Okay, let me qualify that headline. Don't hire your friends for tasks they don't do professionally or as a business. Regularly, I'm a big advocate of hiring your friends, but not if they're not qualified.
I know this seems like common sense, but when people start a business, they often try to cut costs by hiring people who will do it for less or as a favor instead of paying higher fees for a professional. But what often happens is that you end up with bad results and have to hire a real professional to fix things. And then you've paid twice. Here are some examples from real life...sort of.
The Edible Logo Logos are an interesting thing. Everyone thinks it's easy to create one. But the truth is, it's not. At least not if you want a good one. There are a lot of things you need to consider. Case in point: A client of ours wanted us to create some stationery using a logo created by his 11 year old daughter. 'Said it would break her heart if we didn't use it. Anyway, the pre-teen designer used crayons and macaroni shells which made it almost impossible to scan. But scan it we did, but because it was multicolored, it looked really bad printed in black and white for his invoices, and was practically unreadable when printed on his business cards. It didn't look too bad on the side of his delivery truck but the macaroni shells kept getting soggy in the rain. In the end, we had to dump the logo and create a new one because Prego was threatening trademark infringement. Thank God. Since then, we've instituted a policy that only WE get to design the logos on branding projects.
The Website That Almost Never Was Building a website is one of the more complicated thing you can contract for. A client came to us after they went to a guy someone knew who could do it for cheap because he had a full-time job and just did this on the side. But because the guy only designed websites and never actually "planned" or "managed" a website project, the whole thing took several months and endless revisions. When the designer realized he was putting in more hours than he had budgeted for and was now practically working for free, he became really resentful causing him to eventually lose his insecure girlfriend. What she had to do with any of this, I don't know. But the point is, he wasn't happy, the client wasn't happy and by the time we got involved, the designer was in therapy and in debt, the client was suing the designer and had realized that the product he wanted to sell on his website was now obsolete (Leather accessories for Palm TREOs, remember those?), and the girlfriend was dating Eliot Spitzer. I admit this is an extreme case.
The Unprintable Publication One client, a disgraced former NY governor who shall remain nameless, wanted to save money by having us design the cover for his tell-all book and simply use the MircoSoft Word document he had laid out himself for the inside pages. Well, let me tell you something we learned about MSW files that week. Traditional offset printers don't know what the hell to do with them! They can take QuarkXpress files, inDesign files, PDFs even Illustrator EPS'. But give them an MSW file and all hell breaks looks! Fonts don't translate well from PC to Mac or vice versa, text shifts, page numbers go all out of wack and the pictures wouldn't stay on the centerfold. So remember, don't use MicroSoft Word to do pre-press page design. Okay, maybe I've embellished a little on the facts, but the lesson is true. Use professionals (like us) for your communications materials, graphic design and marketing needs. It's usually easier (and cheaper) to do it right the first time, than to have to explain to your wife why the FBI is asking her for receipts. Well, you get the picture.