So I finally cut a deal with Mammon (my star salesperson) about his pay rise. It was a long, painful and very unpleasant process, but we got there in the end. I'm not sure whether or not our recent sales competition had the desired effect of making him more humble and appreciative, but it certainly seems to have made him a bit more friendly – we actually ended up having a decent conversation, rather than a full-on negotiation.

As I've said on this blog before, there's nothing I hate more than salary negotiations. I hate how personal it always gets, however you hard you try to avoid making it personal. I hate how time-consuming it tends to be, as if doing it quickly shows how little you care. And I hate what it does to people – often you see perfectly sensible types spouting complete nonsense that they've clearly cribbed from 'Getting to Yes' or 'How to Make Friends and Influence People' or some other ridiculous self-help book, and you have to spend ages wading through their lamentable attempts at psychological manipulation before you can actually get down to business.

That said, I have no objection to giving people pay rises per se. Quite the reverse, in fact. Some entrepreneurs I know have recently introduced a pay freeze until the economy picks up, and although it's an attractive idea from a practical point of view (think of the time it'd free up), I feel very strongly that it's a disastrous idea. To me, this is precisely the time when you desperately need your best and most important people to stay with you and stay motivated. If you punish your best person in the same way as your worst person, they're not exactly going to feel valued, are they? My policy has always been that if you look after good people in the bad times, they'll be more loyal in the good times. Of course there will be some people who don't get anything and won't be happy about it - but that's a risk you have to take.

Anyway, once we were all agreed, he insisted on buying me a celebratory drink. Now as you can see, I'm completely happy with the rationale of giving him a pay rise. I'm convinced it's the right thing to do. And I didn't even find his behaviour that objectionable, eventually. But I always find the whole process a bit distasteful. I can never shake the feeling that the extra money is coming directly out of my own pocket, which means I can't use it to buy important stuff like computers and desks and a new pair of shoes. In other words, however much I rationalise it, I'm still a bit bitter about it - so the last thing I feel like doing is celebrating the fact that he's basically squeezed more money out of me.

Nonetheless, I did go, because I couldn't think of any excuse that didn't sound rude. And as we sat there with a beer, I couldn't resist asking him about his love life. Normally I don't do that with boys, in case it gives them the wrong idea, but I was dying to know whether he'd come clean about the new girl in Marketing (who I saw him playing pat-a-cake with through a restaurant window a few weeks ago). But he just went a bit pink and mumbled that he wasn't seeing anyone. Which either means that he's trying to keep it a secret, or she's rapidly come to her senses and realised that they were completely unsuited.

Either way, at least now he's definitely staying I'll be able to watch the fall-out at close quarters...

Previous blogs:
Breaking and Entering
The importance of Plan B
Competitive selling
The elephant in the room
Office relationships
Money troubles
I Don't Need No Bad Advice
Value creation
HR Therapy
Difficult people
Partnership Troubles
Bad debts
About Me

This week, some entrepreneurs I know had their office broken into. Their business is on the fourth floor of a serviced office, but the thieves somehow managed to get in and waltz off with very single bit of portable electronic kit they could lay their hands on, including about 10 laptops. Apparently the police said there had been a rash of similar burglaries in that part of town: the burglars would get in past reception when people are still coming and going, then hang around until the coast is clear before bashing the door open and taking their pick. Fortunately everything was insured, but it’s going to cause huge amounts of disruption.

I find this kind of thing very disconcerting. For weeks afterwards, I’m always completely hypersensitive about the prospect of the same thing happening to us, and contemplate installing all kinds of whizzy security systems (alarms, keycode pads, iris scanners) to protect against it – before remembering how much this stuff costs and deciding against it. Rationally, I know that’s not the way to look at it – even if you end up losing a day because of something like this, the opportunity cost to your business is huge. But hey, there’s a credit crunch on.

It also brings back horrible memories of our first office, in a converted warehouse on an industrial site (it was a lot cheaper, but we ended up spending a small fortune on travel). We moved our stuff in on a Sunday, and due to some mix-up with the insurance people our cover didn’t actually start until the Monday. I was so terrified that some ruffians were going to break in and steal everything we owned (basically about five ancient desktops and a kettle that didn’t work properly) that I ended up sleeping on a roll mat in the middle of the office floor with all the lights on, to deter any passing thieves. Every time I heard a footstep I thought I was going to die.

