These 3 Founder Archetypes Benefit The Most From Cofounder Therapy
Improving your communication and teamwork should be the top priority for your startup.
Cofounder therapy is an emerging category nested between traditional couple’s counseling and high-performance executive coaching. It addresses a primary need within every startup: Improving the communication, teamwork, and alignment between the founders.
While most founders working to build their company into a successful business benefit from working with a startup therapist, three types of founders reap the greatest benefits these services have to offer.
Read the list below to discover who benefits the most (and why).
1. Cofounders who just closed a seed round and are entering high-growth.
Transitioning between stages of growth is taxing on cofounders, who often react differently to changing stressors and may not have the same perspective for how to achieve optimal performance moving forward.
Prioritizing time and space to improve strategic alignment while addressing underlying emotional concerns can be pivotal to maintaining a healthy working relationship and tends to be crucial after closing a series A or B.
As an example, two founders I’m working with have a successful fintech company with VC backing. After closing their series B, they’ve realized a few things:
The skillsets and frameworks that worked in the past will not work for their partnership moving forward;
Each founder is noticing repeating relationship disagreements that add friction to their already-stressful situation;
If they don’t discover new ways of operating and working through the resentment at their current level, the company will fail to achieve optimal growth.
For these founders, it’s the perfect time to bring in a third party.
In my capacity of therapist and coach, I’m able to help them process the emotional buildup — resentment, fears, frustrations — with one another and hold space for high-level strategic conversations. This dual approach nested between coaching and therapy allows them to create new frameworks for productive conversations that lead to greater clarity and execution during this next phase of growth.
Cofounders in this type of situation tend to benefit from cofounder therapy because they’re able to hit the reset button and get clear about how to continue moving forward.
2. Cofounders who are married, friends, or family members.
These types of partnerships are complicated.
Friendships, marriages, and family relationships typically have layers of complexity prior to starting a business together. After adding the stressors of running a company, these relationships find themselves strained in different ways than other types of partnerships.
While founders without personal ties have the ability to focus a bit more on their working relationship, existing relationships turned cofounders often experience cofounder strain in a more threatening way:
If the business fails, your relationship suffers. If your relationship suffers, the business may fail.
It’s an uncomfortable catch-22 with big personal and professional implications.
As an example, I am currently working with married cofounders in a bootstrapped advertising business that just secured a major contract. They’ve long recognized their differences in working style adds frustration to their home life, and now that pressure is mounting. They’ve stopped spending the type of quality time together they need to sustain a healthy, loving partnership, and mutual frustration is getting in the way of the work-related support they need as they transition roles and expand their team.
Similarly, a different pair of friends-turned-cofounders are trying to work through resentment that has threatened to tear their friendship apart. One tended to be more controlling and critical in the business, the other feels like they were taken advantage of and personally attacked. Unpacking the fears and trust issues in their dual relationship has helped them avoid devastating personal and professional consequences.
Creating intentional time and space to discuss these relationship complexities before they damage the personal relationship is an invaluable process.
Whether you’re a family member, friend, or partner turned cofounder, no business is worth destroying your personal relationship.
3. Successful cofounders who have worked together for more than 5 years.
A third group that tends to benefit from cofounder therapy are successful founders who have worked together for many years, but have built up resentment along the way.
Resentment is the consequence of internalized frustration compounded over time.
Most business partners have an internal debate about whether or not to raise an issue. They often engage in a cost-benefit analysis of the potential consequences of providing critical feedback to their partner. And it is this very type of withholding that can set long-term partnerships on the road to hardship.
I recently worked with cofounders who were in the SaaS space for the last 7+ years. They grew to become friends over that time, yet both had resentment that impacted their relationship and business. Their leadership meetings often featured silent tension that created a walking on eggshells atmosphere and contributed to each of them dreading work more than in the past. What was once a vibrant, successful partnership felt dull and draining.
Our work focused on airing their resentments while adding new skills for difficult conversations. Building these skills while each person expressed their resentment allowed each person to feel heard, understood, and then develop a sense of how to move their partnership forward.
As successful founders learn to turn their attention inwards, they have the ability to improve their relationships and infuse their partnerships with more vitality, happiness, and teamwork.
Each cofounder relationship is unique
Every partnership has its complexities, strengths, and weaknesses. Allowing your weaknesses to compound over time leads to bad outcomes — Noam Wasserman found 65% of high-growth companies end due to cofounder fallout.
Investing in your business by engaging in couple’s therapy for business partners — cofounder therapy — has the single biggest ROI for improving this most important relationship.