The power of the partnership. In my business it also gives you a headstart. Twice the experience, twice the contacts, twice the ideas. But perhaps most importantly, twice the courage. I really do wonder if I ever would have had the guts to try my hand at starting and growing a firm on my own - and if I had, whether I would have enjoyed it half as much. Right now around half the population dream of setting up a business but well under 10% actually do it. Partnerships could transform that figure by emboldening people with the confidence to go for it. Partnerships seem to be a growing part of the entrepreneur scene. A huge number of the firms I have met through my work on the StartUp Britain campaign have been formed in this way. Yet partnerships continue to play second fiddle in the realm of popular mythology about entrepreneurship. Here the ideal of the white knight, the sole hero holds court. Perhaps the addition of some new role models could help provide a more balanced picture. When we established our business we were inspired in the early days by the Saatchi's story. Restless thinkers who delivered game changing campaigns through what they described as the "brutal simplicity of thought." For many years the brand Saatchi & Saatchi helped define British creativity and it was built on the pioneering power of partnership. "Maurice could never have created the ads without Charles," says one industry figure quoted in a recent profile, "but Charles could never have created the agency without Maurice." We might do well to remember that some of the most successful businesses in the world, some of the titanic brands of our age, have been built through the strength of partnership. Take Mr Rolls and Mr Royce, Mr Marks and Mr Spencer, Mr Goldman and Mr Sachs, or Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard, to name but a very few. What's more, eponymous brands like Apple and Microsoft were built on partnership. Bill Gates may be the one we remember from Microsoft but his co-founder Paul Allen lives with an estimated fortune of $15 billion, as one of the richest men in America today. And it doesn't stop there. Both Gates and Steve Jobs had important phases of their lives working as partners and not just competitors. Gates programmed software for the early Macintosh, while in 1997, the year Jobs returned to Apple as CEO, Microsoft ploughed $150m into the then-struggling business. But for all of that there is a great risk to partnership and nothing so destructive to the life chances of a business as when it goes bad. My grandfather used to call partnerships "the worst ship to sail the sea." He would never entertain them, seeing them as a proxy for conflict and compromised, weak decision making, heightening the propensity for drift. What starts as the ultimate pairing can easily collapse into acrimony. A Bridge Over Troubled Water sunk the friendship of Simon and Garfunkel. The tempestuous relationship between Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams could have cost the world Twitter, while German brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler famously fell into irreconcilable conflict over their co-owned shoe business in post-war Germany. The result was two companies which still have competing factories in the Dassler brothers" home town of Herzogenaurach. Their names? Adidas and Puma. Friends, even family, can find it hard to make a business work beyond the founding phase. This is not something to enter into lightly on the assumption that a relationship will carry you through. There's an art to it, and a business partnership is something you must tend as assiduously and caringly as any long-term relationship. As JD Rockefeller put it: "A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship." To borrow a catchphrase of Eric Morecambe - he's not wrong, you know. Nor, 99pc of the time, is my business partner. As he said about this column: "I don't like the comedic analogies in these situations. They never work in my favour. Better leave it there then.