So it looks like my new venture made its first sale this week. And I can’t tell you how excited about it I was. It’s not so much the money (they’re getting it for a song, because we need to build a customer base). But there’s just something about that very first sale. It’s the moment when something that started life as a random thought process inside your head suddenly becomes something of value, something for which someone is actually prepared to pay perfectly good cash. For me, it’s perhaps the most exciting bit about being an entrepreneur.

I still remember very vividly the first sale I made in the original business. It was basically just me persuading someone I knew to let me tell them what to do about something in my specialist field, so it wasn’t exactly a huge stretch for them. But at the time it felt more significant: it felt like a validation of this big risk I was taking. Someone was acknowledging that they were willing to pay for a commodity that only I could supply, despite the fact there was no big brand name on my business card to reassure them that they’d be getting a good deal. That was a huge moment for me, because I knew that if I could talk someone into that, my business had a chance.

I should really have gone out and painted the town red to celebrate, but I was so skint at that point that I had to settle for a bottle of cheap plonk and a bag of chips. Besides, although there’s something magical about that first sale, and you rightly get very excited about it, a little annoying voice in the back of your head is telling you that one sale doesn’t make a business, and if this is really going to go somewhere, you need to come straight back in the morning and do the same thing all over again. And then again, and then again, and then again until the day you quit. I reckon not many people have the appetite for this, so if you can manage to muster it, that’s half the battle won.

That said, it’s still a milestone, and I think it’s important to celebrate milestones, particularly on the sales side. So after work, I took my new sales guy Ace out for a drink to celebrate. Not that he actually did much work on this one – I’d basically lined it up for him in advance – but I need him to get a taste for entrepreneurial life (plus I wanted to share my philosophy about coming back in the morning etc). Reassuringly, he actually seemed just as excited about the fact that he’d just booked his first big meeting, after a few days of sales calls. OK, that might be because he gets full commission on that one, but hey, what do I care as long as he keeps closing deals?

‘So how are you finding it? I asked him, as I sipped my glass of red.

‘Great place to work,’ he replied instantly, in his usual too-good-to-be-true fashion. ‘But I’ve got to tell you - on the basis of these first three days, I get the feeling it’s not going to be an easy sell. There’s a lot of nervousness about.’ This, by contrast, certainly wasn’t what I wanted to hear, although I wouldn’t blame him for trying to manage my expectations a bit – I’d do the same in his shoes.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’ll get easier.’ Hopefully.

Meeting our IT guys is rarely a thrill-a-minute at the best of times, but my heart sank this week when Ace and I turned up for a progress report on our new platform, and discovered that our regular project manager wasn't there. Since this guy has an assistant who's also working on it full-time, this theoretically shouldn’t have mattered - except that the assistant appears to communicate in an entirely different language. I mean, I understand the individual words he's using (or at least most of them); he just doesn't seem to string them together in any recognisable way. Maybe he keeps slipping into C++or something.

I don’t know if I’ve just been unlucky, but I seem to have met a lot of IT people like this. Our regular guy is great – he can explain whatever’s going on in plain, non-patronising English, and he can turn whatever it is we want him to do into some kind of whizzy code that means nothing to us. Which is precisely what you want in your IT supplier.

However, he’s an exception. More often than not, I’ve ended up with people who just spout incomprehensible jargon and ridiculous acronyms, presumably on the basis that you'll be blinded with science and thus too clueless to argue with them. I strongly suspect that it’s worse because I’m a woman, although maybe that’s just me being a bit Germaine Greer. Either way, it seriously winds me up. I don’t generally react well to being patronised, particularly by someone who’s spent their entire formative years in a darkened room wearing black T-shirts.

The thing is, I'm convinced IT isn’t actually that complicated (not least given some of the people who’ve managed to get jobs in the industry). During my early days as an entrepreneur, when I was too penniless to afford IT support, I even ended up having to fix a few computers myself (and when I realised that 95% of problems can be solved by turning your computer off and on again, I decided there and then never to waste money on expensive IT support). So I’m not a complete ignoramus in these matters; I know one end of a motherboard from another. Nor am I an idiot – which means there’s no excuse for someone not being able to explain things in a way that I can understand.

