A Family IT/Tech Business?? 398
adzoox writes "As I have just hired on my girlfriend to help out with some secretarial work in my Apple consulting, sales, and technical service business, and considering having my brother work with me soon; I'd like to know what the /. readers think about family in the 'Tech Workplace.' Obviously things aren't hectic like a restaurant, but my father and friends have all warned me against mixing business and pleasure and family. Do any of you have successful family owned IT businesses, eBay businesses, or programming/software consulting engineering businesses and what's been or secret to success? If not successful what unique problems did you encounter? How can I make it successful? And most importantly how do you handle authority (tardiness, work ethic, and workplace codes) with a girlfriend?"
Hiring Family Members (Score:3, Interesting)
Better be prepared . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
If all of you are mature abd straight enough character wist it may work. I've seen one or two family business's that have worled, more that have failed.
Why struggle? (Score:2, Interesting)
IF Compatible(You, GF) THEN Partnership (Score:4, Interesting)
If you try to have a boss-employee relationship with your girlfiend or family, things might get ugly when you have to make an executive decision that they do not agree with or respect. You could try establishing "ground rules" but I'd bet that any asymmetries in the relationship, even if prearranged, will lead to grief.
This is a high-risk, high-reward issue. If you make this family business work, you will have the best time of your life. If you can't get along with family/coworkers you will have the worst time of your life.
Good Luck!
Priorities (Score:3, Interesting)
I kept out of it, reasoning that a business that big would end up owning you. Sadly it proved to be the case as nobody talks to each other any more. I'm not saying dont do it but be aware that relationships can come second to business. Also remember that relationships can change over time. Depends on the people involved, many cultures handle family businesses very well, but they tend to be the ones with very clearly deffined social heirarchy. The best bet would be to set out very clearly the rights and responsibilities of everybody involved - employment contracts right from the start. Then expect to adjust as time passes and the business changes.
A final suggestion is that the number one rule is dont lose a friends or family members money if they invest.
Go for it (Score:3, Interesting)
There are two views on this, and both have validity. If you do it right, it'll pay in spades. Do it wrong, and you'll end up pretty lonely.
Personally, I'm all about doing business with my family. Simply put, they are the people that I know and trust. If you hire someone, you really don't know them beyond what their resume says and what you can learn in an hour or two of interviewing, which is not much.
Money magazine had an excellent article on the subject last year, here it is in the archive:
Silver Spoon - In Praise of Nepotism [cnn.com]
The article is an interview with the author of a book called "In Praise of Nepotism", and makes some excellent points.
Keep everything on paper and signed (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually provided evidence in one case where that happened and the halves of the family were sueing each other in court including some Linux related matter.
So stick it all on paper then at the end of the day if bad stuff occurs everyone knows where they stand.
The other arguments I've seen about family business are really about diversification - if you and your girlfriend both work for the same company you can both lose your job at the same moment much more easily.
In the UK lots of people employ family members just to improve their tax position. Hiring children to create tax efficient ways to provide university funding, hiring wives to use their tax allowances etc.
I guess the US has similar "opportunities"
Yeah, the girlfriend thing might be tough. (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not saying you shouldn't hire her, but just make sure she is loyal to you and your company.
And like others have said, a ring would be a good idea. If you want business commitment from her you probably need to promise her a future as well.
Re:Careful planning (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that when everything goes great, there's no problems, but if she suddenly decides to go shopping instead of working, you can't help but have negative thoughts about it ("Why doesn't she put in as much work as I do?"), and ultimately those thoughts will affect the normal relationship too, you can't just seperate those 2 things.
Also I were put in a situation where my (ex)girlfriend told me she found some new customers, just to make me happy, because I was feeling depressed one day, and I later found out that she had not even talked to them.
Of course this is more of a trust issue, but I found that mixing business and pleasure on a full-time scale, was definately not the way to go for me.
Re:and after that (Score:1, Interesting)
On the other hand, there are some family businesses who it would be a pleasure to work for because of the quality of people in the whole family. These are rare; the standard pathological setup with a single competent but quirky founder and a lot of incompetent family member employees trying to slide by is much more common.
