STAINGIRL ELLE: Kaye and I have known each other since our boys were in preschool over 13 years ago.  We have gone through long periods of time with little or no contact and other stretches where we see each other [...]]]>  

How Carefully Do You Have To Tread When You Go Into Business With a Friend?

STAINGIRL ELLE: Kaye and I have known each other since our boys were in preschool over 13 years ago.  We have gone through long periods of time with little or no contact and other stretches where we see each other more often.  We’ve exercised together – obviously, to those who know us, not enough!  We’ve done the supportive friend thing, but we’ve never been the Sex and the City type of friends who shared every facet of our lives constantly – nor did we have their Jimmy Choos.

And we’ve never been in business together.  We’ve never had to face certain issues before.  I want to get everything done now.  Kaye wants to research and cogitate.  How do we decide priorities?  What happens when two people in charge have different ideas on one matter?  How do you critique your friend’s work?  Yea, we just faced this one – Ouch!

Now that we finally got going, Kaye was inspired.  She had accomplished so much and she was anxious to blog about it.  She proudly emailed me about her fantastic post.  With great expectations, I excitedly clicked over to our blog to check it out.  Uh-oh, it fell somewhat flat with me. 

What was I going to do now?  How to tell her that I wanted the post pulled for a little retooling?  Was she going to feel hurt, disappointed, deflated?  Worse yet, would she regret working with me? 

I took the direct (and slightly bulldozerish approach), and Kaye took it like a champ.  We agreed that in future anything we posted would always be looked over by a second pair of eyes.

And as far as I know she doesn’t hate me.

STAINGIRL KAYE:  Not to worry, friend!  In fact, I’m impressed again at how kind you are, so worried about my feelings.  (Or did she just feel guilty because she thought it was really bad?  LOL!)  All the work everyone does in my office gets reviewed so I expect to have critiques.  I feel badly that Elle fretted so much over it.  But Elle is right, we need to review each other’s work.  And normally, I would probably have insisted on it given my meticulous nature, but I got a little hasty in trying to get the next post out, even though I knew ideally it could benefit from Elle’s review and influence.   My bad! 

Now…about our different pace preferences…that could get lively.