As you may have seen, this will be my last ever blog as MT’s Secret Diarist. I’ll be sorry to stop; I’ve loved doing this, and it has very rarely felt like a chore. But I figure that I’m probably running out of interesting things to say, and it’ll do you all good to get a different point of view.

In terms of external drama, I couldn’t really have asked for much more. I wrote my first blog way back in July 2008, back when Lehman Brothers was a respectable financial institution. Now, nearly three years later, meltdown may have been averted, but the doom and gloom precipitated by the events of that year still hasn’t quite dissipated. We’re out of recession, but not out of the woods.

When I first started doing this, I remember an entrepreneur friend was horrified by the whole anonymity thing. Her view was that it just wasn’t the done thing these days; that it’s all about openness and transparency now. I saw her point, but I didn’t agree with it. Writing this behind a veil of secrecy has allowed me to be far more open and transparent about my actual problems – which, I’m sure, are of far greater interest to most of you than my actual identity.

Looking back, I view these last three years as a bit of a mixed bag. Of course the main thing is that my business is still going – which isn’t the case for lots of businesses that were around back then. So for that I’m truly grateful. Better still, we’ve actually managed to grow both revenue and headcount every single year. Every now and then, I allow myself to feel a little glow of pride about that; it’s been a tough few years, but we’ve done our bit for the recovery.

On the other hand, the new business venture, in which I invested so much emotional energy, failed. I could give you a hundred different reasons as to why it failed, and many of these factors were entirely out of my control. Still, the fact remains that it failed. I don’t regret it for a second; my philosophy has always been that if you never fail, you’re not trying hard enough. And canning it was absolutely the right decision. But I have to admit, that has knocked my confidence a little. When your first business venture does well, you start believing a bit in your own brilliance; you feel like you can always bend the world to your will. This proved that I couldn’t. And that stings a bit.

(The publication of this final blog will coincide with Ace’s last day in the office, and somehow that seems kind of appropriate. It feels like the end of a chapter – and hopefully the start of a new one.)

More to the point, though, I’ve loved having the opportunity to talk about all the dramas of the last few years on here. Partly because it’s a chance to blow off steam – and in what can be quite a lonely job sometimes, that’s absolutely worth its weight in gold. But also because of all the fantastic advice and support I’ve received from you lot. I’ve been bowled over by how many of you have gone out of your way to try and help with my problems – given that you basically don’t know me from Adam (or possibly Eve). It makes me feel all mushy about the world. And often it’s been incredibly helpful practically too. So for everyone who has taken the time to write, thank you so much. Words can’t convey how much I appreciate it.

Anyway, so that’s it from me. I hope that you’ve occasionally found this diverting or even useful – if only in terms of working out what you absolutely shouldn’t be doing. Either way, thanks for reading.

P.S. Incidentally – speaking of things that I could only tell you anonymously – one final footnote… At the end of my final meeting with Ace yesterday, he asked me whether I wanted to go for a drink next week. I spent ages trying to work out what we’d possibly have to talk about so soon into his new job, before realising that he actually meant a drink drink. As one door closes, and all that…

Of course, there are all sorts of bad things about Ace leaving, what with him being my favourite employee and all that. But there are two really good things about it too (and I’m not just saying this in a desperate bid to look on the bright side, honest).

For a start, I don’t have to replace him. Much though (as discussed) I fancy myself as a bit of a recruiting whiz, one of the worst things about someone quitting is the thought of having to go out and find a replacement for them. Honestly, the thought makes my heart sink every time. Thankfully I get to delegate some of the more mundane and tedious bits of the process to someone else these days. But in terms of the time and resources it wastes, it’s always a hassle I could do without. Plus you might end up paying a premium to get someone else of the same calibre, even if it’s only a recruitment agency fee.

And the second key advantage is that we’re not at odds over notice periods. I don’t know about you, but I rarely seem to end up with a particularly satisfactory solution to this problem. In fact I’m not totally convinced there is one. Read More »

So it looks like Ace is off, sadly. A few of you have (very kindly) written to suggest I should bend over backwards to make sure he stays – perhaps by trying to find him a new role, or giving him a longer go at the current one until a suitable alternative presents itself. The thing is that although I’m sympathetic to this view in principle, I just didn’t feel I could justify it in practice. Paying him quite a lot of money to do not very much for a year might turn out to be a wise investment in the company’s future. But I figure that ‘not going bust because I run out of cash’ should be a fairly high priority for me too.