Now I’m sure there are lots of great IT people around (some of my best friends, and all that). But because it’s a technical discipline, the development side generally attracts people with hard quanty skills – and it’s rare that these people have the ‘softer’ people skills to match. So you end up with techno-geeks in client-facing roles, which can be a challenge for the likes of me. It’s also a challenge for their employer, because let’s face it – it doesn’t matter how great your product is if you can’t communicate that to people. This bloke might have been telling me that we’ve just accidentally invented a better version of Google, and I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was talking about.

Then again, I suppose I’m in the same boat with Ace and my new venture. No matter how fantastic I think the idea is, its success will basically comes down to the ability of a man I barely know to convince other people of the same thing. Let's hope he’s up to it.

I always think it must be hard for a senior person to come into a new firm. I haven’t had much experience of it myself, for obvious reasons. But when I took my last corporate job, which involved managing a couple of people, I remember being absolutely terrified. What if my new team hated me because they’d wanted the job, or because the previous incumbent had been their best friend, or (worst of all) because they thought I was an idiot? (And would it matter if they did?) How would I establish the right balance between iron fist and silk glove?

For want of any better ideas, I ended up reading about 300 business books in an attempt to work it all out. I remember one in particular called ‘The First 90 Days’ (like the President’s first 100 days, but shorter – you’ve probably seen it around), which gives you ten strategies that help you reach the ‘break-even point’, i.e. become indispensable. It was actually pretty useful – securing quick wins, accelerating learning, building coalitions and so on – but there was just so much stuff in there that it made my head hurt, and probably actually made me more nervous than I was before. In the end I decided to rely on my instincts, keep my ear to the ground and basically wing it, and it was fine.

The new guy’s actually in an odd position: although he’s clearly a senior hire – he’s slightly older than the average, and will have a lot more autonomy than most – he won’t have anyone reporting to him, and he’s also doing something that’s quite separate to the rest of the business. In theory you’d think this would make life easier, but actually maybe it’s more difficult – he has no obvious way of establishing his place in the hierarchy (such as it is). And I worry that if people don’t get what he does, or who he does it for, they might end up resenting the fact that he’s senior to them and getting paid more money (although nobody’s actually asked that question yet, with the obvious exception of my top sales guy Mammon – ‘Not as much as you’, I replied, which seemed to satisfy him entirely).

However, if the new guy’s been losing any sleep over all this stuff, he’s done a pretty good job of hiding it. He waltzed in nonchalantly on day one and immediately began schmoozing the entire office systematically. Sensibly, he’s been taking people out for coffee to get to know about what they do, and they tend to come back looking like they’ve had the time of their lives. To be fair, he’s quite charming and has a nice line in self-deprecation, so I can see why. And he is basically a salesperson, so he’s made a career out of sweet-talking people who don’t know him from Adam.

Let’s just hope he’s as confident when he gets on the phone to some clients. A few quick wins on that front certainly wouldn’t hurt, on every level.

To me, starting a new business is just about the most exciting thing you can do (in a work context, I hasten to add). I find it really thrilling to think of all that new business we’re going to win, all that publicity we’re going to attract, all those diems we’re going to carpe. It’s like looking through the window at a brand new covering of snow, and getting all excited by the prospect of crunching around and having a big snowball fight.

But what I sometimes forget is that lots of people don’t see it like this. What looks like an opportunity to me looks more like a risk to them; whereas I tend to focus on the potential outcome, they worry about all the problems in between here and there. Where I see fresh snow, they see slippery pavements and dirty footprints on the hall carpet. I think the big challenge for entrepreneurs is to take these people with you, to convince them it’s a risk worth taking – and if you can’t do that, you need to make sure they don’t suck all the energy out of you before you even start.

