A fellow university mate connected with me on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know him. But he introduced himself, explained why he wanted to connect (cause we’re from the same uni), what he does and many more. Fortunately to my father, who is currently looking for a business partner for his new business , this guy is currently working in one of the companies that my dad was interested in. So naturally, when I told him about it, he’d want me to set up a meeting with this guy immediately.
But instead of setting up a meeting with him himself, my dad told me to do it instead. For context, I have a degree in Business Management but since I’m pursuing performing arts as my career I have absolute 0 experience in this field. Yikes. So naturally, with my background, and as a person with social anxiety, this is very very scary.
Here are the things that I ended up lying about:
1. I was asked about how many services have we provided so far, and I said 8 instead of the actual number 3. I think the reason why I said it was cause I thought 3 sounded bad. My dad’s company is still very new so I dont even know if we could actually completed 8 requests in just 3 months so wtf.. Now this dude thinks we’re a really great company and would like to see the deets .. but like.. what deets
2. He asked about the “director’s background”, and in my dad’s company, him and his cousin are the bosses. What my anxious ass ended up doing was introducing my dad’s cousin using my dad’s background. I have no idea why I did that. I just panicked I guess. It was already too late when I realized what I did. So what I ended up doing as a “fix”, I told them both directors have similar experiences… when they don’t…..
Now since we sounded so good, he’d like to set up more meetings with the directors and I’m screwed.
a) how do I tell my dad that I just lied about something so stupid. My dad is generally an honest person so this isn’t something he’ll be happy to hear about
b) do you think it’s a good idea for me to just tell my dad and his cousin to just go with my story…. ….
Yeah.. I don’t ever wanna do this again haha
4 comments
Oh shit… When it involves other people is when it gets messy… I’d tell the whole story to your father first. He’s the main person interested in it. And it’s kinda his fault for asking you to do the meeting for him in the first place. Just be honest and tell you panicked and that that’s exactly the reason why you didn’t pursue that career in the first place lol
Talk to him and you’ll figure things out together. Since he’s the main person interested he should be the one making the decisions from now on on how to deal with this.
Don’t put yourself down so much, though, ok? Shit like this happens lol and it’ll all work out in the end.
Kill the deal, admit to the person you exaggerated everything and if the want to speak again about the real status of the company you would be willing to do so or ignore this person going forward, you don’t want to be partnering up with somebody through lies it can lead to lawsuits
Well, if you started bullshitting. You have few options:
1) Admit you have lied 🤥 and fuck up any relationships with a business partner.
2) Go with the flow and organize the meeting with your dad and cousin.
What I will do, I will try to go with the flow.
Meet again.
Usually, work meetings without summaries are quite vague. Your counterpart may not even remember who exactly you have introduced. So I will not care about this much. Each person can do own introductions in the next meeting. And even if somebody asks, you can say, you messed up with background, sorry (but now we have an opportunity to know each other better).
As for number of projects.
I will turn it out this way, say you have an experience and want to show the last three “best” projects you have done. And make a good presentation with three projects, your solutions and why those are good. Just do not mention “eight projects” anywhere (you may include there some old projects you have not done in the company with dad, just throw anything you have, remotely relatable). Do not concentrate on thing you have lied about, focus on your value and see how it goes. I will not turn in other people into the lies, because it becomes much more elaborate and sounds like a scam.
Fake it till you make it, basically.
If your university interests are performing arts (acting?) and business, look, both are about lying. And look at you, you did lie, only not on purpose.
Get better at lying on purpose and you’ll be a better actor and businesswoman.