Earlier today, I had a reminder of how important it is to carefully select your business partners.

In the words of a friend, “When you go into business with someone, sometimes you don’t realize you’re going to be working with them for 5, 10, or even 20 years.”

Knowing that means it’s important to not only choose your professional associates carefully, but to also be the kind of person someone else would choose to work with.

As Warren Buffet is often quoted, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”