- Your vendors, employees and contractors
need to be under contract.
Just like your clients specify performance terms with you,
you need to specify terms and relationship parameters
with vendors, employees and contractors.
For vendors, ensure the work they do for you
is properly scoped and pricing is clear for both parties.
At Thought Leaders, I had an attorney I worked with
for a long time.
I asked them to do some work for me
and when I got the deliverable back,
I was pleasantly surprised.
It was really comprehensive.
Then I get the bill.
I wasn't nearly as happy.
It was for $1,300.
I was expecting to pay two or $300.
When I got on the phone with them, it was clear.
We had a mismatch in expectations.
Because I had skipped the step of scoping the work
and putting a budget in place, we ended up with a problem.
After that point, all future work
that I was having done by any contractor or vendor,
was clearly spelled out.
You always want to hope that relationship
with contractors and employees go well.
Many times, they don't.
Protect yourself before there's an issue.
For employees, consider employment agreements
that spell out the terms of the relationship.
Things like compensation, termination, resignation
and competition rights should be as clear as possible.
If you don't define these parameters upfront,
it could be costly down the road.
Define non-compete and non-solicit rules clearly
for employees and contractors.
You don't want a former employee or contractor
walking away with your clients, your intellectual property
or hiring away your best employees.
Non-competes specify who they can or cannot pursue
as a customer, services they are or are not allowed to offer
and a timeframe for these restrictions.
Non-solicit rules say whether or not
they can hire members of your team
or even facilitate the recruiting of your team members.
Again, these terms should be spelled out
in your independent contractor agreement
or your employment agreement.
You might be tempted to skip setting up a contract initially
because it cost money to draw one up
and everyone's friends to begin with.
Don't fall into that trap.
It doesn't take much for a situation to take a bad turn.
If it does, you'll be glad you have a contract in place.
I had one situation where I brought on an instructor.
Everything was great.
I knew this person for a while.
But at one point in the relationship, things went sideways.
I was pretty unhappy with the work they were doing.
We needed to part ways.
The contract I had put in place
spelled everything out clearly
and ending the relationship was pretty painless.
You'll find that vast majority of the time,
you have business relationships with contractors
and employees that are issue-free and productive.
For the times that you have a bad situation,
some foresight and solid contracting
can make ending the ordeal quick and relatively painless.