A real estate business partnership fails long before anyone files dissolution paperwork. It fails at formation — when two people who like each other’s energy skip the vetting, overlap on the same skills, and never agree on how money leaves the company. Jeff Cichocki’s partnership lasted 11 years and ended in 2023 with zero dollars changing hands, because all three of those things were settled years earlier.
Cichocki runs Best REI Funding out of Green Bay and now owns two lending companies and five brands. He and his former partner Derek met as strangers at REIA meetings, flipped and lent together for over a decade, and separated by trading whole businesses rather than arguing over a split.
Below: how to test a partner before you commit, how to divide roles so the other person actually adds value, how they ran the money, what an asset-for-asset unwind looks like, and what you have to rebuild once your partner is gone.
Key takeaways
- Don’t formalize anything on the first deal. Flip one house together, then flip another, before you discuss a permanent entity.
- Pick a partner whose strengths you don’t have. If you overlap completely, the second person adds cost, not capacity.
- Cichocki and his partner owned the company 50/50 but deliberately left capital inside it so either family could draw on reserves — one used company cash to fund an adoption.
- Their 2023 split involved no cash: Cichocki took the lending company, his partner took the flipping business, the mastermind, and the annual conference.
- A players only refer A players. Cichocki rebuilt his entire staff through referrals rather than job ads, paying severance to exit nearly everyone who was there before.
From the Real Estate Pros Show
This article draws on an interview with Jeff Cichocki of Best REI Funding on the Real Estate Pros Show, hosted by Issa Hanna.
Test the Partnership Before You Commit to One
Do a deal together before you form anything. Cichocki is openly pro-partnership despite the horror stories, but his rule is narrow: “I just don’t tell everybody to jump in bed with a permanent partnership on the very first go. Just start with something small, like just go flip a house together. Then flip another together.” Try it before you buy it — it isn’t a marriage until you both commit.
The vetting period before that first deal matters more than most investors allow. Cichocki and Derek were not looking for partners. They were two guys showing up at the same REIA meetings month after month, hitting multiple clubs, and gradually asking each other hard questions. He describes it as dating — a long, unhurried read on character and integrity before any money was involved.
One structural detail made the whole courtship easier: they lived about 100 miles apart. Neither was in the other’s backyard, so comparing notes on deals, lenders, and contractors never felt like handing an advantage to a competitor. They were effectively running a two-person mastermind long before they were running a business.
If you can’t replicate the 100-mile buffer, replicate the function of it. Spend months in the same rooms, swap real numbers on real deals, and watch how the other person handles a project that goes sideways. The point of the test period is not to confirm you like each other. It’s to find out, cheaply, whether you want this person’s judgment attached to your balance sheet.
Pick Complementary Skills, Not a Clone of Yourself
If you and your prospective partner do the same things well, you don’t need a partner — you need a hire. Cichocki frames it as oil and water, which sounds like an insult until he explains it: “If you’re both the exact same, and all you do is overlap each other, then what value does the other really bring to the mix?”
Picture a glass half oil, half water. The thin band in the middle where they mix is your overlap — the shared ground where you communicate and cover for each other’s weak spots. Everything above and below is the reason the partnership exists. In his case the division was close to total: “Everything he hated, I loved, and everything I hated, he loved.”
That’s how the business got built. Cichocki’s strength was networking and raising private capital. When his own flipping volume got so heavy it threatened his marriage, he scaled back and started placing his private lenders into other investors’ deals. Those lenders flatly refused to fund Derek without Cichocki in the deal — their relationship was with him. That constraint is literally how the lending company started.
Skills complement; values must match. Cichocki is specific that the complementary-skills test only works on top of a shared foundation: both partners going the same direction, caring about each other’s families and not just the dollar. A partner with the exact skill gap you need and a different definition of fair is a worse outcome than no partner.
I just don’t tell everybody to jump in bed with a permanent partnership on the very first go. Just start with something small — go flip a house together, then flip another together. Try it before you buy it.
— Jeff Cichocki, Best REI Funding
How the Money Actually Ran: 50/50 Ownership, Not 50/50 Accounting
They owned the company 50/50 and never ran the money that way. Ownership was equal on paper. Distributions were not tracked penny for penny. Instead they deliberately left capital inside the company so that when either family needed something, the money was already there.
The clearest example: Derek and his wife struggled to have children naturally and went through an adoption while the partnership was young. He didn’t want to pull cash out, on the logic that the company would then have to earn it back before either of them benefited. Cichocki’s response was to take it and stop worrying — family mattered more than the bank balance, and he knew it would even out.
It did, repeatedly. “The scales just tipped back and forth, back and forth the whole time,” he says. Neither kept a ledger of who had drawn more. His read on why it worked financially as well as personally: “If you don’t care about the money, money actually shows up faster.” They spent their attention on each other, their families, and their customers, and the business grew roughly 5x in a handful of years after he left his corporate job.
Be honest about what this requires. This is not a model to copy on a handshake with someone you met last quarter. It works only on top of a decade of demonstrated character, and it works because both men had already decided the relationship outranked the split. If you can’t say that about your partner, write the distribution mechanics into a real partnership agreement instead — decide in advance how and when money leaves the company, and have a lawyer paper it.
The Amicable Exit: Trade Assets, Not Cash
When they separated at the end of 2023, no money changed hands. They traded whole businesses. Cichocki took the lending company. Derek took the flipping business, the rentals, the national mastermind, and the annual conference — three entities for one.
On paper that looks lopsided, and Cichocki concedes the lending company was clearly the more profitable asset. “It worked out financially pretty balanced overall. Not 50/50, but close enough that we were both happy.” The reason they could settle it that way is the reason the money ran loose for ten years: neither man had spent the decade tracking who was owed fifty cents on the dollar, so neither started at the breakup.
