Should You Hire Your Friends?

 

What do you even expect when employing
your friends and family?

 

I have to be really honest with you guys.

I work with my friends.

I have a company, 20 plus women, and a lot of them are my friends.
I've hired a lot of my friends, okay?

It’s honestly a super fun time with the girls that I get to work with now, but that wasn’t always the case!

Somebody asked me one time,
"Have you ever had to fire any of your friends?

Yes.

So the question becomes, should you work with your friends?

From somebody who's done it and has done it a lot, I'm going to tell you exactly what to expect in this video so you can make up your own mind and decide whether or not you want to as well. And if you’re one of my reader boss babes, keep reading! It’s all laid out for you right here.

 

 

People say,

“Never hire friends.”

“Never hire family.”

I've done both.

It’s not easy, okay?

Some people say, "Oh, you should hire friends, because you know who they are. You can trust them," and then others say, "Eh, it's a gray area. It can get kind of murky and it can ruin relationships."

Both are true.

 

Your team is everything.

 

So let's chat about selecting that group of people and how it feels when they betray you. How do you come back from that kind of deep betrayal?

Sometimes I'm like, "How am I still smiling today after all of those memories?" You well-meaning business owners feel me on this?

There's a cognitive dissonance when you give and give and give, and then they turn around and give you back either the worst of the worst or the least of the least. Then there's this unrest within you because you were raised to believe that, hey, if you're good to people, they'll be good back! I'm 38 years old and I'm still learning to accept that sometimes that isn't the case.

Right now, I love the Sheila Bella family. I really, really do. We all love each other, but we've gone through some… crap.

Anyway, have I ever had to fire my friends?

Yeah, I've had to do that several times.

 

It's a risk-reward thing.

No risk, no reward, right?

 

I've had to do it a lot of times, and at first it's really hard and uncomfortable, but if you've been in business as long as I have (10 years. That’s crazy), I'll be honest with you, it kind of gets easier, unfortunately.

Nobody really knows what it's like to be in this position as the boss until they've actually been in it themselves. I don't care, you can read books on it, you can watch this video, you can read this blog, but until you yourself is in this position, you will never really know.

There have been a handful of times where I've had to let somebody go that I was either very close to or someone that I liked, or even worse, someone I was related to! A blood relation too, not like married into blood.

It's not fun having that kind of conversation with family and people you looked at as family.

I don't even want to say not fun.

 

It's really devastating and literally traumatic to have to do that.

 

I've had my own family steal from my business before, after I gave them a job.

 

I just think that if it's something like that, if something like that doesn't change you, then I don't know what will.

 

I've had people that I felt I was very good to start rumors about me that were untrue, and that level of betrayal really hurts. Even my closest friends, who've been a witness to all this stuff happen to me, say they can witness it, but no one will ever truly understand the weight and the toll it takes on your heart and in your mind, forever.

Sheila Bella Corp. isn't a one-woman show. The company has a lot of moving parts, and obviously, I can't do it all.

I still try, but I can't.

I value the people and the beautiful relationships that are within the umbrella of this company.

 

We have all have a common goal, right?

That's what makes it a family.

 

The people who work for me become family to me very quickly because they become an extension of my voice, and I become an extension of their voice in a way.

I've decided to trust them with my business baby—the personal brand that I poured everything into for years.

When you know you're good to people and you know it, hand to heart you know you are really good to them, and they don't return that sentiment, it really ***** with you.

You're like, "Dang it! I messed up now. You've messed me up."

When your output of kindness is incongruent to theirs it’s, like, in your bones confusing.

It's confusing, especially when it first happens to you. After a few rounds of it, you start to understand that people just show their true colors the minute they get either too comfortable or when they get uncomfortable. Not everybody can handle a difficult conversation.

You learn to get to know people slowly.

 

It's not until things get hard that you really know what people are made of. It kind of has to get unglamorous for it to be real.

 

When things are hard, people will reveal their pettiness. Unfortunately, people put their best foot forward, especially if money's on the line and a nice paycheck and they want a job.

You can make your best assessment in the beginning, but you never really know. You never really know.

I mean, what do you do? Is there no hope for us? No.

 

You just need to keep on going.

 

You keep going until you find the ones, and only time will tell.

They say that there's a new devil at every level. For those of you who are just starting out, maybe your problems are booking new clients, being known in the industry. But if you've been in the game for a while, your problem, when I talk to people who've been in the industry for a long time and who are kind of successful, their number one problem is typically their team. So yeah, there are problems at every level.

 

Honestly, if your team is your problem, it means you’re lucky enough to have gotten to this point.

 

My advice is that sometimes being in charge will require you to detach.

 

You have to learn to detach your emotions from the bigger picture, from the dream.

 

Just like a soldier at war on a mission, you've got to learn how to do hard things for the sake of the greater good. So detach.

But still, still, I would not trade working with my friends for the world.

To my core tribe who've been there from the very beginning, I love you more than I can express (and I'm not sucking up to you guys).

 

Finding your core team is hard work.

 

Not everyone is a perfect fit and that's okay, but you'll find people. You'll weed out the bad ones and you'll be left with a solid tribe that you know you can fully trust. But don't give up.

 

Don't you dare give up.

Keep trusting.

 

There are good people out there. I feel so blessed to have found such an awesome group of chicks.

It's all good, it's easy. We have fun, we get stuff done.