I was lucky to find a partner who not only helped me achieve my vision, but was also a mentor who taught me lessons that I continue to benefit from. Many of the successful entrepreneurs I know turned the concept of a partnership into a strategic tool throughout their careers—both for maximizing their own personal potential to succeed and for driving their business models.

I’ve known Ron Bruder for more than a decade. My admiration for how he has managed his phenomenally successful career has only grown over the years. Ask him about his success, and the first thing he’ll talk about is the value of partnerships.

First, a bit about Ron. Ron grew up in a hardworking family in a rough neighborhood of Brooklyn. “My parents gave me the belief that I could achieve whatever I wanted,” he recalls.¹ At 17, he was selling encyclopedias. He created a profitable business by hiring stay-at-home mothers to make phone solicitations and paying their kids to slip proposals through doors. After studying physics and then economics in college on scholarship, he also went on to earn an MBA. Then Ron took over a distressed travel agency in Clifton, New Jersey. Within a few months, he talked his way onto the American Airlines Sabre computer network, increasing his traffic exponentially. It is hard to appreciate how ahead of his time Ron was. Sabre was the first computerized airline reservation system. The mid-1970s were still 20 years away from a functioning Internet. In fact, the entire Sabre reservation system existed in a single computer center, which travel agents called into until the mid-70s. Then, in 1976, Sabre installed online terminals in the first 130 travel agencies. It took extraordinary foresight and Ron’s salesmanship to get his travel agency to be one of the first travel agencies in the country to have this advanced tool that would revolutionize the entire travel industry. Ron was in the vanguard, and he created huge upside value in his travel agency.

He sold the agency and, in 1977, founded the Brookhill Group (named for his uphill climb out of Brooklyn), a real estate company that specialized in developing and turning around shopping centers as well as industrial and office buildings. In the 1990s, Brookhill created a special niche as the nation’s premier redeveloper of brownfields, environmentally polluted land that must be cleaned up as part of the redevelopment process. The company has operated real estate in 22 states, with a total value of more than three-quarters of a billion dollars.

On top of that, Ron also founded a medical technology company and an oil and gas business. And since 2006, he has worked full-time establishing Education for Employment (EFE), an international foundation to create employment opportunities for young men and women in the Middle East and North Africa (www.efe.org).

What was the common denominator that helped him climb that hill out of Brooklyn and into an extraordinarily varied and productive career as a serial entrepreneur and philanthropist? “Good partnerships,” says Ron. “I’ve been in good deals with bad partners and bad deals with good partners. I would definitely choose the latter.”

The approach he adopted at Brookhill epitomizes Ron’s use of partnerships to achieve more than might have been possible on his own. Unlike most other investors who walked away from the potential liabilities of properties burdened by both real and perceived environmental contamination, Ron came up with an ingenious strategy that would help him turn such distressed assets into gold. First, he partnered with a world-class environmental engineering firm, Dames & Moore, that provided him with the capability to clean up pollutants on brownfield sites. Then, he found a large insurance company that would underwrite a new product called environmental insurance, which insured buyers of previously contaminated properties against any remaining pollution. Finally, he partnered with Credit Suisse, which securitized the debt so that the risk could be spread out among investors who provided the necessary capital to restore the land and buildings.

In his 30-plus-year career, Ron has been burned by sketchy partners. “One guy stole three and a half million dollars,” he told me. He has identified three qualities to look for in a good partner:

1. They do what they say they will.
2. They have a track record of doing what they say they will.
3. They have shared values and similar visions of where the partnership may lead.

To achieve his foundation’s goals in the Middle East, Ron notes, “We spend a lot of time figuring out whom to partner with, doing really careful diligence.”

Entrepreneur Jeff Scheck also believes in the importance of partnerships, but instead of looking for partners, his family company set out to create them. In 1956, Jeff’s grandfather, Samuel, had bought a paper mill in Syracuse, New York, and moved it to Cuba. Three years later, he found himself with a partner who certainly didn’t share his values or vision. “In 1959, Castro became our 100 percent partner when he nationalized my family’s paper mill in Cuba,” Jeff explains. “We fled to Miami.”²

Burdened with more than $500,000 in debt that he had borrowed from Georgia Pacific to build the business in Cuba, Jeff’s grandfather came up with a plan. As Jeff tells it, his grandfather “asked Georgia Pacific for some materials and products so that he could begin distributing them and create a business that would generate adequate cash for repayment.” That was the origin of Sweet Paper Sales, which over the next 50 years became one of America’s largest wholesale distributors of paper, food services, and commercial janitorial and sanitation products. Jeff’s grandfather eventually handed the reins to Jeff’s father, Michael. Jeff and his siblings were innovative vice presidents who kept the business growing. Their clients included hotels, offices, and especially restaurants, which turned out to be why the Schecks sold Sweet Paper in 2005 to a major janitorial/sanitation paper company that wanted to increase its footprint in food services. With 450 employees, 10 distribution centers around the country, and $250 million in sales, it had the resources to acquire Sweet Paper.

At the root of Sweet Paper’s success, according to Jeff, was a philosophy that focused on nurturing a partnership spirit among all parties. “We always treated vendors, customers, and employees like family. When we made mistakes, we fixed them. When we made promises, we fulfilled them.” Jeff and his brother Marty talked their father into incentivizing managers with a share of any profits they generated. “He thought we were crazy. He green-lighted the idea skeptically. But his skepticism vanished when one of those highly incentivized managers increased his sales by a million dollars in a single year,” Jeff recalls with a laugh, noting that those tuition payments his father paid for Jeff to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and for Marty to get degrees at Columbia and the University of Miami’s business school were maybe worth it after all. “We worked hard to find the right employees and we were happy to share profits with them—creating businesses within businesses to empower people into being more entrepreneurial.”

For Jeff, this successful partnership strategy was simply an offshoot of the principle at the center of the Schecks’ family values. “We treated others as we wanted to be treated.” Sounds to me like one more key to finding and keeping a good partner.