Working for family, friends doesn’t always end well

The first time Ralph Brandt worked for a friend, he was nine years old. “I worked with my buddy Dan at a lemonade stand we set up at Wrightwood Park in Chicago. We sold cups of lemonade for a quarter, but I can’t really say it was a joint venture,” says Brandt. “At the end of each day, Dan would give me 50 cents while he pocketed whatever else we made. And we sold a lot of lemonade.”

There’s a lesson in there somewhere, says Brandt, an accountant who now lives in Milwaukee with his wife and three children. “Working for your friends and making sure that they’re not taking advantage of you is tough, especially when you’re nine,” he says. “Dan is actually still one of my best friends and we laugh about that all the time. He told me later that his dad told him to give me a dollar a day, but he decided to make it 50 cents. Nice guy.”

It can be difficult to work with someone you know, much less someone you know very well, but that difficulty is only increased when you work for them instead of with them, says Lynda

Samberg, a career coach in Salt Lake City, Utah. “It’s really hard to separate the friendship from the business relationship, especially if your friend is the person setting your salary,” says Samberg. “But a working relationship with a friend also can be incredibly productive. There is a certain energy that’s created when people know each other outside of the office.”

Brandt says he’s tapped into that energy as an adult, having worked for his wife’s brothers at an auto dealership chain in Minnesota. “There’s a lot of freedom. You can say things that you wouldn’t normally say to a boss who you don’t know that well.” Brandt says. “I

was fortunate to work with some really good guys. My brothers-in-law are very smart and very willing to listen to other ideas, but I know that’s not always the case with people you know.”

Chicago resident Michelle Cargot sold software for a firm owned by her college roommate and her husband. She says her experience was the opposite of Brandt’s. “Part of me blames myself because I was too casual about things, but I do think that it can be really frustrating to work with people you know because they’re not always willing to take you seriously as an employee,” Cargot says. “They see you as the friend or the sister or as the wife’s roommate and therefore they don’t necessarily treat you with the respect you might get at other places.”

Cargot says her own experience was tainted by her company’s unwillingness to listen to her ideas. “When you sell a product, you know that product from the inside out, and after a while you know your customers from the inside out as well. Any good sales rep tries to merge that product with her customers’ needs and that’s what I tried to do,” she says. “But Michelle the employee was still the same person as Michelle the friend, so I don’t think my professional opinion weighed as heavily as it should have.”

Cargot says she left her position with the software firm after two years — “before it ruined my relationship with my friend,” she says — and took a similar

sales job with a local start-up, a decision itself that caused problems. “That’s the other danger of working with friends and family members,” she says. “When you leave, it’s almost viewed as a betrayal. And if you go work for a competitor, then it’s viewed as an outright act of war.”