In life and in partnerships … a winning recipe is everything.

I am often asked to help other entrepreneurs put together new teams and partnerships. I immediately go back to the words my father taught me right after I graduated from college:

My financial future is completely up to me. No one else is responsible for my economic freedom.
Before I can expect to be paid, I must first deliver exceptional value by solving someone’s problem or meeting a particular unmet need.

Prospective partners admire and respect one another. They are often like-minded. Many times, they are friends. They’re attracted to one another. For this conversation, I’m going to limit my thoughts to those budding relationships that are based on genuine attraction and not selfish intent.

Before you create a new team, form an organization, or structure a formal partnership, before you add new seats on the bus or invite people on to your bus … everyone involved needs to understand two things:

Each individual must bring a set of skills or qualities that you need and do not already possess.
Each individual can demonstrably fulfill their role better than everyone else on the bus in the same role.

This is another way I define adding “exceptional value”.

Here’s another way of explaining what I mean. Let’s say you’ve been working on a venture for weeks, months, even years. You’re worn out. You’re frustrated. You’re lonely. You want to share the journey you’re on. The ups, the unknowns, the downs.

You have a chef. You!

You probably have cooks. Employees, consultants, volunteers, friends, your mom!

You have a kitchen. It could be the trunk of you car. It could be an office or warehouse.

You have ingredients. This is your “Cost of Goods Sold” that makes up your offering.

So what’s missing? You need a winning recipe.

If you are a better chef than me, I’ll gladly allow you to become the chef.

If you love to cook and can do something better than us and you’d enjoy working in our kitchen, whether it be fancy or a dive, you’re welcome to become a cook.

Do you have a better kitchen? We will gladly move into your kitchen.

And if you have better ingredients, I would love to substitute some or all of my ingredients for yours.

As for the winning recipe, if you have something special, a true secret sauce, yes … we should adopt your recipe.

As an entrepreneur, you’re going to find yourself providing all the above. This is obviously time-consuming, exhausting and eventually, futile. This is why from the onset, you must be eager to find contributors that can take what you’re doing and take it to the next level ... and hopefully, do it even better than you originally imagined.

Be direct with your prospective partners. Ask them to help you understand precisely how they can contribute:

Find the best talent and contributors
Secure the resources you need
Tell the very best story
Attract millions of participants
Produce positive outcomes that benefit other people and our shared planet

And when you succeed, don’t be stingy. Share your recipes. Share your ingredients. Share your kitchen. Promote your cooks. Celebrate your chefs.

We feed others because we understand we exist because someone else fed us.