Buddy system
Working for friends, family doesn’t always end well
The first time Ralph Brandt worked for a friend, he was 9 years old. “I worked with my buddy Dan at a lemonade stand we set up. 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, a 52-year-old accountant who lives in the midwest 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 9,” 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.”
Common goal
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 experience was tainted by company’s unwillingness to listen. “When you sell a product, you know that product from the inside out, and after awhile 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” — and took a similar sales job with a local startup, 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.”
Luckily for Cargot, she says both firms were bought by larger companies within one year, and despite flirting with the idea of working with her friends once again, she decided instead to take a different route and go back to school for her teaching degree. “I didn’t want history to repeat itself, and at my age, I can’t afford to lose any more friends,” she says.
Finding balance
In some cases, it can be difficult for someone working for friends to separate his or her professional life from the personal. Eric Ross says he hired his friend from college as a staff attorney a few years ago. While the Indianapolisbased manufacturer says the work was excellent, he had to eventually let his attorney friend go because he spent entirely too much time out of the office. “It was a case of him assuming that I would understand if he wanted to take a three-day weekend,” Ross says. “And there were short workdays, too many sick days and a few last-minute vacations. You just don’t do that, even with someone you know.”
In Ross’ case, the end of the professional relationship resulted in the end of the personal relationship as well. “We were pretty good friends in college, but we haven’t spoken since his last day at work,” Ross says. “I feel bad about it, but I have 37 people on staff. If people notice the favoritism, I’m going to have problems much larger than one guy mad at me because he can’t take a Friday off.”
Samberg says the pressure is often on the manager when there is a family- or friend-based relationship at work, since he or she usually will shoulder the blame when things go wrong. “I had a client who had an employee who continually asked for loans and advances on his paycheck, and when my client decided that he could no longer accommodate those requests, his friend quit and badmouthed him to every person they knew,” Samberg says. “If you hire someone you know, you have to be ready for that scenario.”
Avoid the drama with a clearly defined set of rules in advance, both written and unwritten. “If you hire someone you know, you’re going to have to make sure that they have to play by the same rules as the rest of your employees,” Samberg says. “But at the same time, you can have a conversation that outlines the rules, specifically the unsaid rules like extra time off. A small conversation about expectations can go a long way.”