There's a piece of advice handed out constantly to anyone starting a company, which is that you should build your business with people you already trust, and the easiest people to trust are your friends. It sounds warm and sensible, the business equivalent of marrying your childhood sweetheart. It is also, in my experience, one of the fastest ways to destroy a friendship and damage a business at the same time, roughly the way marrying your childhood sweetheart at nineteen tends to go. I think the advice has it backwards. You shouldn't turn friends into colleagues. You should turn colleagues into friends.

The trouble with starting from friendship is that friendship runs on rules business quietly breaks. Friends owe each other loyalty and patience indefinitely, no performance review attached, no probation period ever, even if they show up forty minutes late to your birthday with a bad excuse and no cake. Business runs on the opposite logic. Someone has to be able to say your idea is wrong, we need to kill this project, or worse, we need to let you go, and none of those sentences have ever appeared in a birthday card. The moment you owe someone unconditional loyalty as a friend, you lose the ability to hold them accountable as a colleague, and the moment you try anyway, you're suddenly the friend who brought a performance improvement plan to book club.

And when it goes wrong, and it often does, you don't just lose a business relationship, you lose the friendship too, because the two were never really separable once you tangled them together like two different coloured socks in the wash. Money changes the friendship, even when you're not talking about money. An ordinary disagreement suddenly carries the weight of who owns what, and it's hard to go back to casually texting memes once you've sat through a conversation about a "vesting schedule."

There's a subtler cost too, the one that shows up long before anything blows up. Working with close friends quietly discourages honesty. You don't want to bruise things, so you don't say the pitch deck is weak or the strategy's drifted toward a cliff edge, and everyone else at the table can feel exactly what isn't being said, the way you can feel a fart being held in at a dinner party. Founding teams full of old friends often end up with a blind spot right at the centre, among the people supposedly closest and least willing to say the obvious thing out loud.

None of this means work should be sterile and friendless, marching in each morning like it's a Soviet ball bearing factory. The point isn't to avoid closeness, it's to let it grow the right way round. You work alongside someone, watch how they handle pressure and the seventh boring Tuesday in a row, and build trust through actual shared effort rather than history you already had before either of you showed up. A friendship grown that way has already survived disagreement and honest feedback, a far better stress test than shared memories of primary school, and it tends to be sturdier than one imported from outside and asked to carry a business on its back too.

So don't go looking for your co founder in your closest friend from university, and definitely not because you already know their coffee order. Go looking for the right person for the job, someone whose judgment you respect under actual pressure, not just at the pub, and let the friendship arrive later, earned rather than assumed. Work with people you can be honest with. Become friends with the people you work with. Get the order right, and you give yourself a real shot at a business that works and a friendship that lasts, instead of one slowly poisoning the other while you both pretend not to notice.

I’ve been lucky enough to see this play out the right way round myself. Some of my realest friendships grew out of years of working alongside people first, arguments and deadlines and all, and now I get to sit over a glass of wine with them and talk, unreasonably happily, about work, which is either a wonderful friendship or a mild personality disorder, and I’ve decided not to look into it too closely. These friends just get it. They know exactly why I haven’t answered a WhatsApp in four days, because they haven’t answered theirs either. They’ll let me vent about a nightmare supplier or a client who’s changed their mind for the ninth time this week, and instead of glazing over, they lean in with a story that’s somehow worse.

There’s also a nice lightness to it that I didn’t expect. If a work friend goes out with a different group of mates and I’m not there, it doesn’t sting the way it might with an old friend. There’s no weird feeling, no mental tally of who invited who to what. We each have a whole life outside work that the other doesn’t need to be part of, and somehow that makes the friendship easier rather than smaller. It also just makes work more fun. Genuinely, properly fun, in a way that’s hard to fake and hard to get any other way.

The business takes over my life more than I’d like to admit, and it comes with a particular flavour of guilt, the kind reserved for missed birthdays and the friend you keep meaning to call back. Out of work friends deserve better than the distracted, half present version of me checking a phone under the table, and that guilt never fully goes away. But my in work friends don’t need the apology in the first place, because they’re living the same juggle. They’ve seen a bad week swallow a weekend up close, and instead of being hurt by the distraction, they just nod, carrying the same weight themselves. Some people simply already understand, and don’t make you say it out loud.

It was never a chore we shared. It was the thing that brought us together, and it’s still the thing we both love. That’s a rarer gift than people think, and it only comes from getting the order right. My work pals, you know who you are!

Jojo loves…

Molten Gemstone Baguette Hoop Earrings
Hoops so lightweight you forget you're wearing them, until someone asks where they're from.

Félicien Top
The kind of top I reach for when I want to look like I've made an effort without actually making one.

Raffia Cruiser Straw Boater Hat
This is going to become a permanent fixture on my head for our road trip around France this summer - car windows down, hair doing whatever it wants underneath.

Slingback Espadrille
Cinnamon suede, an espadrille sole - summer, basically, in shoe form.

Thank you so much for reading No Place Like Home. It genuinely means the world.

The book is out on 10th September and, if you were planning to buy a copy anyway, I’d be so grateful if you pre-ordered it.

Apparently (and this was news to me), pre-orders are a Very Big Deal in publishing. For a first-time author, they’re what tell publishers and bookshops, “This one’s worth getting behind.”

So if No Place Like Home was already on your list, ordering it now rather than later makes a far bigger difference than you might think.

Pre-order here

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for cheering me on. I don’t take any of it for granted.

Jojo x

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