Your first employee
New businesses sooner or later, need to find people to join its mission. Whether its just to get some tasks done, that the owner doesn't have time to do or; to do something specific that the owner doesn't have the skillset or knowledge to do.
Sometimes, business owners will look to recruit people they know, perhaps family members or friends or friends of friends.
Is it a good idea or bad idea to hire family and friends?
For some it works out really well for a long time, for others, it works well for some of the time and for others it doesn't work at all ever!
When we look at the reasons why it works or doesn't it comes down to the conversations and expectations that are set from Day 1.
What we mean by this, is that if you engage in conversations that relate to:
Business Strategy
Business Operations
and set expectations that treat them as a colleague/employee and not as a friend or family member... this will seed the way for the path ahead.
Once you start to engage in conversations that introduce emotions, family, feelings, then you are likely to end up having some sleepless nights, uncomfortable family of friendship relationships and possible disruption to your business may transpire. Decisions will be hard to make, without family or friend agreement and ultimately you will end up wishing you had not employed them in the first place.
So start as you mean to go on. Set the business agenda and how you will work with each other at a business, groundrules if you like and operational level and don't be afraid to have those tough conversations (you can be kind, yet tough), even it that conversation leads to an agreement that its best for your family/friendship relationship and the business if they leave.