1118 – Look Before You Leap: Tom talks Perils Of Partnerships

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

In Episode 1118 of the podcast Screw the Commute, Tom Antion discusses the dangers and complications of business partnerships, drawing from both a recent public example and his own personal experience.
Key points from the episode:
• Tom references Lucas Botkin, founder of T.REX Arms, who reportedly lost control of the multimillion-dollar company he started after bringing family members in as partners. According to Tom’s summary, disagreements, power struggles, and family conflict eventually pushed Botkin to leave the company he created.
• Tom then shares his own experience from the 1980s when he owned a nightclub in Morgantown. He partnered with a builder to expand the club, but the partner allegedly performed unsafe construction work and contributed little beyond taking advantage of the business. Tom eventually had to go through a costly legal battle to remove him from the partnership.
• The core lesson of the episode is that partnerships are often easy to enter but extremely difficult to exit. Tom strongly recommends keeping 100% ownership of a business whenever possible.
• He cites estimates suggesting that partnerships fail at very high rates — often due to:
o Money disputes
o Unequal workload
o Control issues
o Personality conflicts
o Family drama
o Poor planning for illness, death, or exit scenarios
• Tom stresses the importance of detailed legal agreements before entering any partnership, including:
o Buyout terms
o Valuation methods
o Responsibilities
o Exit strategies
o What happens if a partner dies, becomes ill, or stops contributing
• He recommends alternative funding methods, such as crowdfunding or bootstrapping, rather than giving away ownership.
• The episode also references Episode 993 of the podcast, where he discusses partnership pros and cons in greater detail.
Overall theme:
The episode serves as a cautionary lesson that partnerships can destroy businesses, friendships, and family relationships if expectations and legal protections are not clearly established upfront.

