Mistakes when selling to friends, family or people you know

Posted on May 7, 2006

The risks of not doing a clear contract

My business is developed to serve people I know. It’s natural that running a business as a part time job will somehow make more difficult to approach customers that you don’t know - because it would be difficult to make them understand the special work hours you are doing or even it might be harder to actually reach them. So, I’m selling mostly to people I know, or people my friends or coworkers know (and this makes networking really important).

But the again, I should probably say something about the risks involved when selling to people you know. Basically you will pt yourself into a position in which you can’t say NO. I’m doing this mistake over and over again, and this is bad for the business, for your spare time and for yourself. One of the following things happen:

  • You don’t make a clear contract for the job and this leaves space to interpretations and excessive demands from the customer (and this is where everything starts actually
  • You do things you wouldn’t normally do for a regular customer, like keeping a very low price or even worse, not updating the price when the costs are higher
  • You’ll take every mistake or failure personally
  • Bad situations don’t affect only your business but also affect your personal relationship or friendship to people
  • You will spend a lot of extra hours trying to make things better, and this will prevent you from doing a better business to people you have never met
  • You will not be able to tell your friend customer that he did mistakes (like for example keep changing the work specs) and that why things are not as they should be

I bet many of you will say that “we are always making a very clear contract to our customers even if they are our friends”. But, can you really tell them that “this feature was not meant from the beginning and now we should charge you more if you want it”?

Hm, remember my older post about my first client coming back for a second job? Now I’m paying it with blood! Changes don’t stop, features change, everything is a mess. Just because I can’t say NO to people I know.

I did that before, and I’m sure I’ll doit again. And that’s bad for the business and myself.

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