Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is gonna be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Business RadioX. If you’re a business coach who’s tired of being a best kept secret, set up a call with Stone Payton at bookstonephone.com to unlock your perpetual prospect pipeline. Today on this show, we have Richard Chandler, who is with Strategic Leadership Consultants. Welcome.

Richard Chandler: Hi. Good to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your firm, how you serve in folks.

Richard Chandler: Well, I’m from Minnesota and how we serve people is to give them the very best consulting, advice, coaching, and more specifically, counseling. When they’re a business partnership and perhaps they’re struggling. They haven’t been getting along as well as they used to in the past. They’re perhaps not agreeing on how to do things, and maybe one partner is at the point where they’re wondering if they should stay in the partnership. And that’s where we come in.

Lee Kantor: So what’s your backstory? How did you get into this line of work, and what interested you about business partnerships?

Richard Chandler: Well, the backstory is that, first of all, I grew up in a family business, and I understand from our brief conversation that you actually hosted a show on family owned businesses. So I know you know a lot about this yourself. And I actually was not successful in my first family business. I was very, very young and my parents owned the business. And I came in in a partnership arrangement and recognized after about a year and a half that I had to choose either to have business partners or parents, but I couldn’t have both. So I, I, I chose parents and instead I left the partnership, even though financially it would have been better for me to stay. And then later on in life, I had a partnership with somebody else doing risk management consulting work, and he was a good partner. But my marriage partner at the time wasn’t in favor of me staying in the partnership. And I deferred to her. And in hindsight, uh, you know, after that marriage ended, shortly after that, it might have been better to keep my, my business partner. So I had two, two big times in my life where it didn’t work well. And then with becoming a licensed psychotherapist, focusing on marriage therapy and having done executive coaching and, and business consulting for many years, I see that the sweet spot was business partners counseling where my skills in as a marriage therapist and as an executive coach really came together. And now this time I’m doing it much, much better. And I have my son as a business partner now. And we’ve been working this way for all 3 to 4 years. And we made everything official at the beginning of 2026, and it’s going really well. So I have a laboratory for how to do things personally as well as doing this for, for clients.

Lee Kantor: Well, what it sounds like you have some scar tissue from experience of kind of been there, done that. Is there things that you’ve learned over the years, whether it’s a marriage partnership, a business partnership, a friend partnership, you know, any type of partnership? Are there some do’s and don’ts? Is there some foundational elements that any good partnership, whether it’s in business or personal, uh, or their foundational elements that you can share?

Richard Chandler: Yes. A lot of people, especially in business partnerships, they have dual relationships. They didn’t come to the partnership just out of nowhere. Maybe they worked together in the same firm. Maybe they’re already married. Maybe they’re a relative, you know, father son, you know, mother daughter or siblings. There’s other and other existing relationships that often is there. And what we realize is that when people don’t do well is they haven’t done a good enough job of keeping their roles in their personal relationship more distinct from their roles as a business partnership. And we help people do that. I can give you an example. When my son and I grant have business meetings, even if no one else is present, he calls me Richard. He doesn’t call me dad because we’re in a business discussion. So we’re very clear about keeping our business role separate than when we’re doing things personally. And we actually carve out time to make sure we’re doing things personally, too. That has nothing to do with the business. So we’re we’re cultivating both relationships concurrently, having a really strong business partnership relationship, but also continuing to have a good, strong personal relationship. A lot of people don’t do that. They stop doing the personal stuff because they see each other frequently in the business, and that’s actually a mistake.

Lee Kantor: Now, when it comes to kind of setting expectations and kind of the rules of engagement early on, I see that it is critically important. But how do you kind of just adapt to just changes in the landscape that can occur with any long term partnership?

Richard Chandler: Yeah, it’s really important that that people have ways of checking in with each other in which both people are willing to be very candid in order to know that the landscape could be changing long before it actually does change. I think that’s really key. We do it in our business by having quarterly meetings. We have really robust quarterly meetings in which we look at the last quarter and the next quarter. But even more than that, we look at least a few years ahead on a regular basis, and getting away from the business to do that actually is more effective, where you’re just getting off someplace and, you know, a retreat kind of a situation and really talking about long term, long term, do I want to keep going for many years or do I want to sell my portion? Should we be selling the business? Should we bring in other partners? What if people want to bring in family members? How would that work? Having those discussions long before you actually get to the point where you want to do it is very helpful.

Lee Kantor: So is it the heart of a lot of the friction or the challenges between partners, or does it kind of boil down to communication and clarity?