Each took what he actually wanted. Cichocki calls himself a deal junkie who can’t generate enough of his own deals to scratch the itch, so lending — living through everyone else’s deals — was where his passion already was. Derek wanted the operating and events businesses. The allocation sorted itself by appetite, not by appraisal.
The timing is the part most investors get wrong. There was no blowup. Cichocki and his wife were empty nesters; Derek’s youngest was eight or nine. Life stages were diverging, and they chose to separate while they still respected each other rather than wait for resentment. As he puts it, they left it all on a high. If you are reading this because your partnership has already soured, the clean asset-swap route is probably gone — the window for it closes well before the fight starts.
Life After the Split: Replacing a Partner With a Team
The expensive part of a clean breakup isn’t the assets. It’s losing the person you bounced ideas off. Cichocki and Derek stayed friends, but friendship isn’t partnership — you stop wanting to be a burden, so you try to solve everything alone. “In a way, separating from him put me back mentally years,” he says. He struggled for months.
He fixed it with one Facebook post. He wrote that he thought his company might need a CEO or CFO, that he’d never hired for that role, and asked who he could spend 10 or 15 minutes on the phone with just to learn what such a person actually needs — compensation, autonomy, expectations. People he already knew came out of the woodwork, some wanting the job.
One of them had grown and exited seven companies before turning 40, retaining 10% equity with no voting rights in each. For a couple of thousand dollars he offered to spend a month investigating the business: interviewing every employee, reviewing every process and procedure, then reporting back on what was actually needed. The verdict was that Cichocki didn’t need a CFO or a CEO. He needed a very strong project manager who could grow into a COO. The engagement was supposed to last a month; the operator stayed at least 18.
Then came the hiring rule that mattered more than the diagnosis. Cichocki asked him one question — who do you know? A players will not refer B players. Every subsequent hire came through referral, not job ads. He ultimately replaced every staff member but one, writing severance checks and treating people well on the way out.
What a Partner-Free Business Should Be Built To Do
The target isn’t fewer hours for their own sake. It’s a business that runs when you can’t. Cichocki now works about 12 hours a week across five brands — and only about three of those are spent managing the brands. The other nine go to coaching students and projects he does for enjoyment. Four of the five brands are self-sustaining because of the team.
The proof came in a way nobody plans for. Eleven months before this conversation, his wife died unexpectedly. He had been working roughly 60 hours a week. The message he got from Brittany, his right hand and the person who runs day-to-day operations, was essentially: don’t worry, I’ve got this, take whatever time you need. He went to zero and the company kept running. “I found out I had built the company of my dreams when my wife passed.”
His framing for how to get there rejects work-life balance outright. Balance implies a scale with infinite positions on either side and exactly one point of equilibrium — a breeze knocks it over, and every gain on one side is a loss on the other. He prefers harmony: ask what you can change inside the business that gives time back to the family. A process, a system, a hire.
That reframes what financial freedom is actually buying. Nobody sells time because nobody can put a finger on it, so the industry sells money instead. Build the time in from the start, Cichocki argues, and you need far less money to get it — because you created it rather than bought it.
Frequently asked questions
Should a real estate partnership be structured 50/50?
Equal ownership can work, but equal ownership and equal accounting are two different decisions. Cichocki and his partner each owned 50% of their companies for 11 years while deliberately not splitting cash penny for penny — they left reserves in the business so either family could draw on them, and the scales tipped back and forth without anyone keeping score.
That only functions on deep, proven trust. If you don’t have a decade of evidence about how your partner behaves under pressure, define distributions explicitly in a written partnership agreement and have an attorney review it rather than relying on goodwill.
How do you divide assets when a real estate partnership ends?
Trading whole businesses or asset classes is often cleaner than arguing over cash. When Cichocki and his partner separated at the end of 2023, no money changed hands — he took the lending company, his partner took the flipping business, the rentals, the mastermind, and the annual conference.
The division followed what each person actually wanted to keep doing rather than a precise valuation. Cichocki acknowledges it wasn’t exactly 50/50, but it was close enough that both were happy. That only works if neither side has been keeping a running tally, which is why the exit terms are really set years earlier by how you run the money.
How do you find a business partner for real estate investing?
In the rooms you’re already in, over months, without looking for one. Cichocki met his partner by repeatedly bumping into him at multiple REIA meetings. Neither was shopping for a partner; they were comparing notes and asking each other hard questions, which is a far better filter than an intentional search.
One underrated factor: they lived about 100 miles apart. Not operating in each other’s backyard meant they could share everything without feeling territorial. If your candidate buys on your streets, agree early on how you’ll handle competing for the same house.
What’s the best way to test a potential partner before committing?
Do one deal together, finish it, then do another. Cichocki’s advice is to flip a house together and then flip a second one before anyone forms a permanent entity — try it before you buy it.
Two deals will show you how someone handles a budget overrun, a contractor who walks, and a slower-than-expected sale. Those are the behaviors you’re buying for the next ten years, and you can’t learn them from a coffee meeting.
How do you hire A players for a small real estate business?
Hire one and then ask who they know. Cichocki’s core lesson from rebuilding his company is that A players will not recommend B players — their name is attached to the referral. He hired almost entirely through referrals and Facebook posts to his network rather than job ads.
He also recommends diagnosing the role before posting it. He paid an operator who had scaled and exited seven companies a couple of thousand dollars to spend a month interviewing his staff and reviewing processes; the finding was that he needed a strong project manager, not the CFO he had assumed.
The bottom line
If you are considering a partner, stop designing the entity and go do a deal with them first — the formation decisions that determine whether you can exit cleanly are the ones you make before any paperwork exists.