Yes he’s great. But neither of us have any confidence whatsoever that this new business idea will ever be a big winner. So on the grounds that I know this is the kind of operation he wants to run (i.e. something with a big potential upside) and that’s the best I have to offer at the moment, I can hardly blame him for going elsewhere. I did talk about restructuring his package so, for instance, he could work on it part time alongside other projects. But the other thing offers him much more certainty and security. And since he’s got a mortgage to pay (on his own, when it was originally supposed to be a joint thing), I can see why he thinks a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Nonetheless, our conversation on the subject – i.e. when he handed in his notice – was a bit farcical. He clearly expected me to be massively irate and hugely disappointed about the whole thing. So he was ridiculously sheepish, and launched into a five minute explanatory monologue of why he’d decided this was the best thing all round (i.e. him leaving) before I could even get a word in edgeways. Which is not an experience I’m used to.

I don’t blame him for thinking I’d react that way; to be honest, that is my standard response when I lose someone I don’t want to lose. But as discussed, I just didn’t really think I could reasonably ask him to stay – or offer any decent alternative to the status quo. So I didn’t even really bother arguing the toss.

However, the unfortunate consequence of this was that he just got horribly offended – presumably on the basis that if I wasn’t bending over backwards to try and keep him, I clearly wasn’t that bothered about him going. Whereas, ironically, the reverse was closer to the truth: if I didn’t think so highly of him, there’s no way I’d have been so obliging.

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, SD,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘I didn’t really expect this response.’

‘Really? Why not? I said, a little too defensively (I’m not great with direct criticism of my management style, in case you hadn’t noticed).

‘Well… It’s just that when you’ve lost other people like [at this point he named a couple of recent leavers he knows I liked] you’ve been quite… angry about it. Whereas in this case…’

It was only as he tailed off that I twigged what was going on – that my efforts to be selfless, mature and grown-up about this situation had actually left my star employee feeling massively undervalued.

I explained my take on the matter, of course, and I think I eventually assuaged his hurt feelings. But it did remind me, not for the first time: it’s bloody hard work this management lark. You can’t do right for doing wrong. Roll on the day when all I need is an army of robots.

As you may recall, for reasons that I would never admit to publicly, I’m not a massive fan of the whole flexible working thing. I appreciate the arguments in its favour vis-a-vis working women. But frankly, the downsides tend to outweigh the upsides. Or to put it another way, what’s in it for me?

The best argument I’ve heard so far is that it’s good for engagement: it makes staff feel more loyal to the company. The essence of this theory is that it’s not just the beneficiaries who feel more engaged – it’s everyone, because they realise just what a nice, kindly progressive employer you are.

The trouble is that one woman’s progressive is another’s over-obliging (‘Compromise is being someone else’s doormat’, as the saying goes). Naturally people tend to like being allowed to work exactly how they want. So they tend to be fairly appreciative when you let them. But invariably, it’s a bit of a pain in the proverbial to manage the whole process, especially when you’re a small company and it’s the exception rather than the norm. And yes, I know can you can turn it down if you can come up with a legitimate business reason for doing so – but that always seems to be much harder in practice than it sounds in theory (annoyingly, ‘because I can’t really be bothered’ apparently doesn’t fall within the bounds of legitimacy).

Anyway when you’ve agreed to this stuff, and bent over backwards to be accommodating to people’s inalienable right to do whatever is most convenient for them, a bit of extra engagement is the least you can hope for, in my opinion. In fact, I would argue that said individual should be so grateful for my niceness that I never hear a peep out of them again.

So all this considered, you can probably imagine my reaction when one of my people in this immensely fortunate position told me this week that they were going to leave. True, in the schema I outlined last week, this guy fell into the ‘liking but not loving’ category – so I’m annoyed by his belief he could do better elsewhere but not that fussed about him leaving per se. But my annoyance was magnified substantially by the fact that he had this very cushy flexible working arrangement – and far from being more engaged, it actually seems to be one of the reasons he’s leaving.

‘The thing is, SD,’ he said, ‘X [insert stupid big company with more money than sense here] is just a lot better set up to give me the kind of work/life balance I need.’

‘Well it seems to me that X may do it more regularly,’ I snottily replied, ‘but we’re actually far better set up because we can be more flexible about it. I bet they have a much more predefined template for flexible working, which probably won’t fit with your ideal in quite the way we’ve tried to do.’ And more to the point, stop being such an ungrateful b****r, I nearly said but didn’t.

