When Business & Pleasure Collide

When we first started 3DPixel Ltd. we naturally had to ingratiate ourselves with everyone we could think of in order to generate business. This is how every business has to scrape at first to stay afloat. Anything and everything.

Forums are created, IRC channels are made, phone calls are made, less-than-perfect business is taken on. Naturally, being of that nature, your relationship with people gets personal as well as professional, if only from existing friends taking on business you offer. 99% of the time this works out fine, but what happens if say, the personal relationship turns sour? Could be anything. A falling out, a clash of ideals, simply growing apart. The worry for myself then is that person will hold a grudge against the business because of a personal matter as they are so ingrained with eachother from that early stage. A lot of damage can be done when it’s nothing to do with the professional aspect of the business. I am not generalising here, I have genuinely felt this will happen and have had to dance around to prevent it doing so.

Many will say don’t mix business and pleasure. I wholeheartedly agree, now. When however, when you are (or were, I should say, 5 years soon!) a young business in desperate need of new business; You try it.

I myself spent most of 2007 distancing myself from people I once was talking to all day every day. One event made me realise this ‘pally situation’ could not continue. I was talking to my friends, some of who had accounts with us, in IRC and the network we operate went down for 23 seconds (as part of some maintenance from our upstream providers). I was hounded, I mean literally hounded with cries of derision and annoyance that would not normally be aired if they had to log into our website, and log a support request. In a sentence, we were too available in my mind.

I only post this now as I feel finally that situation has been attained. It’s sad for me as I’ve lost a lot of friends in the process just by simply drifting out of contact. Our business is now more… I want to say stand-offish but I don’t mean that, I mean more professional. We don’t know our customers as friends, we help them as well as we ever did but there is never the risk of anything but professional differences getting in the way of business (bad enough of course). Less complications and less risk of emotional contamination.