When I met Helen for the first time, she had just parted company with Mia. In this first interview, Helen emphasised repeatedly her friendship with Mia and how their business separation was the best option available in order to save their relationship.
“It became inevitable that our friendship would be worth nothing if we didn’t sit down and say where we are going.” (Helen 1)
“Mia and I had parted ways and we had not fallen out. We had parted ways because, and it is Mia’s own words here, that I wear her out and she can’t keep up with me and she felt that she was letting me down and she was holding me back. So I bought her shares off her 1st April this year and she has gone off to do her own little thing because Mia hasn’t got my ambition and my drive and that doesn’t make her a bad person. It just makes her the way she is and our friendship would have been jeopardised if we had carried on working together. But we had some good years together.” (Helen 1)
Although the emboldened words above signal Helen’s unease with Mia, this feeling remained subtle in the first interview as she highlighted the importance of their friendship even if this was at the expense of the business performance.
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“Well the biggest thing I did and despite me liking her very much was to take Mia as a partner. That was a big mistake. I didn’t think it was at the beginning and it took me a couple of years to realise it. And another big mistake was to not tackle that head on because I didn’t want to hurt her, because I like her. So we ended up working together for four years and she worked in the business and she worked hard but she didn’t add anything to it she didn’t add any value to it. And I chickened out and I should have tackled it as I would in any other area but because I like her and care for her that was a mistake. Even though I still like her and we are still friends she just wasn’t the right person for me to be in business with, and I realise that now.”
(Helen 1)
In the second interview, I was surprised to hear that Mia’s departure was recounted as a scary experience for Helen. When I probed her, Helen gave me a totally different account about her relationship with Mia.
“Me: Could you please tell me more about this period? How did you first split? You said it was so scary and you were scared that the business was going to close down.
Helen: Well because when Mia left I didn’t know whether she’d try and poach the business away you see.
Me: But has she started her own business?
Helen: Yeah, yeah. Did I not tell you about the break up? No?” (Helen 2)
Mia was then portrayed as a sneaky enemy and no reference was made to their friendship.
In the interval between the two interviews, Helen suffered from numerous setbacks in her personal life as well as in her business due to Mia’s departure. These setbacks may account for why Helen attributed different meanings to her experience with Mia.
“The breakup with my business partner affected me more than I perhaps wanted to admit at the time. The six months after Mia and I split up was so difficult that I’d lost the fun out of it. Well because when Mia left I didn’t know whether she’d try and poach the business away you see. Well Mia went into business with one of our clients. They went off and set up their own business. Not doing HR, it was doing training for the care industry. Because this client has a care business where they put care workers into people’s homes. They set up a training school for care workers, thinking that loads of people would send their care workers to them to be trained. And I don’t know what’s happened but it folded after six months. Now I knew then that she would want to earn a living somehow, that she would come and try and poach
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some of my clients. So what I decided, I didn’t trust her after what happened and how she’d been sneaking behind my back. When she left, she said oh I don’t want to do the HR, because she hates HR you see. She likes training, where I like HR, so, she said I’m not gonna go after any of the clients but I didn’t believe her.” (Helen 2)
Taking this point further, Helen complained that she was stifled by Mia’s presence because she faced strong resistance from Mia every time she wanted to introduce a new idea into the market.
“So for instance when I was creating that product, what I needed to do was I needed to have other people’s input. The first thing I did was, I said to Mia what do you think about this? And straight away she said it won’t work I don’t want anything to do with it. And that is where we were like Ying and Yang really.” (Helen 1)
7.3.2 Helen constantly shifting between the role of an innovative