Naturally this fell on deaf ears, because the guy had clearly already made his mind up – and, I suspect, when push came to shove, the prospect of a hefty pay rise outweighed the whole flexibility thing. Maybe I’m being unfair. But to me the moral of the story is that flexible working doesn’t really create higher levels of commitment at all, because these days, people see it as the least you can do for them.

So there’s only thing for it: I need to start dreaming up more legitimate business reasons for turning the requests down in the first place. Who wants to be progressive anyway?

Disaster: Ace has been offered another job. He hasn’t taken it yet, and he sounds as though he could still be convinced not to. But it does leave me skewered on the horns of a very awkward dilemma.

In some ways, the timing couldn’t be better. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to decide what to do about him, so you could argue that this makes up my mind for me, and gives both of us an easy way out. But to be honest, I don’t really see it like that. In my eyes, he’s one of the best employees I’ve got (if not the best). And on the basis that finding really really good people is incredibly hard, I really really don’t want to lose him.

When people tell me they’ve been offered a new job, I tend to react in one of three ways. If I don’t like them, and have been pushing them firmly towards the door, I’ll respond with barely concealed glee. If I like them a bit, but not that much, I’ll be a bit annoyed that they think can do better, but not lose too much sleep over it. If I really like them, though, I expend a considerable amount of time and energy trying to think of a way to keep them (which doesn’t usually involve offering them more money, because a) it sets a bad precedent and b) it doesn’t usually solve the underlying problem). And Ace definitely falls into that third category.

The trouble is, of course, that this is an unusual case – because actually, I don’t really have a job for him. I decided to test out my ‘good people can turn a mediocre idea into a good one’ theory, and set him to work on one of those business ideas we were kicking around. But if truth be told, it hasn’t really got anywhere yet. And I suspect Ace shares my scepticism about whether it ever will (although all the Easter disruption hasn’t helped, obviously).

For once – and this is unusual for me, I’ll be honest – I don’t blame him for looking at other options. After we decided to close the new venture, and there was nothing else obvious for him to move on to, he’d have been crazy not to. He isn’t the kind of guy who’d be happy to hang about picking up a pay cheque for not doing very much; apart from anything else, he’d be bored out of his mind within a month. I know what he’s like: he wants to be somewhere where he feels valued and can make a big impact, as opposed to hanging around like a faintly embarrassing bad smell.

And that brings us onto the other unprecedented aspect of this situation: I’m actually not sure whether I should be persuading him to stay. In fact, I think I might even feel guilty if I did. If even I don’t love this idea he’s working on – and I still don’t, despite my best efforts to convince myself – how can I, in all good conscience, ask him to give up a perfectly good job in a perfectly good company (for more money) to try and make it work?

The thing is, I actually think he might, if I pressed him hard enough. I really do. I’m just not sure it’s the right thing to do. In fact, I can’t help feeling that it’d be better if he took the other job – better for him, and better for the world as a whole. Quite where this sudden onset of moral fibre has come from, I couldn’t quite tell you. But it’s very annoying.

So the question I have for you all is: is it ever reasonable to keep the right person for the wrong reasons? Go on, give me an excuse…

I don’t know about you, but my April numbers were shocking. Shocking. Like, 35% down on last year. This is the thing with the double bank holiday – it doesn’t just write off those days, it largely writes off those in between, and in this case the bit before and immediately after too. It’s an absolute shocker for business (unless you run a clothes shop, a grocer, or a pub). If I actually knew who my MP was, I’d be tempted to write to him.

(Speaking of which, in case you’re interested, I voted no to AV – on the grounds that i favour benevolent tyranny as the optimum ruling model, and in the absence of that, I don’t want people getting democratic ideas above their station).

Long-time readers may recall that back in the old days I had a business partner, before it all went a bit pear-shaped between us (professionally and personally). Anyway I mention this because the two of us would react very differently to numbers like these. My immediate reaction was to panic slightly and start looking for underlying problems. He was more the type to stick his finger in the air, conclude ‘Yeah it feels like we’re going in the right direction’ and dismiss the numbers as an irrelevant and temporary aberration. As you can imagine, this used to drive me bananas. We used to have regular conversations along the following lines:

‘Why am I the only one who seems to care that we’re not making money? Do you realise that we only need another two months of that and we’ll have to start sacking people?’

‘Oh calm down, it’s just a one-off thing.’