My experience (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't put all eggs in one basket (Score:4, Interesting)
Too close... (Score:1, Interesting)
I started a business with my brother, and became very resentful when I was putting money in from my pocket and he was spending it on an overpaid assistant who happened to be sleeping with him. It made get togethers with his wife and kid awkward too.
Well, here's my experience... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's just the same as any other business (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are going to mix biz and pleasure, then do it with the idea that you will disolve the biz relationships in favour of the personal ones. The one relationship that strikes me as being a bit dicey is the girlfriend. If this personal relationship is likely to disolve, then your biz will suffer if she becomes irreplacable and decides to move on.
Don't Do It (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Emotional issues between the partners get in the way of sensible business decisions. This will weaken your business.
2. It is inevitable that one partner will be better than the other, and it may reach the point where the only reason the weaker partner remains is due to nepotism. This will be noticed by both customers and employees, and will damage your credibility.
3. One of the best things about being in a relationship is being able to have a life outside work. By entering a business relationship with your partner, you've given that up. This will lead to burnout and stagnation, and will eliminate what little quality time you might otherwise have spent together.
I would recommend against it. (Score:3, Interesting)
We try very hard to make sure that the person we're hiring is a good fit before hiring, but you just can't really tell until they're in place. Much of it is our work environment, which is rather self-directed. It's also kind of isolating, just because of us all working on computers. So, it's fairly easy for people not to fit in to the environment.
For example. At one point we hired the ex-girlfriend of a good friend of ours. She hated our work environment, and left within two weeks. She was quite bitter about it, for reasons I don't fully understand. She ended up giving our mutual friend an ear-full, apparently, and we've hardly spoken since.
If everything works out well, hiring a relative could work out great. In most cases you know a relative better than you know random other people you will hire. However, our experience has been that it's much more likely not to work out.
We've found it's important to be able to easily stop the relationship as early as possible when it's not working out. It's hard enough doing this with just random people or aquaintances. With relatives, I can only imagine it's harder and may cause even more problems if there are hard feelings.
Take, for example, a business associate of ours. They hired a person to do sales a year ago. They've been paying his salary during that time, and he hasn't actually sold anything. Literally nothing. The contacts he said he had were all the wrong kinds of contacts, and in the mean-time he's spent a lot of time spinning his wheels trying to sell this particularly specialized ASP service.
You probably don't want this to happen to you.
Sean
Burned -- Don't mix business with pleasure (Score:2, Interesting)
You should consider the following:
1) Exposure of trade secrets: After I dumped her (found out she was cheating on me yet again), she went out and told competitors my business strategies, tactics, passwords to accounts etc
2) Blackmail: she refused to give back equipment suck as a laptop + desktop computer or she would expose more proprietary business information to competitors
Your intensions may be good but use extreme caution when dealing with females. They can turn on you in a heart beat.
Its all in the details (Score:2, Interesting)
Or it might be the best thing that ever happened. I've lived through and seen both. My personal experience, as others have said, is that the friends and family bring sufficient complementary skills, share a common work ethic, and are committed to the business, you should run it as a partnership. In all the cases where this happened with my friends, the team at top was a boy/girl friend relationship, they partnered for control of the business, and it turned into a happy long term relationship or marriage.
But I've heard tale of much of the opposite. You have to be prepared for the risk that it will all go south and you will lose the relationships and the business. If this prospect doesn't cause you or your friends to flinch, go for it! Otherwise, don't do it, you are asking for trouble. If anyone expresses serious reservations, odds are they shouldn't be involved.
Re:TV can teach us everything! (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not one for drama, myself, but the producers of those two shows (and Monster Garage) realize that they can capitalize on the fact that many people do like drama. They like consternation, but they only like to watch other people suffer it.
I work with my dad (whom is one who likes consternation, FWIW). If we have an issue, we're likely to argue about it, but if it goes much farther we go wrestle. Whoever wins wins the argument, simple enough. Yah can't be submissive on some things. But most other places, that's just unacceptable behavoir--it'd get you fired. I should know, I do iron work, most of the guys aren't such assholes.
