A Family IT/Tech Business??

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?"

Comments

Better be prepared . . .

[Rootman]

to accept the fact that you may alianate your entire family. I was involved not in a tech business but in a cleaning business with family. It strained us to the point that I had to quit and things were rough between my sister and I for years.

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.

IF Compatible(You, GF) THEN Partnership

[G4from128k]

My wife and I have worked together for 9 years in a small consulting business (we've been married 20 years). It works very well for us because we have complimentary skills, mutual respect, and agree on many issues of business straetgy and tactics. She can do things I can't do, and vice versa.

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!

Keep everything on paper and signed

[Alan Cox]

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.

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"

Re:Keep everything on paper and signed

[fucksl4shd0t]

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:Careful planning

[TheViciousOverWind]

I've worked with a girlfriend in "software development" - One man company, she acted as a sales(wo)man.
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.

Don't put all eggs in one basket

[Wolfier]

The more family members get involved, the higher risk that your family will run going backrupt if the business goes under.

My family business experiences

[soren42]

Of course, just like anyone else on here, I can only share my experiences with the family business, and my insights and recommendations.

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:

• Keep work and home life separate - My father and mother had a very interesting relationship. At work, my father was the VP/Director of Operations for the company, and my mother was the Office Manager. She worked for him. At home, as in most marriages, she was the boss. But, there were very clear boundaries between home and work life, and respecting these divisions kept everyone happier and sane. There was no talk or little talk of work at the dinner table, and there was no talk of family life or family problems in the boardroom.
• Have a set of published rules that apply to everyone - One of the key things that kept our family busniess together was a set of corporate standards that applied to everyone, famly or not. These standards dealt with dress code, vacation time, sick time, tardiness, and other standard HR policies.
• Show favoritism - As a corollary to the last rule, it's important to have an even set of rules, but occasionally, it's important to break them in private for family members. Family members want to know that they have a little bit of edge because they're on the inside track - and that's okay. It keeps them happy, and prevents Thanksgiving dinner from turning into a corporate affair. It's important, however, that this doesn't become a habit, and that your other employees don't get wind of it - it should be a quiet, special exception.
• Honesty is of utmost importance - While as a manager, I espouse being honest and forthright with all of your staff members, this is even more important with family. Be up front and open with your relatives. The last thing you want to have happen is for issues to circulate through the "back channels", and have it impact your relationship outside the office.
• Don't involve other family members - Don't share your business life, gripes, problems, or issues with family members that aren't a part of the business. This applies to siblings, parents, children, or anyone else. Don't gossip about the poor performan