Hi there!
So, do you remember that I talked a lot about personal boundaries lately? I’m sure you do, they appeared over and over again. And this month brought the chance to practise defending mine.
I seem very open and prepared to share personal stories. And to some extent I am exactly that. I am known for always having a story to tell, finding examples for a lot of behaviour you can observe and to having an opinion most of the time.
Business advice for very small businesses like mine talks about you being “your brand“. I don’t want to go into detail on this but essentially it means you put a lot of yourself in everything that identifies your business.
It helps people, potential customers, to identify with your brand / business. This is a good thing: You want them to do so to be able sell them whatever you sell (but marketing is not today’s topic ;-)).
But it bears the risk that your customers feel they are your friends as well.
Before I started working in a funding agency (my last job), I worked in research in plant breeding. This isn’t a big field, so you get to know all the players, a lot of them are colleagues and friends. My field of expertise at the funding agency was plant breeding as well. So I got research proposals from friends. Luckily, I shared that topic with a colleague and we could avoid conflicting interests by dividing the proposals between us according to personal connections or the lack thereof.
One day I was called by a former colleague who said they would send a proposal and could I make sure they got the money. I had to because I was their former colleague, the proposal was just formality. When I said, I would check everything and would come to a conclusion based on the facts and they would hear from us, they got angry and told me that this was unfair and I knew they needed the money and my friend (a second person) would lose their job if I didn’t make it happen.
No, I didn’t invent that story, it happened. And they didn’t get the money. It was very unsubtle and I could see the blackmail attempt very clearly. But my former colleague really thought I could and would just send the money when they asked because we knew each other.
I am very clear about what I can and can’t do - in my old job but in my own business as well.
And this is important - sharing personal stuff, being open and friendly when working together can lead to the assumption the business relationship is a friendship. And it never is. (You can work with friends, but that is a whole other story.)
Isn’t being friends a good thing though?
It is - but in a business relationship friendship only works if you keep in mind that what’s connecting you is the business. You need to be able to separate friendship and business. It can get very difficult if there are problems and one or both of you can’t separate friendship from business.
To avoid awkward moments and situations, think about what you want to share, to what degree you allow a business relationship becoming a friendship.
Because a time will come when you will need to defend your boundaries. If your customer thinks you have a friendship, they will expect more than you will be able to give. If you didn’t define your boundaries for yourself beforehand, this situation will be very difficult for you. It will be difficult to explain that you can’t do what your customer expects from you.
But if you know from the start where your boundaries are, you will see when your boundaries are overstepped and can find clear words to defend them. You don’t need to communicate the rules you defined for yourself but you need to have them so you can enforce them when someone oversteps. And it prevents you from getting to a point where you never planned to be without noticing.
A perfectly fine solution would be to share nothing of yourself and avoid this problem. I can’t work like that because that’s not me. But being your own brand includes being very private too.
Are you clear about to what extent you want to share personal stuff? Think about it, make notes and keep your boundaries.
Talk soon,
Frauke
P.S.: If we work together, I probably will like your designs. And I will tell you if I do. That doesn’t necessarily mean I will knit them though.