How to do business with friends and stay professional

Have you ever been in situation when you are negotiating some business deal with friend, acquaintance or just some company that was recommended to you by someone you trust, and everything is going so well, you can feel the positive energy, you both seem on the same page and you can’t possibly think of anything going wrong?

You get so confident that things will go smooth that you don’t even think about putting things on the paper. At that point suggesting such a thing, if it even crosses your mind in the first place, feels almost like an insult to the other party. You are even ready to close the deal right there without even considering going elsewhere for another opinion on the task or a quote, so you end up just shaking hands and calling it a deal.

I am sure that everyone has been in this situation, I know I was.

As it usually goes when something can go wrong — it will. Promised work wasn’t delivered, or it took more time or money than it should. Most importantly not all agreed terms were fulfilled, overall, you were not satisfied. But sure as hell bill arrived anyway.

Who to blame?

When something goes wrong, usually the first instinct is to point fingers, it’s the easiest thing to do, it’s also wrong thing to do.

There are many roads to take and arguing is one of them, first thing you can try to do is to work it out and try to explain your point of view to the other party.

If complaining doesn’t work you can push it more but in many cases that can bring more damage, it can take away more of your time, patience, it can be expensive and it can maybe end friendship.

In the case where damage is something you can live with I suggest sucking it up, paying the bill, and moving forward. Why? In most cases no one really makes you do anything, you have a choice and you decide who to trust, simple as that. At this point it is irrelevant if you have been fooled on purpose or it was misunderstanding, you are responsible for making it happen. The only person you can really blame is yourself.

It is naive to think that there are friends in business, and I am not saying here that you shouldn’t trust anyone, trust is important, but you shouldn’t let the comfortable situation get the best of you and influence your judgement.

This is a terrible mistake to make in business.

I am assuring you that things get much more uncomfortable when you have to argue later on over who said what and who meant what and how you both remember it.

When everything goes well you never think about it, but you have to get burned so you start thinking — always write a damn contract. If you are dealing with professionals you will not insult them, and its purpose is to protect the both sides, it doesn’t matter how big the amount of work is, or if you will work with your acquaintance or a friend, you are there for business, not socializing.

Best salesmen exploit this all the time, they always set up the situation so that it’s uncomfortable for you to say no, and you always figure that from retrospective. The guy buys you a drink and naturally you respond by wanting to be nice, so you listen what he has to say. But in reality the only thing he bought there was a leverage, and it was very cheap, but in the given moment it’s so easy not to see this.

You can probably get away with it once but you can’t let it happen more often, you have to learn from it.