Don't Hire Your Friends

This topic hit me spontaneously at midnight Nigerian time. Something was howling outside in the dark. I thought — I'm going to write about this.

I have a fairly strong social network. I'm not speaking theoretically. I've been on both sides of this particular wall — hired through friendship, and then doing the hiring through friendship myself.

Back in the day I genuinely thought: doing business with friends is the ultimate setup. Years later, scrolling through entrepreneur content on YouTube, I kept finding guys with puffed-up egos and furrowed brows saying completely opposite things. One, slightly breathless: business only works with people you truly trust — meaning friends. Another practically spitting: that's naive and childish. A third: it's amateur thinking, go it alone, let nobody close.

All three completely convinced they had the formula.

I want to share my own perspective. Fair warning: there is no formula at the end of this.

Early in my career, as a student, I met a girl at a bar — the wife of my future boss. She took to me immediately. Wanted to be friends, took me everywhere, was fascinated. I was a frightened girl who needed money and didn't quite know what to do with the attention.

I was working as a singer in bars at the time. Her husband was the director of one of them. She loved my voice. Everything felt like a good story — until he offered me a job at the Deribasovskaya market in Odessa. It had just opened. This was a very, very long time ago.

Of course I said yes. Money. Night shifts. University in the morning. It all fit. Friends would come hang out at my workplace, we'd have our fun, I was managing well. But every time the couple came together — her and him, my friend and my boss arriving in the same body — something shifted in the air. I felt the hierarchy. I couldn't speak freely. Not because they were heavy-handed — both had easy natures. It was just the awareness: who works here, and who's checking.

That was the first uncomfortable moment.

Later the pendulum swung. I became the one giving a friend a job. I didn't like that either — for a completely different reason.

Because you can't guarantee your clients the level of service your friend will actually deliver. And I am genuinely obsessive about this. Standards. Quality. Guarantees. When a stranger you've hired underperforms, it's a professional conversation. When your friend underperforms, it's something else entirely — something that eats at you from both sides at once.

Back then I was too reckless and too young to fully see it. I was focused on other things.

Today, years later, I'm not in contact with either of those people.

Sit with that for a moment.

And here — I understand — is where you're expecting a conclusion. Neat. Instructive. Ideally with a numbered list.

Sorry.

There isn't one.

Because flattening everyone into a single formula is complete nonsense. I know people who do business entirely alone (that's me, hello). I know people who build extraordinary things with friends and it genuinely works. People who operate only through hierarchy, no closeness — and they're successful. But I also know the others: people who crashed in friendship and business simultaneously. People who built vertically and had entire teams walk out, finding themselves in a very dark place. People who wanted to go it alone and couldn't hold.

Any of us can crash. In any configuration. With a friend, without a friend, from above, from below, sideways.

The only question is — can you take the hit?

As Bilbo said: hold the line, mate. (I know. Bilbo didn't say that. But it sounds right, so it stays.)

Business is part of life. And life delivers surprises — not only bad ones, for what it's worth. I'm saying this from personal experience at midnight in Nigeria.

Let's start seeing all of this as an interesting project with many variables — not as a plan for hacking reality. You can't hack reality. But you can get completely absorbed in the process. That's not nothing.