There is a survey for posting to this sub. I'm answering the relevant questions for the reader below.
1) We are a healthcare company focused on addiction treatment (we have a center with healthcare professionals)
2) My friend's family started this business very recently, I've always been passionate about business (8+ years) so they asked me to join
3) Working on/at this startup for 2 months
4) Future plan is to scale from 1 center to the moon (100+ locations nationwide in USA)
I'm frustrated. My friend's family owns/runs this business and I am meant to help start a corporation-sized company without proper incentives in place.
I take home a modest paycheck (1/4 my current cost of living, not much, below minimum wage if you look at it that wayI) in exchange for half of my time overall per week, about 40 hours. I have no equity and am encouraged to earn my way to that point.
My friend has little/no control over this business from an ownership perspective and sees me working hard and struggling with it. Even if he desperately wanted to change the incentive setup it wouldn't matter.
This isn't a situation of "I'm worth nothing because they won't pay me" or "I'm worth more and deserve more pay" - I just want my incentives aligned because I'm already working a full time job and this extra work - after my 40 hour job - is physically draining. 80 hours per week for birdseed pay is nothing to laugh about.
There are issues in talking with my friend about it. He has experience in personnel management and treats me like any other employee complaining when I try discussing serious topics (like this) with him.
The dilemma is simple. I won't have ownership in our first center, but I am to share with my friend in all future centers. That might be 5%, 10%, or 15% roughly depending on how all the other partners react to us taking stakes in future expansion. I am not able to know what that will look like, how long it will be (6 months, 1 year, etc.) but I do know that it is certain. We have a beautiful model and we're going to kill it. It's just a matter of when.
**Questions to this sub:
1) How would you deal with the communication issues I just described?
2) How would you react in a future equity situation that is verbally agreed upon by a non-majority partner in a business?
3) Would you feel happy taking on a challenge like this, where you work a menial day job to make ends meet, and use your free time as business time? I haven't cooked, slept, exercised, or socialized much in the past 2 months. This is certainly to continue.
4) Feelings of inequity are natural in entrepreneurship, especially when control is not yet within reach. How might you work towards fixing that?
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