One of the business challenges and risks any entrepreneur can face is taking on partners and other stakeholders. The bottom line is partners don’t have the same motivation as you but want the same equity as you in the company you lead to get off the ground. Then when worse come to worst, you are stuck with that partnership and have to buy them out or fight a nasty court battle over whatever assets were gained from mostly your hard work.

I have seen it all the time, especially in the tech industry. You have a fellow coder who can create the software platform all by themself. Then some clown wearing a suit shows up smiling talking about “let’s partner” or “let’s do a joint venture” and thinks their skills are the gift of gab making connections and talking to the right people. Coder burning the midnight oil while the other guy is just BSing and sitting on his butt passing out business cards and talking about he is involved in a venture that you working hard to get off the ground without any of your partners' help. Then when it comes to the glory, they act like they are entitled to the spoils more than anybody.

To avoid this scenario, all startups and new ventures that involve partners should have an operating agreement established. An operating agreement is the rules that the members agree upon. These rules are how much percentage each member has in the group and how the profits and losses are distributed or handled in the venture. Without these rules in place, this is where slacker partners start arguing with the real work in the venture about who is owed more money and partners have fallouts and be fighting.

Our Stony|Ellis platform is engineered to create and manage digital-first entities and brands. These are your companies and your ventures. This is the platform where you just enter the DBA of your firm, you get an address and a crypto-mark logo. But in addition, one of the most important is establishing your operating agreement and how profits are distributed among you and other partners and stakeholders.

Our platform allows you to establish an operating agreement and add rules such as bylaws to the digital entity that you created. The operating agreement consists of revenue distribution and bylaws. The distribution is where you can indicate how the revenue is distributed with either a fixed amount or a percentage amount going to a party. The bylaws are written to a distributed ledger using blockchain technology and are immutable and traceable. These are the foundations of a real business operation and making sure everybody knows the company is operating on a rules-based order and not feelings and emotions.

A good example is someone who wants to create a music group or even a record label. The group members can use the operating agreement to determine who gets paid what from the beginning. Each group member can use their Kossier private key to create a digital signature as an agreement to the operating agreement like an e-signature contract. The same with bylaws – how to deal with a member exiting the group to go solo or leave the label altogether, these terms can be digitally signed with a private key to take effect.

Let me take a minute to say something – noticed what I have been blogging about in the past few articles. I wrote about membership features to quickly launched a business and discussed how to create an exchange for trading marketplaces, now I’m talking about creating digital entities with operating agreements that are binding and follow rules-based order. Now, look at all these clowns in the landscape who tried to pretend I wasn’t over here putting in real work, real big-level work to transform how enterprises are run in the 21st century. Do you see how bad Mark 6:4 messed folks up?

See, cats be making up their own golden calf and worshipping around it until they see Moses walking down the mountain with two tablets in each arm. All of these solutions were an ecosystem that was researched and cultivated through Dream and Hustle articles and making trips around the world looking for patterns and practices. In addition, a lot of our solutions come from real-world experience and interactions at the big-level game where we were all in the mix and know how to make better moves. Remember that our firm is 100% Black-owned and we move how we wanted to move and you see how these characters in the Black community and fake Black media carried themselves when a real one shows up - Mark 6:4.

I have seen the problems when people try to launch a business together and brought in some clown that ruined the whole business from coming to fruition. My goal is I want real talented folks from diverse backgrounds who don’t know each other but they have real skills, making it easier for them to launch ventures together using a blockchain-based operating agreement and settlement distribution that they all agreed upon. That is the real missing piece in American capitalism which is the 21st-century challenge. That is when we can get folks to quit their job after decades of experience and want to go launch their own, truly work with other real talent and remove the trust and familiarity factor out of the way and just focus on collaboration, skills, and shared motivation to deliver value to their customer base.

This solution was well-received all around the world by a lot of elite and talented folks, don’t care how my Mark 6:4 Black community feels about it or feel about me either. Because this is a transformative solution that will create a new paradigm of joint ventures where skilled people can get together and make real things happen. No need to trust each or ask where someone is from or down the line – this trustless solution can quickly enforce a rules-based operation and smoothly kick the clowns out of a venture and replace them with a new partner efficiently.

All startups and ventures need operating agreements and never try to run a joint venture “on code” as they say in the hood. The term “on code” means someone is supposed to have dignity and respect for the partnership but we know at the end of the day, people are self-serving and want to get money out of the venture more than they want to put in real work to generate revenue. It is important to protect yourself from these bad ventures where you can read court dockets in the business court of good entrepreneurs being burned to get into a bad deal with a clown they thought was going to be a good partner.

Once again, another platform by a ghetto Chicago West Side brotha who is stunting hard on these fakers and posers out here claiming they doing things. I can go around the world showing up and showing what I got to offer – all they can do over there is just appear in a writeup with some phony narrative. Now I got it set up where folks can meet at the coffee shop and collaborate on a startup and establish rules-based order and focus more on the business operation instead of looking over their shoulder at their business partner.

It is important to note that what I described is part of a big ecosystem – you running an Agile-driven digital-first organization where stories are fulfilled. Those stories have a value associated with them and those partners who create and fulfill the value get their fair share of the distribution. That distribution and rules are defined in a blockchain-based operating agreement. All parties can sign with their private key to create a consensus. This model can be adopted anywhere in the world from Singapore to South Africa and that’s another notch on how we scale and go global on these folks out here trying to Mark 6:4 a real brotha that doing this to help others be better.