Business-partner work
Therapy for business partners who need the relationship to work.
The working relationships that build businesses can break down in much the same way marriages do. They rarely get the same help. This is relational work for partners who need to find a way forward, together. Online, and in person by arrangement.
Oliver Barnett
Relational work for couples and business partners, built on truth, accountability and repair.
Oliver Barnett
Relational work for couples and business partners, built on truth, accountability and repair.
The adjacent positioning
A business partnership is a relationship.
We do not usually call it that, but it is. Two people, high stakes, years of shared history, money and identity tangled up in it, and a daily dependence on each other that most friendships never reach.
When it stops working, it can be as painful and as costly as any breakup, and far lonelier, because there is rarely anyone to turn to. Lawyers will help you split. Consultants will fix your strategy. Almost no one helps you with the actual relationship.
“That is the work I do.
The same honest, involved approach that helps couples find their way back to each other applies just as directly to the people who run things together.”
—Oliver Barnett
“That is the work I do.
The same honest, involved approach that helps couples find their way back to each other applies just as directly to the people who run things together.”
—Oliver Barnett
Who this is for
Two kinds of partnership, one approach.
Couples in business
Couples who are also business partners
When you share both a marriage and a company, the two relationships feed into each other constantly. A bad day at work follows you home, a tension at home shows up in the boardroom. I help you separate the strands and tend to both.
Co-founders and partners
Business partners who are not a couple
Co-founders, long-standing partners, family members in business together. You may get on well or barely be speaking, but the relationship itself has become the thing holding the business back. That is workable, and worth working on.
Why Oliver
The patterns are the same.
I have spent decades working closely with people under real pressure, the kind that strips away the polite version of someone and shows you what is actually going on underneath. That is exactly the layer a struggling partnership gets stuck in.
The relational training I bring to couples, drawn from Terry Real's Relational Life Therapy and Internal Family Systems, applies just as cleanly to partners in business. The patterns are the same. So is the way out: honesty, accountability on both sides, and a practical set of skills for handling the hard conversations rather than avoiding them until they calcify.
What the work involves
Where we start, and what you leave with.ne approach.
Where we start
A clear look at where the relationship actually is
What each of you is contributing to the pattern, for better and worse. From there the work is practical: understanding what drives the friction, learning to raise difficult things without it turning into a fight, and rebuilding enough trust to make decisions together again.
What you leave with
Skills you keep, not a dependence on me
As with all my work, the aim is to equip you with skills you keep. Whether the right outcome is a stronger partnership or a clear-eyed, respectful way forward, you will both come away able to handle the relationship better than you can now.
Start here
Every relationship moves through harmony, disharmony and repair.
If you have lost your way back to each other, that can be learned again.
Start with a free 15-minute call. No pressure, no commitment, just a conversation about whether this is right for you.
RLT Certified Coach. IFS Informed.
In advanced training to become an
RLT Certified Therapist.
Relational work for couples and business partners, built on truth, accountability and repair.
CUSTOMER CARE
Something to read while you decide.
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