Don't get me wrong, I like what the guys on those shows make, but I could do without the drama. But as it stands, it's like a soap-opera for middle aged men.
Re:Plan on getting her a ring... (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't bet on it. I walked away from a 14 year involvement with a family business because of problems caused by my brother and his girlfriend when he brought his girlfriend into the business.
Business decisions often need to be made purely on business grounds (e.g. sometimes ruthlessly). As soon as you start involving relatives you lose the ability to make decisions without fear of offending people who'll hold it against you. I would never, ever, get involved in a family business again.
My experience (Score:1, Interesting)
Everyone's relationships and experiences are unique, but for what it is worth I will share mine. (Sorry for the AC posting, but this is pretty personal stuff for me.)
My girlfriend and I have been together for about six years, and for over four of those years she has also been my only fulltime employee (and oftentimes boss ;-). I understood the risks, and I admit that both of us had reservations about adding a business relationship to our list of attachments. That aside, there were things to be gained on both sides. For me, I could have someone I knew well and trusted and someone whose knowledge of our business I respected help me make the business more successful. For her it represented a good opportunity for her particular skill set, and the ability to leave a job and employer that had been very dissatisfying. One other thing to point out is that we both love the business that we are in, in fact it has been an almost lifelong passion for both of us, but we also have unique skills and interests within our industry, which is good since we do not really compete but instead complement each other.
So what has been the result of these years of working together? We have found that we work extremely well together. We rarely argue, and then only on a constructive level, we never get personal in our disagreements. We give each other a lot of space to work in, trusting in the other's dedication to the job. That's the positive stuff. On the negative side, our personal relationship has definitely deteriorated over time. The biggest problem that I see is communication. We have fallen into a pattern of communicating constantly on a business level, and it seems that pattern has marginalized our communication on a personal level. Neither us is a fabulous communicator to begin with, but maybe having plenty of work-related topics to discuss has given us something to hide behind to avoid discussing those trickier interpersonal issues.
Just in the last few months we have stopped being physically involved (her choice), but we haven't talked to each other about this because of (I believe) a mutual fear of the potential consequences for the business. Keep in mind, we still work very well together, and are very good friends, often going to movies and dinner. Of course there is slightly more to this than I am sharing, but the point I would like to make is that working together has had a negative effect on our personal relationship.
Where we will end up I'm not sure yet, but the outlook isn't completely rosy. I have more confidence in a continued business relationship than a continued (or revived) personal relationship. So do I regret hiring my girlfriend? Mostly not. If our personal relationship does end, who's to say it wouldn't have ended at some point anyway, never having worked together? Actually, maybe we're just a married couple without being married - mutual trust and respect without the sex! ;-)
Does my girlfriend regret coming to work for me? I can't say for certain, but it seems pretty obvious that she doesn't completely regret it, nor is she completely happy with the outcome. It is obvious that she still loves her job, but it is also fairly obvious that she has grown a little tired of me over these last years. I don't fault her for that, I think that happens to anyone who spends as much time together as we do. Our friends actually wonder at our ability to last as long as we have, and the funny thing is, they don't seem to get along as well as we do, but that's probably because they actually deal with those tricky interpersonal issues, where we've had a mutual excuse to ignore them for some time.
We will eventually come to that moment of truth; I'm actually working up the courage now to confront the personal issues and see what this means for us and the business. To be honest, I think it comes down to a choice between a business relationship and a personal relationship. I think we can have one but not both, because of who we are and the relationship
Re:Plan on getting her a ring... (Score:3, Interesting)
You should have reminded a friend of mine's brother. This friend ran a small, but successful print shop-type business, and hired his brother on full time. Well, long story short, friend ends up in the hospital for a few weeks. When he gets out he finds his brother has taken (stolen) all his equipment, screwed over some customers, and skipped town! Perhaps this friend's mistake was hiring his brother because he was his brother, and not because he felt him to be an honest, hard working person.
No go! No Go! (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's just say that I was terribly wrong. All we talk about anymore is work-related. When we're not working we're talking about an upcoming project and how to manage it. We don't have social dialogue anymore. On one hand we're extremely efficient and know eachother's skills very well, we make a sizable ammount of money (given todays current outsourcing trends, not very much) but none of us have lives anymore. I'm extremely weary about your reference to hiring your girlfriend. I wouldn't expect to be together for very much longer if you were to ask me, work/relationships don't work, especially when you control her income and her work-load.
