Bikes are fun but just because they are fun that’s not a reason to get burned

Several years ago I was asked to help relaunch an extinct bike company. The project sounded like a good idea because as innovative as the original inception of the company was it was underfunded and poorly marketed.

One of the people involved with the company was keen to get the project off the ground again and we spent a lot of time hammering out a mission statement and started doing market projections and we tried assess how much money we needed to get things off the ground.

As things were moving along my sister-in-law caught wind of this project and said before I signed any paperwork, before I spent dime one on this I should phone this guy’s former coworkers and business partners and most importantly look to see if I could find any court and police records concerning my potential business partner.

I grumbled a bit but I started digging around and found court records that my potential partner was the plaintiff in several lawsuits, each of which he lost.

In my search I also found some records pertaining to his divorce and liens he had against him.

Another red flag was he was currently suing his former employer for back wages but the lawyer he hired had no experience in that sort of suit. The trial went badly for him. "Bad" isn't the right term so I'm going with "catastrophically wrong".

My ”partner” had to pay for all of the court costs, had to agree to a twenty plus year long NDA and he had to destroy any intellectual property he may still have related to his tenure with his former employer.

Theoretically this meant that all of the blueprints my “partner” had obtained at his last job, any and all private communications with his former employer, he couldn’t have any contact with any current or former employees of said company.

Without the blueprints, without the brand name we had nothing. Given what the court records said, I didn’t want to move forward with the venture either.

Years later I was contacted by my “partner’s” former coworker and he forwarded an article. The article detailed my “partner’s” history of substance abuse, domestic violence, breaking and entry, false police reports and other incidents.

I found further court records that listed his previous times in jails and the multiple warrants for his arrest.

If you ever decide to go into a partnership due diligence is a must. Had I not I could have been a world of financial woe and quite possibly having a lot of unimagined legal problems.

Bikes are fun but just because they are fun that’s not a reason to get burned.