I was telling another of my friends about this break-in that night, and he decided (not very diplomatically) to put forward the argument that entrepreneurs and burglars are actually two sides of the same coin. ‘Think about it,’ he said (which is never a good start). ‘Being a thief is a mixture of opportunism and preparation. You put yourself in the right place at the right time, and then you decide whether or not it’s worth the risk. Just the same as you, basically.’ I wasn’t really in the mood to argue the toss, but thinking about it afterwards I actually got quite irate about this idea. Entrepreneurs and burglars are actually the opposite of each other – I slog my guts out creating something from nothing, and they just come along and take the fruits of other people’s hard work. It makes me sick. I tell you what: if I ever catch a thief in my office, he’d better watch out.

Speaking of being robbed, I’m afraid to report that I narrowly lost my sales challenge against Mammon, my top salesman. I was a bit annoyed about it actually – we were neck and neck at six meetings apiece going into the last day, and then one of mine decided to cancel. Under the rules we’d agreed at the start, that meant I couldn’t count it towards my total, so I lost six-five. But to be honest, it’s probably no bad thing: I don’t want to disrupt his world-view to such an extent that he throws in the towel and joins a charity or something. Plus it’s still eleven potential clients that we didn’t have before. And equally, I spent less time on it than he did – so pound-for-pound, I reckon that still makes me the best salesperson in the company...

It’s hotting up in my sales war with Mammon. After a week (well, six days), he’s 4-3 up on new business meetings – but I’ve got at least two more that I think will definitely convert before the week is out. So it’s pretty tight, and he’s suddenly looking a lot less cocky than he was when we started – particularly now that some of the others are starting to wind him up about it. It’s actually turning out to be an interesting test of his temperament under pressure, as if I needed any more reasons to justify this little contest to myself.

Of course you may recall that my principal reason for doing this (well, apart from proving my own supremacy) was to gain an upper hand in our ongoing row over the size of his pay cheque. Interestingly, we haven’t even discussed this since the contest started – I think he’s planning to use his victory to justify a bigger raise, in exactly the same way that I’m planning to use my victory to prove that he’s not as priceless as he thinks he is. Nothing like high stakes to get the competitive juices flowing…

On the other hand, I’m not being totally pig-headed and macho about all this (I’m not a boy, after all). I plan to win, and I expect to win, but that doesn’t mean I refuse to contemplate the possibility of losing; that would be silly. I reckon a lot of people think entrepreneurs are just chancers, but in fact the good ones aren’t, really. They’re just very good at assessing the odds, backing their judgement, and importantly, turning any outcome to their advantage.

The contest is no big deal – even before I suggested it, I knew exactly how I was going to position it if I lost (testing his mettle, inspiring the others, etc). But this week, I decided it was time to address the bigger issue: what will happen if he does decide to leave. Again, I don’t expect this to happen, but by planning for every outcome I feel like I have much more control of the situation. So I got a recruitment consultant friend of mine to come into the office (to make sure everyone saw him), and picked his brains on who I might be able to get instead, and what they’d cost.

As a result, it feels like I now have a back-up plan in place – so I feel a lot better. It also means that I’m not too desperately attached to any one outcome, which is always useful in a negotiation – it changes both how you go about it, and how you feel about the eventual outcome. Now that I know there are good, affordable salespeople out there within our sector, I won’t feel too devastated if he jumps ship (in fact, I almost got as far as persuading myself that it could be an opportunity in disguise – to swap him for an upgraded version). As an entrepreneur, putting all your eggs in one basket is a dangerous business, I think.

Of course, I hope he doesn’t go. Replacing someone senior is always a real hassle. But I’m a lot more comfortable about the prospect now I have a Plan B...

When you start a business, you invariably end up doing a little bit of everything: sales, accounting, delivery, marketing, HR, even IT. But as you get bigger, you start dividing all this up and hiring different people to do it – partly because you don’t have enough hours in the day to do it yourself, but also, ideally, because you want to end up with someone who’s actually better at the job than you are.

