The Real Deal

A quick trip to the surface between projects to let you all know that I’m still here.

It’s over a year now since I started writing a reasonably regular blog. It turns out that producing engaging and content roughly weekly, is, in fact, a job. Who knew?

Now, I could write every blog as a piece promoting my general genius and infallibly. Where’s the fun in that though? If I’ve learned anything over the past 32 years, it’s that I’m neither a genius or infallible. I am what I am, the owner of a relatively small company and that shapes my view of the world. I can’t see it the same way as you do and the opposite is also the case. We can empathise with each other, but we can never truly experience each other’s reality. Probably for the best.

So today I’m going to essay on the nature of reality and the nature of business reality as I see it is that explaining it and defining it is like nailing jelly to the ceiling.

You see, in my personal business experience, cash flow, money in the bank and profits are everything, but even a cursory glance at the business press shows that some huge businesses with brands familiar to as yet otherwise uncontacted Amazonian tribes don’t make very much money and still less a profit. In essence, the Business 101 principles thrashed into me by every accountant I’ve ever had don’t seem to apply universally.

What this means is that some people’s business opinions seem to me to come from another reality because their reality is, in reality, utterly alien to mine. The experience of running a sizeable well-capitalised company is entirely different from running a small service company that fundamentally only eats what it can kill.

The bigger your business, the easier it is to find and work with specialist service providers from banks to recruitment companies and the sweeter the financial deal will those providers will be.

I spent years trying to find IT support from a provider who took me seriously. Has Dicky Branson ever lost half a day of business at Virgin because Virgin Broadband just randomly stopped working? Does the Bearded Guru have to wait 15 minutes on the phone only to be told that he hasn’t passed security and that he’ll have to reset his password with the instructions that they’ll post out within five working days? I suspect not.

Dear Dicky can guff on about how lovely all his people are and how well he looks after them because he hasn’t lost a morning trying to persuade the bank to allow him to withdraw his own Euros from his own frikkin bank account.

Grr

So that’s this week’s blog then. The profound observation that not all writing about business is universally helpful or relevant to everyone. The sad truth is that my business is unlikely to be the next Amazon. All I can do is to try and come up with better gags than them and make sure that the real person who stands behind all this is always contactable, even when he takes #2 Son to swimming training at 05.00.