How to Work With Family and Friends In Your Small Business

As a business owner, if you’ve ever worked with a family member or a close friend, you know it can be a blessing as well as a challenge.

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Corepay

Last updated on

December 29, 2024
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As a business owner, if you’ve ever worked with a family member or a close friend, you know it can be a blessing as well as a challenge. Finding and striking the balance between those two extremes can be difficult, but it also makes working with that family member so rewarding.

A recent article in Greensheet.com from Dee and Emily Karawadra talked about the joys and headaches of not only working together in their family business, but bringing their oldest daughter, Morgan, into the fold as well, and the different adjustments they had to make. As they found, “the rewards outweigh the challenges,” and they shared a few important reminders.

We’ve known other people who have worked in family and family-owned businesses, whether as the family member, the founder, the son-in-law, or even the non-family employee. We’ve learned several lessons from the experiences as well, so here are our five tips to working with family and friends in your small business.

A photo of James Smith & Sons Umbrellas, a family businessFirst, leave work at work. Since you’re close enough to your family to work together, you’re probably also going to hang out together. A friend of ours used to work for his father-in-law’s company, and they also hung out on weekends and over the holidays. Since everyone worked for the company, dinnertime discussions often turned to work, despite regular promises not to mention work at all. It was a struggle for everyone to leave their work at the office, and they often broke the rule, but for the most part, they were able to leave work at work.

Second, find a work-life balance. The temptation of working in your family’s business is to do more than is asked of you. It’s your family’s future, after all, so why wouldn’t you put in that extra time. But remember that the whole reason you work is so you can have a life. Don’t neglect the latter just for the former. Work becomes a drag and you can burn out if you don’t let yourself enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Communicate openly. Dee and Emily said they have always been a “say what’s on your mind” family, so they decided that open communication would be critical to their success. If you don’t communicate well as a family in regular family settings, you’re going to have similar problems when you’re dealing with business issues. So set up some ground rules and parameters and let your family members share what’s on their mind without falling back into old family communication habits. Remember, you can’t ground your marketing director anymore, so figure out how to communicate with them like an adult.

You can’t show favoritism. Favoritism and nepotism are often the dual curse of the family business, especially the larger ones. The son or daughter of the president automatically gets a job and is expected to rise up through the ranks. We’ve even seen it happen plenty of times, where it ruins a company: The third generation of the fmaily is expected to take over, only they never really wanted the job, never understood what it took to grow the company, and therefore doesn’t know how things work. As a result, they drive the company right into the toilet and dozens, if not hundreds, of people lose their job.

Fifth, bring in outside talent, too. You cannot do everything by yourself, and you don’t know everything. Bring in people who know more than you and are smarter than you. It’s nice being the smartest person in the room, but if it’s usually you, you’re in the wrong room. Hire people who know more than you and let them do their thing. They’ll make the company more successful and help you grow even more.

Working with family and friends can be rewarding and a good way to help a close family stay close. But it can also be a challenge, as everyone has a personal history together. The key is being willing to communicate and finding a balance between work life and personal life and not blending the two, or spending too much time in one area.

While you’re running your family business, you’re going to need to be able to collect money through credit and debit cards, plus other alternative forms of payment. Corepay can show you how to make all that happen. For more information, please visit our website or call us at (800) 408-0095.

Photo credit: Eilidh_Wag (Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0)

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