Selling my share of a 50/50 business


4

Final question - you may recognize my other two.

My partner invested about $10K into this business and I've got 4000K hours, and I charge $100.00 per hour, invested in this business.

I think nothing of putting in a 14-18 hour day. He says he can't do that because there was no product BUT, now that the product is ready to get he still claims he'll never work more than 40 hours (which is funny because he thinks he may retire in two years working just a few hours a week).

Before we've even had one sale he's claiming he'll never do enough, that we need to hire another sale man - at 30%. I asked him if that meant 15% had to come from me and he said yes.

How does one fix that???! He won't work as hard as me and, because of that, wants me to 15% out of me 50% to hire another sales person to do his work, while I work easily (14-18 hours a day) 60+ hours a week 6-7 days a week and he works about M-F about 20 hours.

Help!

Hiring

asked Nov 15 '12 at 12:31
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Calais
51 points

2 Answers


4

Don't hire another sales person. Who compensates sales people by how many hours they work? This should never be part of the equation. Sell something and take a percentage.

Where is the 10K? Did you get any salary for creating a product no one buys? Consider yourself lucky.

You're not a worker; you're an owner. You went into a partnership with NO contingencies on the level of ownership based on contribution. What did you expect? Learn from your mistake.

Close the company and take whatever from it the law allows. Maybe you can get bought out. Use what you learned from creating this code base and start new. Either that or your partner doesn't call your bluff and gets to work. Good Luck.

answered Nov 15 '12 at 13:42
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Jeff O
6,169 points

1

It's hard to believe you charge $100 per hour with 14-18 hours per day.

The development cost of your start-up is about 40k a month or 500k a year, that's for one developer only.

From business perspective it would be much more efficient to hire full time developers than being charged so much by a founder.

There is few freelancer(who charges by hours) could charge so much hours. The industry average, as far as I know, is about 25-30 hours per week. Not all hours are valuable to business and then could be charged.

I think you need to understand your friend, and suggest as follows.

If the software you delivered could still be possible to generate enough revenue, as your friend's estimation, you can:
1. Summarize a list of real hours chargeable, by making some huge deduction
2. Suggest to make those hours as debt.

If it's not possible to generate revenue, there is no need to hire sales. Or you should only test it by hiring sales based on revenue share instead of equity, as Jeff suggested.

answered Nov 16 '12 at 06:34
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Billy Chan
1,179 points

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