Before You Shake Hands, read this. Elle George on partnership alignment

What is the core premise of Before You Shake Hands and who is it for?

The book is a partnership alignment playbook - a structured set of questions across five categories (values and trust, roles and responsibilities, legal, financials, and exit strategies) that founders, investors, and co-founders should work through before committing to any business relationship. Elle wrote it out of her own 20-year legal battle born from a partnership she entered without doing any alignment work. The audience is anyone who has ever been excited to be chosen by a partner or investor and let that excitement suppress the questions they should have been asking. Elle's thesis: the legal and financial due diligence founders obsess over is secondary to the human alignment they routinely skip.

What is the single most important question to ask a prospective investor or co-founder?

Why do you want to invest in my business? The answer immediately surfaces the real motivation - tax parking, speculation, belief in you personally, social cause alignment, or an exit timeline - and reveals whether any alignment is possible. Elle gives the example of a founder building toward B Corp certification for social impact whose investor is simply parking money for tax purposes: no amount of goodwill can bridge that gap. The question works because it is open-ended enough that people answer honestly, and the honest answer either confirms alignment or ends the conversation before either party has invested more than time.

What should a founder do if a prospective partner refuses to go through the alignment conversation?

Run. Elle is unambiguous: if someone will not sit through the alignment check at the earliest and most optimistic stage of the relationship, they are showing you exactly how they will behave when the relationship is under stress. She frames it explicitly as equivalent to a dating dealbreaker - someone who will not discuss whether they want children before marriage is not going to have that conversation after. The refusal is not a quirk of personality or a timing issue; it is a preview of the conflict avoidance, evasion, or aggression that will define every hard conversation the business eventually produces.

How does Elle approach leadership and staff retention at her restaurant chain in Indonesia?

Elle runs her restaurants on a foundation of genuine emotional investment in the people who work there - birthday bonuses, annual loyalty bonuses that compound with tenure, a full company-wide family day every year where all locations close and everyone does something fun together. The result, in an industry where 30–50% annual staff turnover is considered normal, is that many of her team members have stayed five or more years. The signal she values most is not tenure itself but the moment when a staff member is offered a significant signing bonus by a competitor and turns it down - not because they cannot afford to leave, but because they choose not to. That loyalty, she says, fills her heart more than any revenue number.

What did the process of writing the book reveal to Elle about herself?

Writing the book forced Elle to examine her own attachment patterns and see how they had operated as business liabilities throughout the partnership dispute. Growing up as one of six sisters, always competing for attention and love, she carried an anxious attachment style into her professional relationships - running full narratives in her head about how situations would unfold before they happened, and entering partnerships with a guard up that was essentially waiting for betrayal. The book's self-reflection process helped her identify this, work through it, and arrive at a different default: she now gives trust willingly and places the responsibility for maintaining it on the other person rather than treating suspicion as prudent.

How does Elle define manifestation and what is her daily practice?

Elle is explicit that manifestation is not a Pinterest vision board left on a fridge - it is a discipline. The practice requires clarity on what you want, active work to create the conditions for it to happen, and consistent mental rehearsal. Her morning routine: affirmations she wrote for herself in her own voice (played back on a recording as she wakes and sleeps, because she believes your own voice is absorbed more deeply than any external content), outdoor meditation in her egg chair on the beach with sand under her feet, breathwork, and daily surfing as a moving meditation. The foundation is the Master Key System by Charles Haanel - a 26-week program she has completed multiple times.

What is Elle's advice for investors evaluating younger or less experienced founders?

Ask two questions above all others. First: what are your goals for the business and what does your exit look like? A founder who wants a 10-year legacy business and an investor expecting a 5-year exit cannot be aligned regardless of the business's potential. Second: what is the biggest challenge you have faced in this business so far, and how did you handle it? This question reveals personality, emotional maturity, and resilience more reliably than any pitch deck. Elle adds a third dimension: look for founders who have real battle scars - people who have faced genuine adversity and recovered from it. Someone who has never been tested cannot tell you how they will show up when things go wrong.

How did Elle process the anger from a 20-year partnership dispute without becoming bitter?

Elle made a deliberate decision early in the dispute that marinating in anger and pursuing revenge would cost her more than it would cost them. Her practice is not forgiveness in the conventional sense - she does not need to have dinner with the people who wronged her. It is closer to Buddhist non-attachment: she meditated on wishing them whatever healing led them to behave as they did, and released the outcome. She draws the analogy directly: holding anger is drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. The practical result is that she has no bitterness today about a dispute that consumed nearly half her life - and attributes the absence of bitterness to her ability to keep growing, building new businesses, and showing up fully present for new relationships.

What is Elle's ideal partnership profile for her current stage of life and work?

Elle is clear that she would not take on a co-founder or investor under most circumstances today - she has built her businesses to operate on her own terms and has earned the freedom to work only from passion and love. If she were to partner with someone, the criteria are almost entirely qualitative: someone spiritually oriented, capable of gentle and real communication, who wants to have fun while building something meaningful. She explicitly disqualifies anyone whose primary motivation is money or an exit timeline. She also emphasizes personality fit as non-negotiable - she is gregarious, high-energy, and direct, and a quiet or conflict-avoidant partner would produce incompatibility faster than any financial disagreement.