneur Miki Agrawal explains what makes a perfect business partner. It's not usually your best friend. In fact, it may be best to get a partner who is the opposite of you. Miki also shares how she achieves hiring "yin yang" in her own companies.

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MIKI AGRAWAL :

Miki Agrawal is a social entrepreneur who loves to use designed innovation to break taboos and change culture. She's passionate about sharing her knowledge and strategies, from idea to launch to growth to overcoming setbacks, in the most human way possible.

Miki is the co-founder / chief inventor-er of THINX: the period-proof underwear company that’s disrupting the $15 billion feminine-hygiene market. She also co-created a gorgeous pee-proof underwear called ICON to help women stay their MOST unapologetic selves. For every pair sold, money goes to the Fistula Foundation to provide care for women with obstetric fistula in developing countries.

Miki loves eating so she founded the acclaimed farm-to-table gluten-free pizza concept WILD. The restaurant rang in its 12-year anniversary in 2017 (ding)! She just opened her fourth location in Guatemala!

Miki's newest brand is TUSHY (hellotushy.com) which upgrades the American bathroom experience with a modern, best-in-class, affordable bidet attachment. Wiping with toilet paper after you poop is not only ineffective but helps cause health issues like UTIs, hemorrhoids, yeast infections, anal fissures, anal itching (from wet wipes too!), not to mention kills 15 million trees to make the toilet paper. Toilet paper was introduced to America in the 1800s and Miki and her team agrees that it's time to get our butts into the 21st century. Each purchase helps Samagra combat the global sanitation crisis affecting 40% of the world.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Miki Agrawal: So when you’re looking at bringing partners on, whether it’s investment partners, whether it’s business partners, like cofounder perspective, those kinds of things—Number one, it needs to be the same values. Do you both care about similar things in the world? So values need to align.

And then from a skill set perspective, you need to be opposites. Oftentimes best friends are like, “We want to start a business together!” That’s like the fastest way to not becoming best friends again. Being opposites is so important. I’m great at design. I’m great with the vision. I’m great at sort of the strategy. I’m really great at the aesthetic. I’m really great at the brand.

My partner needs to be great at operations, manufacturing, warehousing, legal, finance, all of that stuff that I don’t love. Can I do it? A little, but I prefer not to. I’d rather stay in my zone of genius and have someone really, really take on their zone of genius, and be in mutual awe of one another. Like I really believe that there is that yin and yang that does exist.

Like if I have yang energy someone needs to have yin energy to be a real perfect partner.

I think to have the right partner energetically you need to be a match and skill set wise you need to be a match. So yin yang like energetically and then yin yang from a skill set perspective

We often like, we’re like: “Both of us are super hyper!” Even if you have other like skill sets than I do, that hyper-hyper-hyper might not work.

And if it’s hype-calm, like the calm counterpart calms me down. My hyperactiveness makes them more excited. So that energetically works.

When from a skillset perspective, “I’m great at this, he or she is great at this,” we’re in mutual awe of each other both energetically and from a skill set perspective. That is the perfect partner.

So I sit on the board of Conscious Capitalism and I think Conscious Capitalism is really based on a stakeholder model. Like every single person has to win, and I think in the past I was a little bit sloppy in a stakeholder model in that we scaled so quickly, “just put butts in seats fast.” I didn’t really think about a lot of things as you’re scaling, which happens to most entrepreneurs, and I think now it really is with Tushy I’m really, really deliberate about the type of people I bring onto the team: really checking their background to see if they really fit.

Before anyone gets hired they have to meet the whole team and the team has to give me their feedback on what they think about this person, if they jive well. It really is culture. Culture trumps strat...

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