Jeremy Hall – Confessions of a serial entrepreneur

Month end

I, like many other business leaders talked myself in a tough month in April. If you take the Bank Holidays, a week away on holiday and a two day trips to France, there was little working time.

Now I know that this is no excuse. I also know that success requires a positive attitude and there is no space for negativity, moaning or a blame culture.  I can even throw in to the pot an office move, IT upgrades and focus on marketing to make my excuses for a bad month (from a gross profit perspective.)

The facts are there to be seen, April was a poor profit producing month. Cash flow has been tight. I can detail out all the good things that have happened and keep this blog as positive as I want it to be, but sometimes you just have to ask yourself a simple question, did we make money this month? I think you have worked out the answer here for yourself!

Royal Wedding

By coincidence, we have spoken to two other companies moving offices this weekend. It is a sensible use of time and offers the least disruption to a business. What with the Easter Bank Holidays, May Day and the Royal Wedding, the phones have been quiet.

 Having a Bank Holiday to celebrate the Royal Wedding is a great touch. It might have cost UK PLC many billions in lost revenue, but it is a positive event for the country. Hopefully this feel good effect will make us bounce back next month.

Packing too much into a working day

I have an important business meeting in the Midlands, my five year olds Birthday party and completion of the office move to do all in one day. I feel like Victoria Beckham having to go through three changes of clothes in one day from a suit in the morning, shorts in the afternoon to jeans in the evening.

My morning Midlands meeting with the UK MD of a substantial supplier of scientific equipment confirms my thoughts there is still so much potential for our leasing business. More about this later in  May.

As a colleague joins me for the final part of the office move, we transport over 50% of the box’s to storage. I visit a lot of offices and few are either tidy or well organized. Most are a hybrid between a working office and storage facility. Regardless as to who is right or wrong, I want a culture of a sales office, not a storage facility for records of deals we did ten years ago.

We clean our old office and hopefully send a message out to our previous landlord that we appreciate their help and assistance. Having a small operation, we have not had to employ space planners. The process is made even easier with using wi-fi for all the laptop users as opposed to having the offices rewired with CAT 6 cabling.

Again, we finish at 11:30pm. To be fair, if this had to be done in the day time, I would not have done it myself.

Moving offices today

The process of dismantling the office starts today. Being a person who does not like keeping junk or having clutter around, it is welcomed. We organize our contents into three sections, rubbish to be dumped, items to be stored and everything else that will make the move to the new offices. For someone that aggressively gets rid of unwanted or obsolete items, I am still surprised at how much we accumulate that we do not need again.

At 6:00pm I start to dismantle desks and computers and drive them to our new offices to reinstall them. Finishing at 11:30pm, I think to myself how things have changed. My previous offices moves would entail months of detailed planning and a team of removal men to do the “donkey” work. As the UK Chairman of what was a substantial business, I would oversee the works ensuring that I did not get my hands dirty. Now I save the cash and have the pride of doing the job myself.

New strategy at The Apprentice

I have been reading about the new series of The Apprentice. Instead of Lord Sugar providing the £100,000 per year job for the successful candidate, he will loan £250,000 to the winner and set them up in business with himself as a partner. A much better format that I am sure will make more interesting TV and with any luck, incentivise other people to set their own companies up.

Only the brave say no

I sit for hours and contemplate my business. A lot of the thinking is about ideas I have or how we can produce more income. It is time well spent and over the years I have got a lot better at looking at a project and then saying no. It often takes a more experienced or higher caliber person to say no as opposed to yes. Saying yes to a project if often easy, you can throw some money and time at what you are doing then always walk away at a later date. It takes a brave man to turn down what potentially looks like a good idea.

Delegation

I have a great team around me, they are hardworking, loyal and committed. They have different skills, ideas and perspectives on life. They have so much to offer the business, far in excess than either they or I am aware.

There is so much more they can do, there is so much more they want to do. As a business leader a key task is to learn how to get the most out your team and delegate effectively.

Getting the best deal

When you buy a new car, a pad of paper, or even a loaf of bread, it is not unusual to look around first to get the best deal. Employing new people is exactly the same, the interview process is about getting the best person for the job for the salary you are willing to pay.

In our business, we may well have the best person for the job, but are we really getting the best value out of them? Have they been trained well enough, have I motivated them as required?

Thinking about it, I do not get the best deal. It is not their fault, it is the fault of the management. To get value for money I need to invest more into my team. It seems so basic when you write it down in a blog, but I bet nearly every company in the UK has got employees where the employer does not get value for money, and it is not the fault of the employee.

Mr. Non –Existent

Well at last, my best mate, Mr. Non-Existent has picked up the telephone and make a call to try to resolve his precarious situation. (Not to me I hasten to add.) Now this is an interesting lesson for us all. As I have previously noted, he does not have a leg to stand on. We are completely in our right to demand the return of equipment previously on lease, even charge him a rental.

However, things are not quite what they seem. Whilst we have been charging him a rental since 1^st October last year, the date we took ownership to the equipment, he has also been paying a rental to the leasing company by accident. Without going into detail, the original bank that lent the money to Mr. Non-Existent, has made a serious administrative error, even after I have had numerous conversations with them. So the result is that we are in the right and potentially Mr. Non-Existent is as well. Regardless he is a fool. Rather than sending letters out to me saying he does not exist, he could have sorted this out easily. Unfortunately, in business not everyone is rational and normal.

So what is the outcome? The bank will pay us all the money we are owed as opposed to Mr. Non-Existent. He will have to pay us a small rental, but nothing much. As we have a good working relationship with this bank, and they have fully supported us, we cannot seem to be unreasonable. If we wanted to keep pushing this, which we could, it would cause them embarrassment and will waste their time. So, to maintain a good working relationship with them, we have to resolve this quickly and fairly, i.e. cut a deal!

The moral here is that things are not as simple as they seem. Even when you think you are guaranteed to win, some anomaly form somewhere can pop out of the woodwork and disturb your plans. We have done the right thing by pushing this but now it is time to draw it to a close. The only person to have lost is Mr. Non-Existent. If he had just responded to our letter in October like any normal person would have done, he would have saved himself a lot of time and money.

Being a consultant

My idea of offering consultancy is either to help other people by providing knowledge on a free of charge basis, or charging a realistic figure and take on a small number of projects. I will always maintain, that if your “product” is just yourself, you are limited to 24 hours per day of income. For that reason alone, it does not make this business viable to me. Yes, we could build a consultancy business where there is a team of people selling their services but this type of business does not interest me.

I do enjoy meeting business people and learning about their company. What is fascinating is that often they are so close to the business the fail to see the pot of gold or the real problems. I have taken on my first paid consultancy project and it is great fun. My solutions to problems are simple and obvious, you do not have to be a rocket scientist and come up with some complex answer. I know what my focus is, and looking to take a shareholding or directorship in these companies is not a part of my strategy. There is no hidden agenda, I want to have fun and learn from these people as well.

A few key things strike me:

1. How many fantastic companies there are out there that can still do so much better. These are the companies that have survived the recession and make money. They may not even have any real challenges to speak of. However, they are running at 50% performance levels.
2. It is very easy to see other people’s business problems and offer a solution but not so easy to see your own.

So there is me, offering advice and opening criticising a director / business owner who has a bigger more successful company than me!