Business Partners || Watercolor Stories in Grease Pencil || Blender Grease Pencil

Frank lights a smoke and waives his hand around, the cigarette a tiny torch or wand pointing down at his partner Roy. Roy scribbles numbers into a bookkeeping ledger, trying to keep up with Frank’s direction. Frank sips coffee out of a cardboard cup.

“So, if this new filament works, it’s gonna be huge. All we need is one big contract, and I am telling you buddy, my contact at the state mid-sized public library assembly is our golden ticket.”

Roy doesn’t miss a step in his slow steady transcription, saying “the filament works, 30 percent stronger and 10 percent under the cost of anything else on the market.”

“Which means we can sell it 15 percent over our competitors,” Frank exclaims, “with the right packaging and marketing campaign, maybe more.”

Roy and Frank started their business partnership with a handshake deal five years ago. When they closed their first substantial contract 8 months later, they wrote out a formal agreement in a composition notebook with a sharpie marker. The document doesn’t address what the partners should do if they don’t agree on an issue.

The business partners split everything 50-50. Both invested an equal amount of their own savings.

They split the work evenly. Frank took the lead on marketing and client relations, and Roy oversaw production behind the scenes .

With Frank’s encouragement and support, Roy recently developed a new bioplastic filament for consumer 3D printers. The filament works like an ink cartridge in a classic paper printer. This new filament was composed of corn, sugar cane, hemp, and papyrus. It also had a touch of citrus grinds, which Frank loved to promote to Florida vendors. Roy had filed a patent for the process they used to produce the filament. Since the state recently allocated funding for every public library to provide the public with access to 3d printing, the market for filaments was exploding.

About 20 minutes later, Frank and Roy eat sandwiches at a diner down the road from their warehouse. Frank pulls out a folder and slides it over to Roy. “oh, will you take a look at these? It's probably time for us to make a company, an LLC, you know to limit liability. I had an attorney whip these up. It’s standard boilerplate, but we are entering the big leagues now and we need to act the part.”

“Ok Frank.”

3 months later BioFilaments, LLC closed the deal with library assembly, a contract to be the exclusive supplier of filaments.

Frank remained in the spotlight, and Roy crunched the numbers. If Frank had ever taken a close look at the books, he would realize that over time Roy had developed some sophisticated methods of calculation. Roy, in fact, was taking in a significantly larger share of the profits, while Frank was exposed to more of the costs.

Less than a year later, the state of Florida declared war against Alabama, and the libraries were used by the militia to 3d print weapons and supplies with Frank & Roy’s filament. The company made billions, and the business partners remained friends for the rest of their lives.