AIBU to expect a party invite for DS?

[Blueskiesarenice]

My DS has a best friend, they’ve been best friends for approx 4 years, in the same class at school and always having play dates, sleepovers etc.

Due to their friendship, his mum and I have became friends and just over a year ago she came to work for my business. Shortly after she joined I went on maternity leave. She took on a senior role with the view of running / growing the business whilst I was away.

Towards the end of my maternity leave it became clear things weren’t going well at work. I was told the business would make a loss next year if nothing changed. The senior team proposed a restructure and a number of redundancies. My friend was part of these discussions and knew her job was at risk.

Though I’ve not been at work when things went downhill and I wasn’t responsible for the restructure, I did approve it as it seemed the only option for the business and therefore my friend was made redundant.

She has taken this very badly, even her husband has sent me horrible messages.

But what’s shocked me most of all, is her son told my DS at school that he’s not allowed to have a play date with my DS ever again and he’s not allowed to have my DS to his birthday party. Both her son and my DS ended up crying about this in school.

Turns out my ‘friend’ has already invited all the kids in the class to her son’s birthday party and excluded my DS. My DS is heartbroken. Sounds like hers is too.

What do I do? AIBU to expect her to invite my DS to the birthday party?!

I thought we could sort this out without involving the kids. I get that she’s upset about the job but I don’t feel I had any choice and I don’t believe it’s my fault.

It can’t be having that much of an impact if she’s managed to finance a whole class birthday party!

Op you're quite ignorant here as to even why she would be so upset. You have a job she doesn't, it's as simple as that. How can you expect to go to her house and act all smiley knowing you caused her financial situation. Get over yourself really. I wouldn't want to do much with your family either.

Op should never have mixed up her sons friendship with her business. Pretty stupid in fact.

They can’t be struggling that badly if they can afford a whole class party. You both sound like people I wouldn’t want to be friends with though. Let it go. She doesn’t want to be friends and she wants to punish you for the redundancy. You were silly to hire her in the first place

She presumably left a job to work for you, the business went south (and your decisions play the biggest part in that) and now she has no job. She is never going to be happy about that.

When you say two promotions and two new directors, which do you consider her to be? And are the others (especially the new ones) also family or friends of yours?

Like many I didn’t initially understand why the OP paid £250,000 for a one year maternity leave. But the more she explained the more I understood. After working so hard for so long, I think it wasn’t just about taking maternity leave. It was about needing a complete break from the business, perhaps for the sake of good mental health.

She has been advised by someone or various people she respects that this is the solution. This £250,000 is not just to pay salaries, it’s an investment. The management team will grow the business so she’ll eventually get her investment back and more.

I think it was an obviously risky to employ her friend but we never hear about the situations where employing a friend is a great decision, only the horror stories when it doesn’t.

So I can understand why she did what she did. Her only mistake was not realising that nobody will have the passion for her business that she does, and that passion is probably what makes the difference.

I can't really understand why you felt able to completely leave the running of your business to others, even if you had complete faith in them. No one else cares / understands quite the way the owner does imo.

But I also don't get why you can't see that this situation is very difficult, awkward and embarrassing for your friend. Having a friendship and not just a working/business relationship puts it in a different category for her. Reason and rationality don't come into it, feelings trump those.

Yes she probably is aware that it is unfair to take it out on your son, but unfortunately wants nothing to do with your family, as that's easier for her.

Seems fishy that the new senior team would vote to just keep one of them. You are naive to believe this. There is something else going on.

It’s also risky to invest in and effectively expand your business significantly at the same time as stepping right back out of the picture. Much better, if wanting to take a step back, would be to do it at a time when you were available and could do a controlled, staged retreat.

With hindsight, as they were covering maternity leave, and OP knew she wanted to withdraw entirely, it would have been much less risky to take on the two new staff on a temporary basis and employ them permanently if it worked.

Perhaps OP felt she could get better people if the positions appeared to be permanent. A risky strategy; it didn’t pay off.

You keep saying you planned it for seven years, but you really can’t have planned it very well. You know the sign of a good manager / business owner is that things continue to run properly when they do step away. You appear to have not put the right systems, processes and people in place. You also seem to be blaming others a lot. You could have had your maternity leave and still checked the accounts once a month. Admittedly I am an accountant, but I could have spent five minutes per month looking at the accounts and would have spotted the issue a long time ago. How I don’t understand why a business owner would not do this. It is like saying you never checked your bank account because you wanted to enjoy your baby.

