Your Experts in Business Partnerships

For over 30 years BMC Associates has worked exclusively with family and non-family co-owners to help resolve their conflicts and design healthy, resilient partnerships.

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Business partners can be like magic

When people tie their futures and fortunes together in a partnership they enjoy many advantages. For example, researchers proved that companies started by partners outperform those founded by solo entrepreneurs – by a long shot!

There's just one problem.  Having partners is challenging.

Money issues, personality and values conflicts, turf battles, power struggles, equity fights... partners have seen it all and the magic can disappear in a flash.

THe challenges

Partners need help with 2 things

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Partners don't always see eye to eye

BMC has helped hundreds of partners get out of very sticky situations – when they get "sideways" with one another – and back to business... or part peacefully.

Designing, or re-designing, a partnership can be complicated

Hundreds of partners have used BMC to proactively design healthy, rewarding partnerships that are stronger, more resilient, and more likely to withstand the inevitable challenges partners face.

OUR SERVICES

BMC only does 2 things.
But it does them very well.

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CONFLICT RESOLUTION

Partner Mediation

Mediation is widely accepted as the preferred approach when partners aren't able to resolve their differences themselves. Mediation keeps the co-owners in charge of their business and the outcome. The mediators are skilled at helping them collaborate and communicate more clearly and effectively.

CONFLICT PREVENTION

Partnership Charters

BMC licenses the "Design Your Partnership" tool from The Partnership Charter Institute. Not only is this tool the only one partners will ever need to design their partnership, it's the only comprehensive program available to partners for addressing both the interpersonal and business sides of partnership.

"According to David Gage, a clinical psychologist and founder of BMC Associates in Washington, a Partnership Charter is… a new way to address an old problem: staving off the sorts of disputes over money and power that have been the undoing of many family enterprises."

ABOUT US

BMC Associates

BMC Associates pioneered a speciality in business partnerships beginning in 1990.  During the 1990s it focused on mediating family and non-family business partner disputes. Those early clients taught BMC's mediators about the approximately dozen different ways partners can wind up "sideways" with one another.

BMC used that information to begin focusing on conflict prevention among partners. Since around 2000, BMC has offered two services to partners: conflict resolution and conflict prevention.