Keep the Band Together…No Matter What.
In another life I used to play music. It turns out a lot of things I learned about entrepreneurship and starting a company would be learned in bands I played in through high school and college. This story takes place during the early days of playing in high school.
Back then we would practice in my parents basement with great frequency. That basement was the band hangout. Friends and family would be over from time to time when we were playing and would occasionally drop in and watch us practice. One day two family friends dropped in. They were *ahem* older gentlemen who had a band when they were in high school and it was very clear they were experiencing some nostalgia watching us play.
Between songs conversation would start on a variety of topics, but there is one conversation that will stick with me until the day I die. One of the guys got to talking and I feel like everything else faded to the background. He looked off into the distance as if we was looking through a window to the past and he said, “No matter what happens, keep the band together.”
At the time I took this moment for granted. The only thing that made it stick at first was the look in his eye when he said it. I brushed it off as a weird moment, but the words would come back to me at the strangest times. Those words would become a very critical part of my personal beliefs as time went on.
I know now that what he meant when said those words was that the relationships and cohesion of the band will outweigh and be much higher in value than all of the bullshit. Bad times will come and relationships will be tested, but the greatest measure of accomplishment will be succeeding intact.
In music, bands break up, they fire the drummer (it’s always the drummer), they experience personal fallouts from which the group can never recover. Sometimes I think that the magic around the best music is that somehow a volatile group of over emotional individuals with egos the size of planets is able to hold it together enough to write some songs that somehow take all of that drama and compact it into beautiful art. This scenario even lends itself to the “glory days” mentality that the gentleman mentioned earlier was experiencing. He was longing for that same feeling that he had back when he was creating something that he loved with a group that he loved creating with.
In business, sometimes the same thing happens. Instead of everyone hating the bassist (you always hate the bassist, but you live with them), they hate the HR person, and instead of creating songs they create products or services. Everything else is pretty much the same. The soul difference is if you are a band and you experience a sudden tragedy or break up, the music you made right before the end of the band might skyrocket in sales, whereas if you are trying to run a successful business, the band breaking up can mean a most unspectacular implosion that results in the end of the company.
We’ve all heard the stories about founders having fallouts, people becoming disenchanted with a company, an unhappy workplace leading to a mass exodus that leads to half the team going to work somewhere else or start a new company. These are definitely bad scenarios, no question there.
If you are surrounded by sane individuals when you start a business, they will try to prepare you for the possibility that these outcomes might occur. While it is not fun considering what happens if your cofounder decides they don’t like you anymore, what happens if they steal money from you, what happens if they die, etc, it is important to know that those things can happen.
The best way to avoid something like this is to pick good cofounders or partners and to love (like actually LOVE) your team. Cofounders who are good at listening, compromise, and demonstrating understanding with you while you continue to grow is critical. Being able to be all of those things for your cofounders is also critical. A team that is happy and knows they are loved will feel respected, feel trusted, believe in the mission, go above and beyond for that mission, and most importantly, they won’t feel like “employees”.
It might be hard to know a good cofounder, partner, or team member at the time, but a good indicator is that they are someone who understands that keeping the band together is the most important thing…no matter what.
