Starting a business with friends is something that we all would love to do for various reasons. In the case of The Shoe Café the want for hiring friends was simply for the desire to have friends available to travel and enjoy each others time while making a lifestyle that was personally comfortable. For specific reasons I will not go into great detail as to who did what and how, but I will say that it took us less than one month to ruin everything that had been planned for the last half of the year. We moved to Orlando August 9th, 2011 and had fallen out and decided to go separate ways by August 28th, 2011. It was at this point when I came to realize that all of the warnings about mixing business with pleasure were coming true even though I thought that our friendship would be strong enough for our business to survive any problems, and prove false all of the friend and business taboos.
In Robert Greene’s the 48 Laws of Power law #2 which is “Never Put Too Much Trust in Friends, Learn How to Use Enemies” Greene speaks of the mixing of friends and business and how it can sometimes hurt you more than starting a business with your enemies, “A friend is rarely the one who is most able to help you; and in the end skill and competence are far more important than friendly feelings”. A lot of times in the business world there are certain things that need to be said or done and if both parties are not able to separate friend feelings from business feelings things could turn bad pretty quickly. This law also speaks of the need for all working situations to have a sort of distance between the people. There are various documents and stories to be read and heard about that will detail the accounts of many friends who tried to start a business together and ended up losing everything including friendships and business investments.
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