My family business experiences (Score:5, Interesting)
My grandfather founded an industrial diamond business in the mid-1960's, just him and his brother. (Industrial diamonds are just a very specialized industrial abrasive, used for polishing, grinding, lapping, and other abrasive uses. It's mostly a chemical, mechanical, and industrial engineering-based firm) It was started with just two employees in NYC, and when it was sold to DuPont in 1994 (and eventually to GE's SuperAbrasives division) it had just under hundred employees based in South Florida. As the company grew, the key employees were family members. Just like in your situation, my grandfather's wife was one of the first employees - doing bookkeeping and billing - followed much later by his children, my father and aunt. My mother was actually an employee at the business when she met (and eventually married) my father. By the time the business had grown to ~60 employees, every divison was headed by a family, and several more worked at the lower levels (including my cousin and I, who worked doing data entry and network administration during high school).
There were a ton of pitfalls associated with having family members work with and for you, and my family learned as we went. Sometimes work problems strained family relations, even to point where my Aunt was fired just to keep peace in the family. Now, ten years after the original family business was sold, my father has started a new family diamond abrasives business, and learned from the lessons of the previous company. His current wife (my mother passed away in 1998), my brother, and I all work at the family business. (I manage the IT department remotely right now, but plan to move back to South Florida in the next several years, as the business grows.)
Here are the key things that I observed my family learned over the years:
future employees (Score:1, Interesting)
However, she was a hard worker and would likely have received the same promotions if she was not married to the boss. She was made full-time because the company was growing and needed a full-time accountant. Nonetheless, everyone in the office assumed she slept her way to the top and questioned the quality of the work.
Sure, there was some favoritism, but much of the behind-her-back criticism in the office was undeserved. Maybe your office will be different, but then again maybe not. It would be unfortunate if your girlfriend or brother were thought to be receiving special treatment (by the future employees you hire) when in fact they are just hard workers deserving of such treatment.
5 years so far (Score:1, Interesting)
I purchased the business in sept of last year, and I'm also now engaged to one of the employees and we have our relationship, both business and work in clear sight....atleast I get to be the boss 40 hours out of the week heh heh heh. All kidding aside, her and I see eye to eye on almost everything and she has the same work ethic I do. Were it not for that I don't believe it would work out as we do work together and live together.
What it all boils down to is...it's a small business. If you think office politics are bad in a corperation, small biz is 20 times worse. You MUST find people you know will work the way you do, have the same goals as you or will atleast follow your orders without question and can truly understand that regardless of outside the office relationships, at the office you ARE the boss.
Re:Setting your own hours (Score:3, Interesting)
You may not get to set your own hours when you work for yourself
Re:Don't Wait! Sign Now. (Score:3, Interesting)
In reality, most verbal contracts are vague and writing them down tends to make people put a little more effort into specifying them.
Verbal contracts don't exist. Maybe they did at one time, when a man was as good as his word, but in this day full of deceit and corruption, there's no such thing.
Maybe some lawyer will chime in with "Yes, it's legally accepted" blah blah blah.
The purpose of a contract, and the *only* purpose of a contract, is to show a judge/jury while you're suing or being sued for breaking your word. At that time, the contract serves to define exactly what you gave your word for, and it becomes your best friend or your worst enemy.
You cannot show a judge/jury a verbal contract. If nobody heard it besides you and the other person, it didn't happen. In fact, even if you go and write detailed notes about a private conversation, those notes can be thrown out as lies because they can't be substantiated.
Now, if you don't trust your girlfriend enough that you can accept her word, you've got other issues either with yourself or your relationship. That's my personal objection to prenups. If I don't trust the woman with whom I'm about to spend the rest of my life with my personal finances, which I'm throwing in with hers, why am I marrying her in the first place? Oh yeah, sure, maybe she's just digging for gold and has got me totally swindled, but in a strong marriage a prenup isn't going to be worth the paper it's printed on. In a weak marriage, well, you should have thought it through some more. Marriage is never 'the next logical step in our relationship'.
