Marriage After The First Date?
So you’ve met someone for the first time and you quite like them, then they thrust a marriage proposal on you before you’ve got through your first three units of alcohol.
Can you really make a decision so quickly based on a few hurried facts learned from the internet and a brief discussion about your entire history?
It takes time to get to know someone enough to assess the likelihood of a long-term relationship. And the same goes for building a working partnership with your service providers.
Public relations and the general art of helping build personalities for a business can take time. It is unlikely either the provider or the client will know enough about the other to do them full justice in the initial stages. But so often there is pressure placed on either side to prove their worth within a couple of months.
In today’s fast movement world it is easy to want quick results and then expect those results to last a lifetime.
But it isn’t usually as easy as that. Building a good business is no different to building a house. Get the foundations strong and the rest will develop quickly and with a view to lasting a lifetime.
It is often said by those who have experience them, that the best marriages are the long and loving ones.
If you want to adopt the Elizabeth Taylor approach to contracts with your suppliers it is interesting to note that of the eight husbands she had, she often referred to just one as the best - Richard Burton - claiming that all other men were ‘really just company’.
If you want more than just company from your business relationships, get to know who you are working with and give them a chance to show what they can do in a reasonable timescale.
At that point you can progress from the holding hands stage to something much more interesting.