Except it’s not quite that simple, is it? I know that it’s important for entrepreneurs to let go. I know it’s important to hire good people, and trust in their ability to do the job. I know that it’s important not to get bogged down in the day-to-day nitty-gritty. But the thing is, there’s still a little part of me that thinks I can do all these jobs better than anyone else (well, apart from IT, perhaps – that’s in every sense of the word a black box). I can’t help it. I created these jobs, I did them first, and I know my company better than anyone else. So my ego refuses to accept that anyone could do them better.

Fortunately, I keep this to myself most of the time. Otherwise I’d spend my whole time looking over people’s shoulders telling them what they should be doing, which (I know from bitter experience) is just about as annoying as management gets. However this week, an opportunity arose to test my theory. As part of my anti-credit crunch drive, we’re on a new business push at the moment. the theory being that we probably need to have a bigger pipeline to convert the same number of leads. For salespeople, of course, this isn’t much fun – nobody really likes cold-calling, not even the gung-ho ones (and we’ve got a few of them).

So I came up with an idea: to challenge my top salesman (better known as Mammon) to a meeting-booking contest. I did this for three reasons: one, so we sell more stuff; two, because if everyone else sees me getting my hands dirty, they’ll have no excuse; and three, because I want to beat him at what he does best. This is partly just me being insanely competitive (as every self-respecting entrepreneur should be, I would argue). But it’s also because I think it will help with our (still ongoing) salary negotiation if I win – it might persuade him that he’s not quite as irreplaceable as he currently thinks he is. And I reckon the pressure’s all on him: it’s his day job, so everyone will expect him to win.

Naturally, however, he’s not going to. As I’ve explained, I’m actually better at his job than he is...

You may have noticed that I've been steering well clear of the cr**t cr**ch in these blogs so far. That's partly because I'm assuming you'll all be sick to death of reading articles about it – I know I am. And it's partly because I don't talk about it on principle, particularly at work. I agree entirely with Sarah Hunt's piece the other week: as MD, it's your job to keep your staff positive, and the best way to do that is to ban doom and gloom from the office altogether.

The problem is, it's getting harder and harder to ignore. Business news is suddenly top of the agenda: instead of being the boring bit buried away in the middle of the newspaper, stories about the economy are suddenly dominating the front pages. When you go out to the park on a Sunday afternoon, you see couples fighting over the business section, instead of using it to wrap up the remnants of their lunch. Even my mother, who wouldn't know a fiscal rule if it jumped up and bit her, has suddenly become an expert on the business world. I rang her up last weekend to hear all about my second cousin's wedding, and she spent half an hour telling me about Robert Peston's blog on the BBC (it looks like he's well on the way to becoming an extremely unlikely Thinking Woman's Totty).

In fact, I've noticed that my job has suddenly become a lot more interesting to all kinds of people. Previously when I told strangers what I do for a living, they'd either glaze over completely, or give me the kind of sympathetic look you normally reserve for the recently bereaved. Now they're desperate to talk to me about interest rate cuts, or the latest high street spending figures, or Government red tape. It's nice to be moderately trendy for once in my life, I guess. But to be honest I'm starting to pine for the days when people left me in peace. After all, there are only so many times you can hear the question: 'So how's the credit crunch affecting you?' before you start wanting to stick pins into your eyeballs.

I suppose the only reason I can afford to be so blasé about it is because my answer is still: 'not much' (clients are being a bit more cautious about spending decisions, but we haven’t actually seen sales drop off yet – touch wood). Indeed, if it wasn't for all the doom-mongers on the high street (which I'm not helping by single-handedly keeping ASOS in clover), I'd be tempted to think that Peston made the whole thing up as part of a world domination plan. But I figured that if I'm getting hassled about it, my staff will be too – and since they know less about the underlying health of the business than I do, they're more likely to worry about it. So this week, in the wake of Bradford & Bingley and all the drama in the US, I decided to break with habit and talk to them about it.

And actually, I'm glad I did. By mixing positivity (‘so far we’re doing ok, and we’re going to keep doing ok because we’re great and great companies always win’) with pragmatism (‘times are tough so we’re going to have to work our little cotton socks off’), I think I left them with the right mix of cautious optimism and stone-cold fear. Should keep them all on their toes for a while...