Brian Zafron: I Eat Web 2.0 for Breakfast

Finding a business partner, temporary or permanent, is like taking home a girl from a bar. Certainly, she might seem attractive from a distance, and perhaps the chemistry is flowing, as well, but what happens when one thing leads to the next and you purchase your non-refundable ticket to Funky Town: what are the chances, you will need to ask yourself, that this girl has an STD?

The majority of my experience with freelancing, apart from my undergraduate journalism days at Northwestern, has come from the client standpoint. In this experience, I have endured a handful of nightmarish relationships that, in hindsight, should have ended at the bar, or certainly in the taxi ride back to my apartment. The following is a favorite/least favorite example.

My old company - which I founded sophomore year and sold shortly after graduation - had begun a project through a large outsourcing site and selected a very active freelancer with verified credentials. We drew up a contract and put all project money into escrow – to alleviate any potential concerns about receiving payment.

Despite our accommodation, the freelancer asked for more money before the project had demonstrated any meaningful headway. A mountain of problems soon amassed - which I won’t delve into because I might summon up dormant rage and end up strangling an adorable and innocent puppy – and even after we placed several additional thousand dollars into escrow, the freelancer refused to finish the project.

At this point, we attempted to backup any completed work - to ensure the freelancer wouldn’t take the money and leave us with nothing but a punch in the balls. But in the end, the punch landed on both our balls and our wallets: we soon discovered that there was a decoy connection script that was pointed at our databases (the MySQL queries were all being pulled from their servers) and that the freelancer created a malicious script with the sole purpose of destroying the rest of the files (executed remotely, of course). We ostensibly threw $8,000 down the drain and on a personal level, I aged about ten years in the span of two months. That’s faster than dog years, my friends.

In today’s world of interconnectivity, outsourcing is only becoming more popular. And naturally, everyone, whether they reside on the client or service end of the spectrum, is bound to run into someone who takes their trust and spreads Vegemite and raccoon poop all over it. However, I firmly believe, and my overarching experience supports, that most people are not seeking selfish, short-term gains. Most people strive to create cathartic working relationships that will transition from one project to the next, picking up a solid reputation and a slew of referrals in the process.

But - and this is a medium to medium/large butt - the risk of encountering the bad apple is very real. And, with this risk constantly looming in the background, it’s important to take whatever precautions possible.

First and foremost, you need to pay careful attention to how the other party responds to initial contractual negotiations. If you give them an inch, and right from the start they try to take a mile, then you’re probably entering into a problematic working relationship. Test the waters very cautiously, in other words, before you take off your clothes and dive into the pool.

Neither freelancers nor clients should tolerate adversarial relationships. Believe me: it’s dangerous to cater to people who neither initiate nor reciprocate efforts to build genuine trust. Along these lines, I ask: isn’t it great when someone, perhaps a friend, perhaps not, performs an unsolicited act of kindness for you? And don’t you, as the recipient, possess an urge to return the favor? If you answered no to either of these questions, then please quietly get up from your seat and exit at the back of the room.

Certainly, sometimes taking a blind chance on another person will pay dividends for current and future projects, but if you remain “blind” for too long, you’re playing with fire. Or, to return to this article’s initial analogy, you’re playing with a girl with some potentially nasty STDs.

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