Richard Chandler: A lot of it does. And also the relationship itself, oftentimes when people are having trouble in a business partnership, the first thing they’ll tell me is, oh, it’s our communication. Our communication isn’t so good. Actually, though, when we actually dig into the real situation at hand, we find out communication is one aspect of it, but it’s also what you talked about before at the last question, do there real long term plans, future plans really align or not? Do there short term plans align or not? Are they feeling fear about their roles and responsibility or not? Yeah. It’s also the relationship itself. Is it is it a fairly good or have they stopped investing time in their relationship? Both. Any other dual relationship as well as the business partnership.

Lee Kantor: Now when you’re working with folks, um, and they’re, and they’re struggling or let’s, let’s take it back to the beginning. Say you’re about to start a venture and you’re deciding, is this the right partner for me? What are some of the things that you look for that are maybe green flags like, oh yeah, this is the we’re aligned, this is great. Or what are some yellow flags that, hey, I don’t know, I’m still on the fence or what are some red flags where you’re like, okay, this, I shouldn’t pursue this. This is, you know, destined to fail. Are there some of these kind of signals and signs that a person could look for before they’ve kind of entered into a business partnership?

Richard Chandler: Yes, there really are. It’s really helpful to separate it out into kind of categories. You can say, okay, this person brings this kind of skill set, and this skill set will be really helpful for the business partnership, particularly if it’s different than your own skill set. So there’s skill sets. The second thing is, uh, how people are put together emotionally. If you have not been around a person who’s experiencing a degree of high stress, you may not know that in a high stress situation, they may be very reactive, which is not who you want for a business partner or someone who could be very reactive. You know, get very angry or, or kind of stomp out or, you know, make big declarations like I’m going to quit or I’m going to end the partnership. You don’t want that. And you don’t know that unless you’ve been in high stress situations with the person to see how they do respond. So that would be one I would say is a big one, is to know that person’s kind of emotional makeup.

Lee Kantor: It’s funny that you bring that up because that’s the advice I give young people when they’re dating. If they’re deciding to be married is to like number one, go through four seasons so you can see them throughout a year. And then number two is do something like camping or traveling where there is the chance for unexpected things happening in a little chaos to see how they handle that type of situation.

Richard Chandler: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I’d agree with you for, for, for, you know, romantic partnerships as well as business partnerships. If you don’t have a way to test it ahead of time. Now you’re now you’re you’re kind of committed to each other and you say, oh my goodness, I had no idea this person was going to react to stress in this highly volatile, emotional way. So knowing that ahead of time. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: What about when it comes to decision making? Do you have to be kind of on the same page? Like, okay, I’m, I’m a believer of trusting my gut. And then you’re a believer in, I got to do tons of research, like how to, how do you handle kind of different decision making skills when it comes to a partnership?

Richard Chandler: I have a model that I use that works really well for people. It’s called head, heart and gut. And it kind of works like this. Head is, you know, I do the research, all the rational, logical reasons. All that and heart is more like the language of the heart is just emotional words. I’m sad. I’m happy, I’m fearful. I’m feeling confident. I’m embarrassed. Those kinds of emotional things. Then the third one is the gut. The gut has no language. The gut does not have words, but the gut will feel, oh, I’m feeling either either more expansive or more contracted. I’m feeling more open or more closed. I’m feeling more, um, settled or feeling less settled. And unless all three align, it’s not a good idea to make any major decisions.

Lee Kantor: And then what about the time frame?

Richard Chandler: Time frames are important. In an ideal situation, you would make collaborative decisions most all the time. But a lot of times you don’t have time for that. So if two partners or three partners have different viewpoints and you don’t have enough time to do a collaborative decision where everybody feels like they’ve won, then you can back down to a compromise. Yeah. Okay. You know, can we meet in the middle in this way or can you get. Can we do it your way this time? And next time we get in the same kind of situation, we do it my way. So that’s really important. What you don’t want to have is in a conflict, a conflict style. We actually do an assessment that we have our business partnerships do called conflict styles. And if you have people that are very avoidant, they just avoid conflict. That’s not good or people that are very too accommodating. They just don’t like conflict. So they just say yes to things. And then later on they resent it and they don’t actively support. Decisions have been made so, so or competing. You don’t want competing either where people are just always trying to win. You want either collaboration or compromise primarily.

Lee Kantor: Now how about if somebody is a kind of a fast decision maker and somebody is a slow decision maker, how do you kind of get them to kind of align on a time frame in terms of making a decision, making a call.

Richard Chandler: Yeah, that’s that’s it’s actually often the case and it’s a strength. It’s actually a strength. If both people can respect the other’s style well enough to recognize that without that person as a strength, um, you know, one will just either go too slow and miss opportunities or one will go too fast and miss important things that they would have not missed had they taken more time. So if both people can embrace the other person’s style as a strength and just and merge the two, that’s really ideal. But if they can’t do it, if one person thinks my style is better and their style isn’t, that’s not going to work so well.

