SILVIE CELIZ & MARYL CELIZ, Co-founders, HLife

10/7/10 | Silvie Celiz & Maryl Celiz | 0 Comments

Silvie Celiz & Maryl Celiz, Co-Founders, HLife

This post relates to business partnerships.

In business, as in love, partnership is work. It takes organization, passion, commitment, flexibility, self-knowledge, patience and what we call “practical spirituality.” When we launched HLife, an online holistic health publication that informs, empowers and inspires you to take responsibility for your well-being, we were already sisters and life-long “partners in crime.” But even with a friendship and love for each other, we had to learn how to do business harmoniously and successfully as a team. Here’s what we’ve found it takes to bring about positive and productive results in partnership:

1. Know yourself. It is key to do a strengths and weaknesses analysis of yourself. In order to succeed, you have to know what you bring to the table in this partnership - and what you need to work on. Your strengths and weaknesses are personal attributes that either help or harm your company’s goals. Get specific - everything from previous work experience and skills to intuition and emotional quotient is important. As you both do this work (a list helps), hopefully you will find many areas where you differ. This is great because your partner(s) will bring to the table things that you are missing, and your personal weaknesses will be strengthened by the partnership.
2. Define value. You now know what you bring to the table, but do you know what that is worth? Getting a clear idea of what your skills and contributions are worth - what the market value is for your time and attributes - will give you a real appreciation for your own work and allow you to appreciate your partner for what she is worth to the business. Some women suffer from low self-esteem, which results from a lack of self-knowledge and appreciation of worth. Defining value will help with that and also help with salaries, pricing and generally asking for what you want.
3. Establish order. In a partnership, nobody’s boss (actually, both people are). But in order to get specific tasks done, there has to be a leader for each project. This helped us a lot because once we shifted our perspective from “we are both heading everything” to “I take top responsibility for this one and you for that one” based on our skills, we were able to take a step back and follow if we had to, or step up and lead if we needed to. This is what we call establishing order. Order allows you to organize, prioritize, manage time, and distribute your precious energy accordingly.
4. Focus on business. Donald Trump said it best: It’s not personal, it’s business. Going into business with someone you know (friend, family, romantic partner) is common, and while it comes with the advantage of instant affinity and mutual respect and appreciation, it has to morph into a business relationship that makes the business the priority. In discussions and disagreements, it’s important to take yourself out of the equation and always think, “this is not about me or about us. Objectively, is this what is best for the business?” No egos, no personal needs/wants - it’s not about you, it’s about the company. This will allow you to listen without prejudice and help you both zero in on the appropriate answers and solutions that will benefit the company.
5. Establish boundaries. Yes, you’re in business together, but you have a life too. If you’re in business with a friend, family or romantic partner, it is important that you know when to “leave work in the office” - even if you work from home. In our case, we’re not only sisters, we’re also best friends, and when we became business partners we had to come up with tools to make sure we got our “sister time” in because all we ever wanted to talk about was business ideas/issues/solutions - at all times, nights, and weekends. This was a recipe for burnout and frustration, so we decided we had to bring back that non-business part of our relationship. We did it by communicating it. One of us will call the other and say, “I’m calling to talk to my sister,” and the other one knows to take off her business hat and settle into sister/friend mode. It works - even if we inevitably end up discussing something business-related, we still feel like we got our sister fix.

Silvie Celiz and Maryl Celiz co-founded HLife (www.hlifemedia.com), a bilingual online holistic health lifestyle magazine, in November 2009. HLife redefines health as an optimal concept, with articles on the mind, emotions, relationships, nutrition, plant-based recipes, green living, science and spirituality, medical reports, opinion and interviews, all focused on overall well-being and a practical and beautiful lifestyle.