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Episode 1118 – Perils Of Partnerships
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1118 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about perils of partnerships. Yikes. I got my own story and I'll tell you another story about this nightmare thing. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 1117. And that was exercise snacks. And I'm not talking about food here, okay, at all. It's just short exercise. Things you can do when you're sitting too long in front of this computer. Really a good episode there. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number. That was 1117. Now pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. I've been telling everybody lately version 3.0 is the latest. But this program that I've been promoting for years and years and years called Short Keys, is no longer a program. It's a browser extension, but it's still extremely powerful and has saved me. We estimated really an estimate, 10 million keystrokes over the years. So that's probably months and months of typing. Okay, check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingtraining.com and my school with IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV. Okay, let's talk about the perils of partnerships. Now, I've personally lived through this, but I was just watching this video by a guy named Lucas Botkin. He is or was the founder. I guess he still is the founder of T Rex Arms. It's a multimillion dollar now company, but he started it in his garage for 2000 bucks of his own money.
[00:02:17] And I'll tell you what I'm going to put in the show notes, a link to a YouTube video that he is explaining to all his followers why he quit the company. He started the company. So I'll give you the short story here. So he was building the company up and up. He was hiring his brothers. I think he had three brothers, and even some of their wives were working at the company. I think there was 70 more or so employees And the company is growing like crazy. And so one day the brothers come to him and say, you know, we'd like to be partners rather than just employees. And I think from what what it sounded like he's the baby of the family. All right. So he bootstrapped this business and it's growing like crazy. And they wrote up an agreement that made him lose the majority interest in the company so he could be kicked out or. It's just crazy. They his own family. What it appeared to me, just took advantage of him and and made this agreement up. And it went on for years where they were arguing and they were treating his wife like crap. And she was offering to work for free, you know, because there was systems that needed help and she was going to do it for free and they wouldn't have her didn't even answer him.
[00:03:50] And he got to the point where he just wanted to buy them out and get them out of there, and they wouldn't even respond to his offers for payment to get rid of them. And so he finally talked to his pastor and he, he decided, you know, I just got to get out of here. I can't take this the way they're treating my wife. It's a Christian kind of company, supposedly. That's, you know, that's what I, I hate to fake Christians out there. But anyway, so he tells this whole story about this and how he got out and now he's starting some other businesses. But, but, uh, terrible. His own family, you know, kind of screwed him over. And my story is that when I had my nightclub in, in Morgantown, West Virginia, it was going great guns, but it was a small nightclub. And I wanted to build on a great big area so we could expand to like 400 people a night. And One of the patrons heard about this and was a builder. Supposedly there's a big air quotes around that builder, supposedly. And so he made me an offer. We became partners and he started building this great big addition onto my smaller club. However, he was building it in a substandard fashion. I ended up calling an engineer in and the way he did the roof, it had caved under the snow.
[00:05:25] Right? So. So it came to. And all he wanted to do was, you know, hang around and drink beer, you know, for free because he's a partner now. And this, uh, club was being built in in a dangerous fashion and just terrible. So had ended up he wouldn't leave. I had to go to court. It was a big court battle. Ended up giving him. 17. I think from what I recall, I had to give him 17000 bucks. Now this is in 1980s money to get rid of him for what? Whatever materials he had in the building. And then I had to take it over myself and build it properly so it wouldn't cave in on all the patrons. So it was a nightmare. So. So if at all possible, I'm encouraging you to keep 100% of your company. Now, I understand that bringing on people and money can work. In fact, one of my proteges is now a multi-millionaire, sold his company for 340 million because he brought in people. Uh, but, you know, that's the exception. That's not the rule. All right, so I want you to keep, uh, 100% of the company yours if possible. Now, a lot of the. Listen to this. Some of the the failures, the. The estimates from. Now, there's no exact figures on this, all right. Because a lot of little companies just go under and quietly go back to working at Burger King or wherever.
[00:07:02] I don't know, but there's estimates across legal places and small business places and venture capital data and all that. They say the failure rate of sole proprietors, which or individual small businesses owned individually that went into a partnership. Listen to this is between 50 and 80%. They fail. All right. And many of the causes, or they're fighting over money, they're fighting over workload and balance. You know, somebody says, yeah, let's be partners. And then they want the other person to do all the work, and then they're out spending the money on fancy cars and and not doing anything control issues or big thing. Personality conflicts, like, uh, they're, you know, treating the guy's wife, their own younger brother's wife like crap. All right. And and, uh, didn't she didn't deserve it. All right. So. So I want you to really think hard if you're thinking about a partnership and how that could help you. I'd rather see you do a GoFundMe account to get a big bunch of cash in. And. And then you still own it. And you don't have to pay anything back or owe anybody anything. So now I also want you to listen to episode 993. That's the pros and cons of the things you need to know before you get into a partnership. See the old saying, and it's totally true.
[00:08:35] It's easy to get in a partnership really easy. It's many times a freakin Nightmare to get out like I had. And mine wasn't even the worst of the worst. I mean, this poor guy with a multi-million dollar company started out of his garage and his own family, you know, pushes him out or makes him want to leave, you know, so. So listen to episode 993, that's screwthecommute.com/993 and really think this through. Um, and see when the getting out, part of the reason it's such a nightmare is people don't plan for it with, uh, you know, prenuptial and postnuptial agreements. And what happens if somebody gets sick and do they still own part of it if they're not contributing? And I mean, just all these things, sometimes they, if, if they're worried about somebody getting sick, or what if they die and, and the spouse wants to come over and take, take their place, I'm thinking Eric or Kirk kind of thing. Uh, but they're not competent. And I'm not saying she's not competent. Everybody else is right. But. But you can you can fund that with insurance. And and you know what the the valuation of the company when somebody dies or, you know, or whatever, if they just want to leave. How do you value it? If they, if the one partner wants to buy the other one or. And a lot of times there's more than one partner.
[00:10:08] So all this stuff has to be thought out in advance so that there's no arguments at the end. There still could be arguments, but thinking this stuff out ahead of time usually helps reduce the arguments, because people agreed to all this stuff in advance. Now typically a lot of them forget about it. Oh, well, you know, that was a long time ago, you know, but now things are different. I want, you know, $1 million, you know, whatever it is. But anyway, that's episode screwthecommute.com/993 on the pros and cons of beef and the things you need to know before you get into a partnership. Okay, so that's my story and I'm sticking to it. And make sure you check out my school with IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world. And it could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars by going to a four year. You know, I call it indoctrination camp, where you learn how to protest and then you compete for jobs at Starbucks, right? Because you were in some dumb, dumb major that didn't that's not salable in the marketplace. So this gives you a highly in-demand skill and as little as six months. And we've had people making money long before they graduate. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.