Lee Kantor: Now, in your work, I would assume most of the partnerships you deal with are two people. Does the dynamic change when there’s more than two people in a partnership?

Richard Chandler: Oh, tremendously. What happens is if it’s three, it’s often two at more polar ends and one caught in the middle. And you see that a lot. And the one caught in the middle ends up doing mediation between the two people. And what gets bad after a while is each of the other partners will talk to that middle person separately. And that middle person feels kind of torn. And that’s not a good dynamic to have. I’ve had partnerships like that. We’ve worked with a lot of three partner businesses, and in those situations, we we say that will stop there. You will not have business discussions on your own about business issues unless all three of you are there. And that’s often made a big difference. That kind of made that a rule now.

Lee Kantor: Is that something that you recommend people avoiding more than two people in a partnership, or is it do you think that it can be workable as long as you have the right kind of framework?

Richard Chandler: It’s workable with the right kind of framework? It really is. It’s actually can be stronger yet with three. One thing is you do have a tiebreaker person. A lot of times, which can be helpful once in a great while, you know. So that’s an advantage of three. Another advantage is then usually just bring more skill sets into it. So I’m not just saying that one is better than the other. They’re both good. But but they both have their their positives and negatives. Obviously with three people, it often slows down the works a little bit because now there’s three people to align rather than two.

Lee Kantor: Now, is the issue a matter of do you want a tiebreaker like an on an odd number will give you a tiebreaker no matter the number of partners. And an even number wouldn’t do that. Is that does that part come. I don’t think that.

Richard Chandler: Yeah. It’s it’s if partnerships aren’t getting along well, then then they wish they had that like two partner partners. They wish, oh, should we have a third person for a tiebreaker? But even that can be problematic because then what can happen is the tie breaking person most always aligns with one of them, not the other. And the one that’s not been aligned with feels like they’re kind of out in the cold. They’re like not even part of their own company. So there’s there’s difficulties with that too. I think it’s more a matter of if people can make sure they can talk really candidly about what’s going on and how they’re they’re feeling about it, how they’re thinking about it, and try to find a way to work with it in very respectful ways, rather than one person thinking, oh, my partner or partners, they just don’t get it. You know, once people adopt that as kind of a, a mindset or an attitude, it doesn’t go well.

Lee Kantor: Well, is there any merit to having a rule in place? Like it has to be unanimous or it’s no.

Richard Chandler: I think that can be overly rigid, too. I wouldn’t make it a hard, fast rule. I would say, though, you could say we’re going to we have a principle of working here where if we’re going to invest a lot of time or money, we need to have consensus with all three of us, rather than just two of us.

Lee Kantor: Now in your.

Richard Chandler: Or we’re going to take longer or we’ll take longer to talk it through before we decide.

Lee Kantor: And in your work, do you have kind of a niche or a sweet spot in terms of types of businesses you work with?

Richard Chandler: Surprisingly, we thought we would. I mean, we do get a lot of professional service organizations. We have attorneys, dentists, financial planners, uh, optometrists, veterinarians. So we got a lot of professional service operations. But we also have things like people in logistics businesses, people that are in finance and manufacturers and people that are in kind of unique businesses. We have people that are in bars and restaurants and people that are in kind of, you know, venues where they promote shows and events. So it varies a lot.

Lee Kantor: Now, what’s kind of the problem that your next client’s having right before they call you? Like how, what is kind of the sign or signal that’s happening in their business where they go. Maybe I should call Richard and his team.

Richard Chandler: It’s usually they’ve reached some, some, some kind of an impasse where they’re just not they’re not agreeing. They’re not knowing how to move it forward. Uh, one is getting to the point where they’re thinking, should I even stay in the partnership? Should we end the partnership? It’s usually at that point where people are feeling more desperate, which the downside of that is oftentimes by the time they get Ahold of me, it’s already almost too late because they don’t have enough trust and goodwill to even move forward, even with facilitation. But, but in general, you they realize they can’t do it on their own anymore. They’ve tried to do it on their own and it’s just not working. So by bringing in a professional and this is a very unique niche is, is business partners counseling because, you know, there’s lots of people with marriage counseling experience. There’s a lot of people that are executive coaches that are pretty good. But to have both. And then, you know, with my background in psychology as a psychotherapist, you know, you know, I can I can often help people that thought they would have to end the partnership, actually get the partnership back to thriving again. We’ve had this happen quite a few times.