Anyway, to your question. No of course you cannot expect a party invitation, that would involve you going to their house for drop off and pick up and they don’t want to see you, understandably so. The boys can be friends in school, not outside, not until they are older anyway.

Did she leave a well paid, secure job to come and work for you, OP?

It’s wrong of her to take it out on the kids but I don’t see how play dates etc. can do to use when you’ve fallen out? That wouldn’t be fun for anyone.

This thread is like the landlord-tenant threads. There are many tenants who can never put themselves in a landlord’s shoes. Frankly, they are not interested in seeing things from the point of view of the evil landlord.

Here you have employees who will never see the ‘boss class’ as anything other than exploitative and mercenary. The are conducting pointless post-mortems, some of them quite laughable.

The idea that this woman was exploited! More likely promoted above her capabilities to be the OP’s eyes and ears and proceeds, with the rest of the management team, to lose control of the business.

You don’t have to be too intelligent to work out that a smallish loss-making business cannot continue to have such a large management team. If the team is not slimmed down then before long everyone will lose their jobs.

I don’t expect her friend to take it well. I don’t expect her to be mature with respect to the boys’ friendship but I do expect her to ultimately realise that OP has little choice going forwards.

And I expect impartial observers on the internet to see this more easily than the friend.

I think it was wrong of her to leave your DS out of a whole class party, that’s pretty awful tbh. It’s not the DC’s fault.

She probably feels like you sold her a pup, an amazing career opportunity, which no matter what she did turned into a nightmare. If she also gave up a god job with security to come to you, I can understand why she's angry.
You on the other hand seem to think she is responsible for running your business into a ditch and as such should be contrite. Can you really not see why she is so mad?

I genuinely cannot understand how anyone is against OP.

Anyone with a business background must know how common this is. Also, this is a standard restructure.

OP’s friend lost her job, yes, that sucks. But if the business collapsed she’d have also lost her job? Would she have been happier because OP went down too? You can’t confuse business and pleasure. Even if the friend is upset with OP, putting it on the children is the clearest sign of being a bad parent. This will affect her child. He will remember it. The impact of these things on childhood trauma is immense. Stupid people should stop having children.

OP well done on taking maternity leave. Sorry that people on here are being so damn right ridiculous, short sighted and obtuse.

She is being a horrible cow by putting the kids in the middle.

Disclaimer - coming at this with a totally unbusinessy background

But, is there any chance she cocked up somewhere, causing the business issues, and is now behaving like this (plus being off sick etc) because she's embarrassed?

I suspect she’s actually avoiding you because she feels guilty that she sunk your business, and hasn’t been honest with her husband about what actually happened and now she’s backed herself into a corner, the only way out is no contact between the families.

Something doesn’t sound right here, OP. Do you know exactly why the business income dropped this year? Is it the fault of the SLT, or other market factors? Has the team incurred extra costs in running the business?

Your friend/employee’s behaviour is extreme. Why didn’t she attend the meeting when SLT told you about the issues? Are SLT trying to cover up fraud? Why would they be proposing their own redundancies?

You need to investigate further.

Agree

She's one in a team of 4. She personally hasn't done anything.

This

Also, redundancies happen all the time sadly. It’s the nature of business and while it can be very hurtful, behaving unprofessionally like she is isn’t exactly likely to get you a glowing reference either.

Lesson learnt - never employ a friend or someone you know.

To attempt to destroy her DS’ friendship is a shitty, controlling and immature thing to do. Encourage your DS to widen his friendship group.

Unfortunately you went a bit mad, splashing out on a big new leadership team would have been a risk even if you were still there. Then you went totally no contact, why couldn't you pop into board meetings monthly? It's your business and livelihood, I didn't just walk away from mine for a year maternity, I planned for the drop in income then dotted in and out to keep it moving. There is a middle ground, it is not 80 hours or zero! It's crazy, and I really hope you've learned a lot from the so you can work to rebuild the business on more stable foundations. Those saying it's fraud, that's a leap for drop in income, more likely incompetence of a new team having fun sitting around and clients feeling abandoned - all of which would have been solved by a day each month of OP checking in.

It's hard to know if the friend should have any responsibility, depending on her role and skills. She is clearly distraught however, and I'm wondering if you ever messaged just to ask if she's ok? It's understandable that she wants a bit of distance for a while, just encourage your DS that the boys can hang out at school and focus on other friends outside. I'd be explaining it's not about him, but she's quite fairly upset due to work ending at your company, so will do something else fun that day instead.

It's not fair to bring in the kids, but she has. Life is not fair!!

I think you probably need to draw a line and move on. Business and pleasure/leisure rarely mix. Lesson learnt.