Dating your client's employee?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t really get out much. I only work with 2 other people and one of them is related to me. When we actually work face-to-face with our clients (which is rarely), we usually only interact with crabby middle-aged dudes with families. The “office dating pool” is non-existent for me.

Anyway, I’m delighted that for the past year or so we’ve been working with a guy who’s my age and better yet we have some stuff in common. We sort of flirt over email but I am pretty gullible so he might just be trying to be nice so I move projects for his company to the top of my queue. I’ve been playing it cool so as not to get taken advantage of.

We’re meeting up for a work lunch next week, to discuss some work stuff. It’d be really awesome if he meant for this to be more than just a boring work lunch, as this sort of thing is highly unusual for my line of work. Maybe he wants to see me outside of work. w00t!

Anyway, I was pondering whether or not it’s cool in other companies to date your clients’ employees (where “client” = “the company that sends your company checks”).

I remember a little while back there was a thread about a Doper and his girlfriend from the client company, and some ensuing problems. But that was a little more hairy due to him leaving the company and specific agreements they didn’t abide by.

We’re just a tiny Web design firm. Our clients are pretty big, though. In our company since I’m co-owner it’s up to me whether or not I would want to date this dude (my partner thinks it’s amusing) and I am extremely good at separating business from pleasure. And, of course, with my luck it’s just nothing.

I was just wondering if anyone has any experience with dating a client’s employee, or dating a contractor you met while on the job. What are the pitfalls? Does it happen a lot?

2

If you were at a bigger company and not co-owner, it wouldn’t be wise for you to continue to handle that company’s projects. Management could assume you were giving his projects priority, underbilling, something along those lines.

In a big enough company, dating wouldn’t be a problem, they could just have you handle accounts A-C and give someone else D-F or whatnot. Think huge companies like IBM and American Express–the companies do business together, no doubt some people are dating or even married to people from the other company, but they’d avoid the conflict of two attached employees directly handling any business. With you being co-owner, assuming the other co-owner is cool with it, it sounds like you are completely free to set your own policy. If the other co-owner is opposed, I think it comes down to pistols at dawn.

Actually, if his company is big and he’s not the owner, and you were hypothetically dating, they’d probably want him not to be the one in charge of projects with your company. The idea being he might send you more business than necessary or tolerate lower quality or some other type of conflict of interest.

Hope it all works out for the best, whatever that might be.