I like to do business on a handshake, and in fact, I consider personal trust to be a key pillar of any business relationship. This approach has its risks, and I’m often advised that I’m asking for trouble by forgoing contracts in favor of informal agreements. But in my experience the efficiencies and other benefits that come with trust-based arrangements far outweigh the risks of being ripped off.

Trust starts with your employees, and nothing is more important in a small business than a rock-solid bookkeeper and office manager. If you’re not willing to give someone the keys to the bank account, you’ll spend all kinds of time dealing with financial administration; and once you do give up control, it’s not easy to monitor things in a comprehensive way.

I’ve come to regard the person we have in this position as something of a saint. I trust her not only on the most obvious level—that she’s not going to steal—but also that she’ll keep me posted on the critical things but not burden me with things I don’t need to know or can’t do anything about. A lot of people in her position would, deliberately or not, exacerbate my anxiety about our sometimes-parlous finances. Terri is always calm and uncritical, and I know she has things under control.

But trust issues extend way beyond the money side of things. In the journalism business, you have to trust that your reporters and editors are doing their jobs honestly; despite the criticism heaped on editors at publications that have been victimized by journalistic fraud, the reality is it’s almost impossible to protect against well-planned hoaxing.

When I do business deals, be they routine advertising sales or more elaborate partnerships, we always have contracts. But I rarely worry about the fine print. Very few deals are worth enough money to get into a lawsuit over if they don’t work out, and thus the contract doesn’t provide any protection. Their real purpose is to be clear about what has been agreed; if I think someone is not going to do what they have agreed, I don’t want to be in business with them anyway.

Here’s another example: When we started NewWest, the domain name NewWest.com was owned by a furniture store in Wyoming, and the owner was not inclined to sell it. We worked out an informal arrangement where he would put a link to NewWest.Net on his site, and we would run advertising for his store. We checked in every now and again and had a few glitches with the link not appearing properly, but it was all friendly, and neither of us worried too much about the exact value of the trade.