“Don’t mix business with personal.”

We’ve all heard this before. Don’t hire your friends. Don’t go into business deals with people you are in close relationship with.

Recently, planned to sell a portion of our business to some friends, and be a service provider of sorts for them going forward. Pretty straightforward stuff.

The husband and I had a strange interaction a few weeks back. My best interpretation at this point is that he was never fully settled on doing business on his own — he’d never had a tone of confidence since we first started discussing our plans last summer — and this was a self-fulfilling prophecy culminating from his fears.

Ultimately, we received an email that to avoid “discoloring our friendship” they decided to no longer follow through on their commitments. OK. It’s good to know this now, of course. But it got me thinking…

Over the years I’ve managed, hired, and engaged in long term business with hundreds of individuals. I certainly didn’t personally like everyone. As a naturally introverted type with finite time, I would not hang out with a most of them… We have mutually beneficial relationships and as long as we all stay true to our word, it works.

Instead of thinking a friendship is too valuable to harm by working together professionally, it seems to me like there’s a sort of converse. If you are not able to function amicably in a basic economic sense, why would you take the chances to trust each other with deeper and more fragile jewels, like emotions and trust?

In fact, many of my strongest personal relationships grew out of work relationships. Co-workers, customers, bosses, and other business associates. Upon closer inspection, it seems like a perfect setting to securely build social credit, actually. Maybe this is one of the greatest losses our society has incurred from forfeiting cottage industry…

I hereby declare we should all engage in business with one another as much as possible, in order to build wonderful friendships.