‘But what if it isn’t? I think we need to do [insert decisive - albeit slightly kneejerk - reaction here].’

‘SD, it’s not worth wasting management time thinking about how to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, or one that will go away of its own accord.’

‘How do you know it’ll go away of its own accord? What if this [insert temporary phenomenon here] is just shrouding a deeper problem?’

‘Like what exactly?’

‘Well I don’t know, do I, that’s why we need to waste some management time on it.’ (accompanied by a sarcastic make-quotation-marks-with-your fingers thing).

And we’d go round in circles like this for a while, until he let me go off and do whatever I wanted to do, while he carried on with whatever he was doing before.

Now ordinarily when I relate this kind of conversation to you, dear reader, it’s to prove my general omniscience and impeccable judgement. But in this particular situation, I have to admit that he taught me a thing or two. Yes, you do need that element of never settling for mediocrity; of always looking to identify issues before they become problems. But I think a good entrepreneur also needs to be able to see past short-term worries and think about the bigger picture; to avoid being distracted by obsessing about the current project or sales target. You also need to focus on the things you can change and need to change, not stuff like bank holidays that (like it or not) you can’t do anything about.

In other words, I decided that the most sensible place to be is somewhere in between the two of us. So ever since I’ve been flying solo, I’ve tried to channel him every time I find myself in a situation like this. I still fret about it, and I still go over all the numbers with a fine tooth-comb to see if anything looks seriously amiss. But I try not to let it affect our direction of travel too much (if you’ll forgive me using that horrid management term).

That said – if Prince Harry ever gets married, he better do it at the weekend. Or I’m going to develop some seriously republican tendencies.

I had 11 whole days off over the Easter/BH/RW period, would you believe? Well, I say ‘off’… I more or less worked full days on the middle Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. But I was at least out of the office and in (semi-) holiday mode for the whole time, which must make it my longest continuous break since – well, since I started paying my own wages, I suppose.

Naturally, I agonised over it for ages in advance. It seemed obvious to me that UK plc would basically shut down for that middle week, and while that might seem like a good excuse for a holiday, my instinct was to do the exact opposite. As I’ve previously ranted, I hate the way the world grinds to a halt in the second half of December, and this was basically more of the same. What’s more, I figured that if I didn’t bother working it, it sent out a message to the rest of my staff that there wasn’t really much point them working it either – even the ones who were technically in the office. This is one of the main problems with running a business, I reckon – it’s virtually impossible to take a guilt-free holiday.

Eventually i decided that I was going to take it anyway. Partly on the ‘if you can’t beat em, join em’ principle. Partly on the grounds that one of my must trusted lieutenants was going to be in the office, so I knew the chances of lunchtime booze-ups and corridor cricket were pretty slim. But mainly because I really, really needed a holiday.

Every time I take a proper holiday, it reminds me that I really need to take more proper holidays. Just being out of London – the tube, the crowds, the Canadian tourists with their bags of Wills & Kate memorabilia – that was restful in itself. Throw in the chance to see the family, breathe some proper air and not actually think about work for a while, and it becomes an entirely blissful experience.

I’m no different to anyone else – and I’m guessing/ hoping this is true of most entrepreneurs – occasionally I get bored sick of this place and everyone in it. The fact that I’ve got a greater vested interest in its success doesn’t change that one iota. My attention span isn’t the longest at the best of times, and though there’s always something new for me to be worrying about, doing that same journey every day still gets monotonous, as does the unending relentless slog of the whole thing. So getting away for a bit and breaking up the routine is pretty crucial to keeping you sane, I think.

That, and wine.

My talent-spotting skills – or lack thereof – are quite top of mind for me at the moment, given all this stuff that’s going on with Ace.

As you may have gathered by now, I think I’m pretty good at recruitment. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s my key skill; I have a (possibly excessive) degree of confidence in my instincts about whether a certain person is suited to a certain role. But a chance meeting I had this week (with two people who have just started their own business) led me to ponder a related question: is it possible to judge quickly whether someone will make a good entrepreneur?

I asked an entrepreneur friend of mine this question the other day, and he had no doubt whatsoever. ‘Oh yeah, definitely’ he said. ‘Look at Dragons Den – it’s obvious within 30 seconds whether someone’s a natural entrepreneur or not. Besides, how many times have you met someone who you thought was a complete punter who turned to be a successful entrepreneur? You can always tell, SD. Or at least, entrepreneurs can. We can spot other entrepreneurs a million miles off.’ I approve of this theory in principle. But actually I think he’s talking nonsense. (And not just because any argument that starts with ‘Look at Dragons Den’ is bound to prove nothing whatsoever.)

