How to Ensure Smooth Business Operations With Multiple Founders on Board? The idea of setting your own company sounds exhausting, however, in such a scenario, having a co-founder by your side means less burden, stress and risk of burning out.

How many founders should a startup have? This is one common dilemma entrepreneurs often face. The idea of setting your own company sounds exhausting, however, in such scenario, having a co-founder by your side means less burden, stress, and risk of burning out. This is one of the reasons why picking co-founders to start a business is the most important decisions an entrepreneur has to make.

Over the last years, we have seen many start-ups fail due to co-founder conflict. Under such situations, co-founders need to follow few tips to ensure their business runs smoothly.

Entrepreneur India spoke to few founders to know how a startup can run successfully with multiple co-founders onboard.

Have a Good Level of Understanding:

Creating a company with co-founders undoubtedly gives your startup the leverage to succeed faster. It brings together bigger and more experienced team with business acumen that's valuable to achieve exponential growth.

According to Prabhu Ramachandran, Co-founder, CEO, Facilio, aligning co-founder responsibilities is a delicate art, so, it's important to set clear understanding around individual roles and responsibilities upfront across multiple functions including engineering, sales, and operations. Doing so creates an open culture and environment that individually helps each founder grow to strength and together withstand the mounting pressure typical of running a business.

"A "fully synergistic team' is a powerful force that can fast-track a startup towards a profitably sustainable business," he added.

Establish Clear Roles & Responsibilities:

Trust and respect forms the base of any successful business and this extends to Co-founders too. Swati Nathani, Co-founder of Team Pumpkin believes it is of utmost importance to establish roles and responsibilities during the early stage of business based on the strength and skill sets of each Co-founders.

"By doing this, one can avoid keeping a tab on each other's tasks and rather use that time in a more fruitful manner to enhance the business," she said.

Develop Mutual Trust:

The foundation of any strong Co-Founder relationship is trust and independence. In setting up anything from scratch you'll often run into many disappointments, especially early on. Shruti Mehrotra, Founder, Mihuru emphasized that at this time it is the mutual trust between Co-Founders that is most important to avoid any sort of blame game.

"If the Co-Founders are aligned in their vision for the business and there is mutual trust in the others' expertise there is no need to micro-manage the activities of Co-Founders. Instead, they should be given the independence to do their bit in the manner they feel most fit while always keeping the best interests of the startup at the center of all activities," she said

Establishing roles and responsibilities in the early days is important only to ensure that each Co-Founder is aware of his areas of accountability. But Mehrotra doesn't believe in tracking everything to make sure Co-Founders are keeping up with the tasks assigned.

"If I need to constantly monitor his/her work then its best to not have them onboard as Co-Founder but as an employee instead," she added.