Today was one of those days where you just needed to get away and get some water time.. I went down to the boat and cleaned a bit and then got Patty and Jeff to go out with me.. we didn’t even go sailing just took the fishing poles and motored up and down the waterway for a few hours fishing. Not a single bite did we get but that wasn’t the point.. I can’t say how relaxing it was to just be out there floating on the water having left all the current crop of problems at the dock.
When we got back I closed the boat up and went to get a bite to eat at a new place in the new sporting complex in Little River. I had previously met two sisters that work there and they had invited me to check it out. I had just sat down to eat a quiet meal with them when one of my current crop of problems called me and then walked in and sat down at the table in the middle of my meal.
I have since september been involved in a business deal with a friend providing IT knowledge to him and building a website and other stuff for him. Never do business with friends!! It can lead to losing them as a friend.
As this company he has started has evolved and he has gotten some investors with money he had come to me three times and told me that he wasn’t willing to continue with the deal I had made with him and he was going to change it.
The first change was to bring one of the new partners brother in to work with me and also take half of what our original deal on compensation had been. I thought about it hard.. I wasn’t happy that he was doing this but there was still a great opportunity there and the brother did bring skills to the table that I didn’t have. I agreed to it.
Next a couple weeks later he came to me and was very unhappy with the progress on one of the projects we were working on, this after he had introduced changes and new people who were now responcible for some of it and not working on it. He then told me that he wasn’t going to give me or the brother any percentage at all that he just wanted to pay my hourly rate for work up front.
I was not happy but at this point and was starting to be concerend about the trend he was setting. I proposed that I would agree to the change but that I wanted to be paid for all the time I had spent re-searching IT solutions for him and implementing them up to that date. In all I had spent time working on this for him over a three month period. I was giving up all possiblity of a large payback on my gambling that the company would fly and that I would be compensated on the backend as the company succeded. He agreed to this and asked me to put a bill together and submit it to him. I did.. then the fur really started to fly. The partner doesn’t want to pay for anything that there isn’t some concrete result in existance that they are going to use and they have decided not to use just about everything done over the last three months. All the hard work I had done for him now irrelavant and we don’t want to pay for that. All the reasearch of products he asked me to do and the hours spent getting him to the choices he is making now is also now irrelevant to them. Though the ammount is small compared to the hours I have spent working on this stuff for him I have even paid out of my own pocket for work to be done that I didn’t have the skills to do. He asked me up front to do what I could and manage the doing of stuff I couldn’t do myself.
Sigh… im stressing out just thinking about this… It’s a combination of sadness at being treated like this by someone I considered a friend and then being pissed at being treated like this. I feel used. His stated expectation tonight was that all the time I spent working on different concepts for him that he wanted and asked me to do for him but that we ended up not using he shouldn’t have to compensate me for. He should only have to pay for an end result. Not all the work that went into trying his different ideas out and not liking them.. The funny thing is that the one he liked was one that I finally talked him and his partner into. Extremely simple and clean based off of Googles look. Not hard at all to implement. It only took 10 or 12 hours of wading through his other ideas and putting togeher examples of them for him to look at. Editing photos and logos he sent me to use, putting together different style layouts he asked for. All stuff that I up front told him I didn’t think would work but did because he asked it of me.
So I guess the question is .. is it reasonable for them to only pay for the results they decide they want or is it reasonable for me to ask for compensation for all the time I have spent implementing the different things that they have asked for but didn’t end up using?
Is it reasonable for me to ask for compensation for the time I spent finding and working on solutions that I ended up finding and hiring someone else to help me implement?
Other than about 20 % of the time involved all the hours were done under the assumption that I was going to get a percentage of revenue down the road as the company succeded. But that opportunity was taken away by him after I had done the majority of this work.
I’m tired and hurt and don’t really want to even think about this anymore.
Leave a Reply