For a start, there are so many different types of entrepreneurs. Some are natural salesmen, showmen, self-promoters. Others are technocrats who just understand an area better than anyone else. Others are just good recruiters and managers of other people who can do all the hard bits (the category I’d put myself into).

And that’s why it’s almost impossible to judge whether a entrepreneur you’ve just met will be successful. Maybe they seem to lack certain key skills – but some of these can be learned, and others can be provided by someone else. After all, if their business is going to thrive, they won’t be able to do it on their own. So it doesn’t necessarily matter if you have a weakness, as long as you can hire someone else to plug the gap.

Someone else suggested to me that even if you can’t always spot a good entrepreneur, you can always spot a bad one. And any Dragons Den fans will probably agree. But when I came to think about it, I’m not even sure that’s always true either. Because really, it all depends whether they have the self-awareness to recognise their own weaknesses and hire accordingly. (Though if they have no self-awareness whatsoever, they’re probably screwed).

The other thing you can’t see immediately is how they react when things cut up rough. To me, one of the key skills of an entrepreneur is reacting quickly and constructively when things go wrong. Sometimes people can seem incredibly impressive and confident when you meet them, or see them pitch – but when things go wrong, they just panic or their confidence disappears.

But having said all that… You know sometimes you meet people and they’re just really exciting – the kind of person you know will be able to convince a lot of people that she has a fantastic vision worth pursuing? That was what this woman was like this week. And since being an entrepreneur is a lot to do with inspiring people and taking them with you, she must have a better shot of making it than most. Now, if she can do recruitment too…

So, I’ve got a bit of a problem with Ace. It’s a few weeks now since we had our conversation about pulling the plug on his bit of the business; since then, he’s been busy winding it down and sorting a few other things out for me, while exploring some new business ideas. My theory was that one of these would be promising enough for me to let him spend a few months trying to make a go of it.

The trouble is, i don’t like any of them. Actually no, that’s not quite right; I like all of them a bit, or they wouldn’t be on my radar. But I don’t love any of them. Not love love. Not enough to convince myself that there’s an idea so strong that I’d be pursuing it anyway, as opposed to it being a transparent excuse to hang on to my favourite employee.

The thing is, though, I’m not totally sure that last bit necessarily matters. You see, my general philosophy is that business ideas are only as good as the person in charge of them. In other words, I’d much rather put my money on a great entrepreneur with a middling idea than a middling entrepreneur with a great idea. From talking to some of my friends at VCs, I know they tend to think along the same lines – back a management team, not an idea. Because so much of it is about the execution.

In other words, in this situation, you could argue that the fact this is Ace we’re talking about is a good reason for me to go with any idea that’s half decent, in the confidence that he’ll find some way of pulling it off. I mean it’s obviously no use if the idea’s a total dog – you can’t polish a turd, as my Grandad used to say. But I tend to think that if there’s anything there, Ace will find it.

There’s only one problem with this. Since I’ll be paying his wages through this process of discovery, I’m basically taking quite a big financial gamble on my assessment of his abilities. And since he’s currently 0 for 1 on the ‘building successful businesses for me’ front, you might argue that this is a pretty daft bet. There’s certainly nothing like having your own money at stake to make you start asking some serious questions about your own judgement.

So… Pick a decent idea and trust him to turn it into a great one? Or take the view that if an idea doesn’t sound like a great one now, it probably never will? Answers on a postcard…

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve been watching the launch of this Start Up Britain initiative with interest. I always found Business Link to be about as useful as a chocolate teapot, so the bar isn’t exactly very high. But the idea of a private sector but Government-promoted scheme, run by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, sounded quite appealing on the face of it.

But to be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed. I’ve seen quite a bit of criticism along the lines of it being a bit too reminiscent of a link farm, pushing people towards the businesses involved via spurious ‘offers’ that aren’t actually specific to the site at all. I can’t decide what to think about this. On the one hand, I don’t see what’s wrong with the site making money for entrepreneurs, especially if it does so by collating potentially useful links. But it does kind of detract from the ‘one for all and all for one’ vibe (the Dogtanian ethos, as people of a certain age may think of it).

But that wasn’t really why I was underwhelmed. There just wasn’t anything in there that made me think ‘ooh wow, that’ll be useful.’ Read More »