Re:Keep everything on paper and signed (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be worried about the way family members trust each other rather than have formally signed contracts and business agreements. This is great until something goes wrong then its horribly horribly messy.
That's a big problem, where you just trust your girlfriend to do something that you won't let someone who's been with you for 6 months do. It's also a problem when your family member expects 'extra understanding' because 'we're family'.
In my experience, you can't start up a business without your friends and family. They will be your first employees, your first customers, or both. There's a mutually beneficial relationship going on. It's easier to ask your family member to work for less money, for example. They want to help you out. They get some work experience for the job (if it's a new line of work for them, they could be getting a new career). In the long run, if things go well enough that the business grows and you've made mostly good decisions, your family member gets extra pay, or at least competitive pay.
I was in a business not too long ago with my best friend, and before that I was involved with my dad. WIth my dad, the problem was that he didn't trust my wife and wasn't willing to share half ownership of the company with me. I wasn't willing to be a puppet partner, and without half ownership I wasn't getting involved. With my best friend, it was a bit different. We hired his sister, his ex-wife (who is still a good friend of his), and immediately office politics came into play and I was the bad guy (his ex-wife doesn't trust me, and I don't believe she ever liked me, and his sister didn't know me well enough to make her own judgement).
In the past, when I worked with family at various jobs, there were no problems. I worked with my brother for a long time in the restauraunt business, and we lived together. No problems. We didn't have to draw a line between work and play. SOme days we'd spend the evening bitching about work and other days we spent our off hours playing our asses off. At work we didn't give each other any particularly special treatment. In fact, I was in a position of authority at that place, and I had much higher expectations from him than I did most of the others, so he got his ass chewed more and harder than the others. :)
There's no easy answer to this question, as much as we'd all like to think there is. You're right, Alan, that having everything clear and in writing is good. But if everything that is in writing is more than you have for other employees, it can be very bad. It can be bad when you give your brother a loan but the company policy is no loans (there are ways to work around this, of course, but not in a startup).
The way I figure it is this: When you hire somebody, you get to know them extremely well, from one side. You learn about their work ethic, you learn about their standards for living. You don't care about who they date, what they eat, what they read, what they do. You establish a working relationship that works, and frequently pushes cultural boundaries. You agree to have differences with regard to religion, politics, and other heated topics. With family, your relationship frequently depends on all of the things you set aside for the stranger who's working for you. And also with family, you don't know their work ethic, and that's the pivotal point.
The other problem that comes up has to do with the word "partnership". Marriage is a partnership, right? Well, partnership is just a two-person version of "team". One of the problems every couple, every team, and every workplace faces is figuring out how much work each person is individually responsible. In a partnership, it's common to say "We're each responsible for half, no problem, we agree on that, we know it in advance." Then, a few months or years or whatever down the road, you start getting angry because you think you're doing your half and the other person isn't doing theirs. If you've hired your girlfriend,
Re:NO (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless you're able to look your family or friends in the face as a boss/employee relationship, DON'T.
I really don't think this would be a problem for me. Fire my dad? No problem! Worthless little fuck. Fire my brother? Why not? I threw him out of my house a long time ago when he didn't pay any bills. Fire my wife? Hell yeah! I can't wait to have that make up sex.
It's not as hard as you might think. Fact is, to start a business, you've got to have what Mexicans like to call huevos. You've gotta have balls, and if you don't have enough balls to fire your family, you've really gotta ask yourself if you have enough balls to even run a business in the first place. That's the single trait that you must have and you can't do without. Every wonder why the really successful businessmen and women seem to have balls of steel? Because that's a requirement for the job.
Re:Don't Wait! Sign Now. (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked for a family owned business... (Score:3, Interesting)
So you must be careful about the nepotism factor. You either have to stay small enough for it to never matter or for you to luck out and never arrive there. You can't fire your wife/gf.. well maybe you can, but I bet you'll be on the couch or in divorce court.
I leave you with this:
http://www.despair.com/nepotism.html
it can work (Score:2, Interesting)