Lee Kantor: So do you mind sharing one of those stories? Don’t name the name of the people or the organization, but maybe share the challenge they came to you with and how you were able to help them get to this new level.

Richard Chandler: Oh, yes. Two that come to mind. Let me just pick one of them. Okay. One of them was a logistics company, and they did shipping all over the world at various times of shipping. And one partner was. Kind of a believer in I show up in the office every day from these times to these times, and that’s how I work. And the other partner really liked to work remotely. He had more things going on. He had he had some kids situation that he had to, you know, bring his kid back and forth to school once in a while. He needed more flexibility and the partner that was at the office had a perception that the other partner just wasn’t working very much, and that wasn’t working as much as he was. It was actually a perception that turned out not to be true, but by the time when they came to me, they were both really pretty upset with each other because the partner that was working remotely was thinking, no, I am holding my I’m doing my fair share. But the other partner just wouldn’t believe it.

Richard Chandler: And, and so they were at the point where they were wondering if they could even stay in a partnership. And once we dug into it and we talked about it, we talked about ways in which the partner that was remote could provide much more structure, which his other partner needed. This other partner needed to know what he was doing and that he would have more regularity in his remote work. They needed that. And the partner that was more showing up at the office, you know, I encouraged him to not to show up to the office every day so he can he can enjoy his life a little more and not feel like he was kind of righteous about showing up at the office. And that was one where they ended up actually growing their business. While they worked with me. They hired another person and they grew their business, and that was one that turned out really well. And it didn’t look like it was going. It looked like they were ready to part ways when they started.

Lee Kantor: So is there any piece of advice you could share if a partnership is maybe experiencing some friction, is there some low hanging fruit? Partnership can be doing an exercise that you found useful? Um, if they have some rough waters.

Richard Chandler: Yes, I would, I would recommend even if they don’t get anybody to, you know, to help facilitate. I mean, that would be more ideal. And if they’re really in tough shape, they may not be able to do what I’m going to suggest next. But what I would suggest is they go off site for at least a couple hours, if not at least a half a day, and they take a flipchart paper with them, a whiteboard and take pictures. They do something to really talk about their long term, what they want from this business long term, and they see if they can get more aligned on that. And they also revisit back to why did we start this in the first place? How did we get in business? How can we recapture more of that? If they can have that time away from the business to really just think about things from a more aerial perspective, I think they’ll have at least an opportunity to to get things better.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there anything that you need? How could we help you?

Richard Chandler: Well, I think just the fact that you’re having this episode, so people are exposed to this profession of business partners counseling, that’s quite unknown because very few people do it. I think that’s really helpful. And if people have, you know, questions about this, they certainly can get in touch through our website, Strategic Leadership Consultants or the other website. We have another one that called the businesspartnerscounselor.com. Either way is fine.

Lee Kantor: Now, what is kind of your first engagement with a new client? Typically look like is do you come in to speak just in general or is it, uh, a session? Uh, how do you normally work with your clients?

Richard Chandler: Well, our process is this people get Ahold of us. We’re saying we’re having some difficulty. We schedule a short meeting in which we can just all talk about what’s going on, that the partners and myself, and see if there could be a possibility that they want to work with me. We would then if they say, yes, we generate a proposal, we have a second 15 to 20 minute meeting, talk about the proposal, and then they say yes or no. And the proposal in general gives them our five assessments. We do we do assessments right up front. That really helps us to understand them and them to understand each other much more specifically. Uh, we have usually an individual session for each of them lasting 40 minutes. And then we have a series of joint sessions lasting an hour each. They can be anywhere from 6 to 12 sessions done remotely. Occasionally we do an on site situation to where then we’ll do half day workshops. But. But usually it’s remote and. And during that time we we have a three phase process. We want to stabilize the relationship and the partnership first. The second phase is to revitalize it. And that’s within the initial engagement. If they get good results and they want to keep working with us, as many people do, then we move into the thrive stage, where then they meet with us about once a month. And we we keep the partnership going strong. We, we keep initiatives growing. That’s our basic approach. And in addition to that, we have seven two hour courses that they get as part of working with us. That gives them a lot of the foundational things that we talk about, but then they can review on their own or even preview.

Lee Kantor: And on the website. Is there any of those resources available?

Richard Chandler: On both websites, particularly Strategic Leadership consultants.com. We have quite a few articles and they’re good articles like what to do when you’re you’re feeling frustration with your business partner or how to express frustration without getting angry. We have lots of articles, so I think that would be a really good place for people if they just want to just kind of gain some of the knowledge base without having to necessarily talk about an engagement.

Lee Kantor: Well, Richard, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Richard Chandler: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate being on your show, Lee.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.