First, before you read I know.. this is my fault. I just would like to share my experience for those of you that are in a partnership, or thinking about getting in one. Some of you guys know me, and met me in Vegas back in 2009. That was about the time I was getting my Wordpress services up and running. I had a thread in the buy/sell that was getting a lot of exposure, so I put on my at the time 'friend' who had no website experience whatsoever, and claimed he had business knowledge. After success with these services we formed a company called Adverse. We had an LLC in place but no operating agreement. He had said it would be difficult putting one together because of our situation of being friends. He also said he would be registered agent as LLC and not partnership due to my credit past. I now see through all these lies. I had spent 2 years supplying my talent, expertise and dedication to get the site and company where it was taking very limited pay. The reason , was I was in it for the long term, branding. I have a 4 year degree and over 8 years in web dev experience so I can write some code to say the least. He was the ''business" side so he took care of the finances, and handled the servers while I did most of the websites, besides puny theme installs. Fast forward to 4 months ago, I get a LONG email telling me how I screwed up a client in which he claimed was 75% of the income, which later turned and proved out to be totally false. Oh and also said I never went down to the office, in which we had for a week and was his idea, plus I had no car and was working and generating income for the business while he was sitting at the office doing his 'business' aspects of the company. He was now 'laying me off' my own company. On this day he disabled my email of sam@adverse.co and changed my password to ALL of my client sites. I can't tell you the frustration of not being able to get into your own sites that you worked hard on for the past 2 years. To top it all off, I agreed to hire his brother as a developer, and after talking to my lawyer find out he removed me from the LLC and put his brother in place. Luckily I have a good lawyer and got my name back on the LLC. I officially served him with a c&d, and demanded passwords back and still have not heard anything from the guy, so looks like he's just planning to hope I go away and now need to deal in more legal fees. They even developed some new site and even stole my content I wrote from the old site and put it in the new one. My mistake was trusting a friend in business without a contract. My girlfriend told me numerous times that this would happen, and I brushed it off because I felt I knew the guy. She claims he was 'grooming' me all along, which could be true. Anyway, I just wanted to post this since this is where my services started and incase anyone out these is thinking about partnerships, clear contracts would definitely be my recommendation, although with this situation I don't even know if it would of mattered that much. I have so much proof that I am the co owner it's rediculous. I'm much better off now, everything happens for a reason kind of thing but I just wish that it didn't go down like this. It's one thing to get laid off from you job, but another to get laid off of your own company!
Thanks for listening.
Sam
Thanks for listening.
Sam
