In some respects, it's amazing I found out. I suspect that we've reached the size now where there's just enough formal structure to warrant keeping stuff from the boss - and as such, I'm usually the last person to hear anything. But I was out in town on Saturday night, and happened to see them through a restaurant window. Judging by the amount of footsie going on, they weren't discussing our new direct mailer.

So on Monday I dragged my HR manager into a meeting room - she's a scurrilous gossip, so she knows absolutely everything - and after a slightly unprofessional degree of coercion on my part, she spilled the beans and confirmed they were an item.

I have to say I was surprised. Not because I failed to notice an office romance going on under my nose; my radar in these matters has never been very finely-tuned. And given the size of the company, and the fact that lots of our staff are around the same age, it was always going to happen eventually. But they just seem an odd couple: Mammon, as I mentioned last week, is like Goldfinger (he loves only gold) while this new girl seems quite a sweet, unassuming little thing. I'd never have put them together in a million years, which either shows what a bad judge of character I am, or what a bad judge of character she is (and I know where my money is).

However, this was brilliant news given that (as I explained last week) the battle lines have just been drawn in our dispute over his pay rise. There's nothing better than going into a negotiation in possession of a critical fact that the other party doesn't know that you know - and I figure that if he's just started a new relationship with someone nice in the office, he's even less likely to leave. So my hand just got a little bit stronger.

This is largely why I think office romances are a bit of a minefield. Personally, being an entrepreneur has been pretty disastrous for my love life. Everyone knows that these days, most people meet their future partners in or through work. But I can't go out with any of my staff, because that would just be weird. I can't start going out with our clients, because that would be awkward. When you spend most of your business life trying to be taken seriously by men, the worst thing you can do is start going out with one of them.

So to avoid giving people (like me) any extra ammunition, I'm strongly opposed to mixing business with pleasure. Though it's great that Mammon doesn't feel the same way...

Regular readers may remember a few weeks back that my slightly psychotic HR manager informed me, in hushed tones, that one of my salespeople didn't think he got paid enough. To which I naturally replied that salespeople always think they don't get paid enough, so if anything the reverse would be more worrying.

However (and much though it annoys me to admit it), from the moment she said it, it's been playing on mind. Admittedly this girl has never knowingly underplayed any potential HR flashpoint, but I couldn't help wondering whether this was something I needed to nip in the bud. The problem is, you see, this guy is very good. He's my best salesperson, and looking at the rest of them made me realise what a nightmare it would be to lose him. Unfortunately, he appears to be well aware of this fact.

I have to say, there is nothing I hate more about running a business than arguing with people over pay. However much I try and distance myself from it emotionally, however much I try to tell myself that it's all a question of negotiation and I shouldn't take it personally, I find it more draining and dispiriting than any other part of my job. The thing is, pay is so bound up with people's sense of self-worth. If you pay them less than someone else, they invariably think you rate them less than someone else - even if they're doing a completely different job.

In some ways, salespeople are easier. For a start, it's obvious how well they're doing, from how much they sell. And you can also make a huge chunk of their pay performance-related, so they only make a load of money for themselves by making a load of money for me. I can live with that. But it's always a nightmare conversation, because they treat it like a sales negotiation - however much you tell them otherwise.

‘The thing is,' this guy said to me over a beer last week (I'd taken him to the pub to soften him up in advance), ‘it's not really about the money.'

This approach is absolutely guaranteed to annoy me. With salespeople, it's always about the money. And if it's not, they're in the wrong job. ‘An admirable attitude,' I ventured. ‘So what is it: personal development? Flexibility? Leadership?'

Mammon politely ignores me. ‘It's really about how much I'm valued. But sadly, society only gives us the blunt instrument of salary to address this problem.' (he's always coming up with nonsense like this; I think that's why he's so good at cold-calling).

In other words, it's about the money. He eventually (after a bit more prevaricating) told me that he deserves a higher base, a more generous commission, and some options (though I strongly suspect he doesn't really understand what options are, only that at some point it might translate into more money).

So now the battle of wills begins. I'm pretty sure we'll eventually come to such arrangement - ultimately, I don't think he wants to leave - but I know for a fact that it will take a few weeks of painful, emotive wrangling to get there. Makes you realise why the Romans were so into their slave labour...

This week, I've been spending a lot of time with my lawyer. It's nothing serious (and nothing that would excite my mother, in her ongoing quest to marry me off) - we're just updating some of our client contracts, so I wanted to make sure we're not missing anything. But it did remind me of one thing: as a budding entrepreneur, I found few things more annoying than lawyers.

I don't want to sound like I'm picking on lawyers here. Accountants and bank managers and consultants can be just as bad at times. But I think there's something about lawyers that makes them the natural enemy of entrepreneurship. The thing is, they're trained to say no. They spend their entire time learning about all the things you can't do, and all the mistakes people have made in the past. In other words, they're basically professional cynics: they're trained (and paid) to pick holes in all of your best-laid plans.

When I started out, this drove me crazy. For me, there's nothing more damaging to an entrepreneur than negativity. If you're surrounded by people who keep telling you that you're going to fail, chances are that you'll probably end up agreeing with them – and we all know where that leads. From day one, I’ve tried to steer well clear of negative people – and this includes 90% of the lawyers I've ever met. 

It probably doesn’t help that small businesses are usually a pathetic source of fees. So unless your lawyer is far-sighted enough to play the long game, you either have to settle for a rubbish firm, or for the most junior people at a good firm. And since these people are usually straight out of law school, they wouldn’t recognise good business sense if it jumped up and bit them in the indemnity clause. They’re smart, and they know the law; they just don’t usually know how to apply it in the real world. They see everything in black and white, and refuse to acknowledge any shades of grey. And they’re far more concerned with telling you what you can’t do, rather than what you can do.

It always made me laugh in the early days when we’d send them contracts, and they’d send back a huge list of changes for us to demand. The fact that this was a huge multinational, which used the same contracts for everyone and was unlikely to have them re-written for a piddling little outfit like ours, just didn’t seem to occur to them. Or they’d warn us of the dire HR consequences of our latest plan, which never seemed to materialise (after we ignored them and went ahead anyway).

Actually I don't really dislike lawyers - just bad lawyers. We’ve finally found a great one, and suddenly I don’t know what I’d do without him. He never tries to blind me with science (my biggest pet hate), he understands how to balance legal priorities with commercial ones, and on the couple of occasions when it’s been necessary, he’s quietly and calmly defused potential powder-kegs. If I’d only found him four years ago, my feelings towards the legal profession would have been more like my mother's.