It all started innocently enough. I had a friend who was working from home as a remote consultant. Since I had just opened our first company office in the Monadnock Building, I asked him if he wanted to work from my office and keep me company. I really didn’t think that we would grow that fast and need people that we trusted, but it happened.
When we had 6 people in the office, his consulting contract ended and he didn’t have anything lined up. I heard from someone in the office that he was asking about if there was something at cleverbridge for him since he saw the rapid growth that we were experiencing. When he finally asked, I was on the fence because his skills didn’t seem to be a great match for what we needed, but since we had hired so many inexperienced people, I thought that it could help to have a more senior person around the office to help monitor progress.
After about 6 months, he had shown enough initiative to convince us that he should lead our corporate marketing efforts, after all he had a bachelors in marketing. Everything was generally going fine for another 6 months, but then we could see the difference in work between what he did and what we needed. The subsequent year included numerous conversations both with him about what we needed and without him about how to get him on track. After another 6 months, we finally decided that he wasn’t a good fit for that position or the company. We let him go even though he was working on several major projects because there's never a good time to make a change and we were convinced that this was the right decision.
I’ve also had several other friends join cleverbridge before and after that time and while most of them have worked out to different degrees, there are definitely some guidelines that I suggest if you are even thinking about hiring a friend or acquaintance:
1. Ensure that there’s a clear match between the person’s qualifications and your needs – This may be obvious, but an entrepreneur can fall into the trap of scope creep with a friend that becomes an employee and no one wins.
2. Hold the friend to a higher standard than all other employees – I personally am harder on my friends than people that I didn’t know before hiring them because there can be no hint of favoritism with your friends or else the office chatter can become a cancer.
3. Require that the person report directly to someone else – This also takes some of the favoritism argument out of the equation and hopefully results in the person being seen as succeeding or failing because of their own work, not the invisible hand of a friend.
4. Be up front about who’s the boss before hiring – I’ve heard this before, but agree that there needs to be a clear distinction of who is in charge and that your friendship can’t get in the way of business.
In my time at cleverbridge, I’ve had to fire two people that I considered friends (more so acquaintances than longtime friends) and in both cases I don’t speak to either of them anymore. On the other hand, I’ve hired 3 friends who have remained with the company for 5+ years each. While at various times they have reported directly to me, as the organization has grown, none of them report to me now and we rarely even talk at work. That seems to be a healthy measure of success.
It sure was fun in those early days to be working with your friends, especially if you are going out after work for beer or to a Cubs game, but this is definitely a double edged sword that can come back to cut you if you don’t address some points in advance.
Have you hired your friends? Has it worked out? How was relationship if you had to fire?