I was reminded of that this week when I told some of my senior team about my plans for the new business – which is good to go, now I’ve agreed terms with Ace (the new guy who’s going to manage it for me). Ordinarily, I’d do this kind of thing individually – people tend to be more sensible on their own – but the timings were awkward because of holidays etc, so in the end I had to get them all in a room at once. I’d discussed it with them at various stages before, of course, so they know roughly what was happening – but that didn’t stop them being a bit fretful.

Will you be spending less time on the core business? Aren’t you worried about doing something new in the current climate? Do our clients actually want to pay for this? Is this new guy going to be a good fit with the rest of the team? Will this involve any extra work for the rest of us? How is this going to affect our options? Thhis was the kind of stuff they were asking. And that’s fair enough – they’re all good questions, and I tried to answer them as best as I could. But I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with their enthusiasm, let’s put it that way. In fact, most of them seem more nervous about failing than excited about winning.

Surprisingly, the most helpful contribution came from my money-loving salesperson Mammon. I had thought he’d be a bit dubious about any idea that didn’t involve him being the star of the show, but he’s actually been quite supportive. It helped that I took him to meet Ace the other night and, after about half an hour of circling each other like rutting stags, they got on like a house on fire (though I’m not sure whether to be pleased or worried about that). Well, it won’t be easy,’ he said, when someone asked him for his opinion. ‘But I think we have to trust SD’s judgment on this one. If she thinks it’s a winner, then I’m going to take her word for it.’

I know what you’re thinking: there’s a man who knows what side his bread’s buttered on. But that’s the kind of attitude I expect. I don’t expect them to be as enthusiastic about this (or indeed anything) as I am – it’s not their style, and to be honest I probably need people like that around to rein in my excesses. But what I do know is that pessimism is catching – and if we go into this expecting to fail, then we definitely will…

No more Budget rants this week, you'll be pleased to hear. I decided over the weekend that I had better things to do than waste my time getting angry with stupid politicians - like trying to work out how I'm going to hit my increasingly improbable-looking revenue targets for the year. Even though we seem to be doing better than most, it's still a real slog at the moment - it feels like we're having to work a lot harder for every pound we earn.
 
That's actually one of the reasons why I'm so keen on this new business idea I've been banging on about recently. Our core business is service-based, so selling and delivering it tends to be not only time-consuming but also pretty resource-intensive. This new thing would be more of a product - so after an initial period of (expensive) slog to get it up and running, it should be a lot easier and cheaper to resell. That's partly why I still love the idea, despite people telling me that it's a ridiculous time to be asking people to spend more money.
 
And things are starting to happen. You may recall I met up with this guy just before Easter, and got very excited about the idea of him running this thing for me (some might call it an intrapreneur role, I suppose, though I may share with you at a later date how much I hate that word). I was so impressed with 'Ace' on first meeting (embarrassingly so actually, reading it back) that I was tempted to offer him a job there and then – but I figured that this was a pretty big decision, and I didn't want to rush into it. So unusually for me, I decided to get a second opinion rather than trusting my instincts, just to check I hadn't completely lost the plot. Fortunately, the two entrepreneur friends I took him to meet thought he was great, so I immediately started trying to talk him into leaving his perfectly stable well-paid job to come and work in a start-up with uncertain prospects run by someone he's only met twice.
 
Improbable though it may seem, I think he’s quite keen. I’d like to think it was all down to my powers of persuasion, but if truth be told, I think he's bored out of his mind at his current place (and I don't blame him - a howler monkey could do that job given half a day's phone training). Plus there's the financial angle: people like Ace realise eventually that they're never going to get rich working for someone else, so the prospect of equity in a high-potential start-up (according to me, anyway) is always going to appeal. So this week I met him to talk turkey – salary, base, equity – what exactly would it take for him to give it a whirl?
 
I hate salary negotiation at the best of times, but this one was even worse than usual because I had no point of reference. I've never hired someone to run a bit of my business before, and although I've given options away before, I've never had to have an argument about equity. As well as coming to a number, there’s all sorts of other stuff to think about: how it would work legally (without affecting the rest of the business), what would happen if things don't work out, how much is too much… In principle, I always try to give way on bonuses rather than equity (because it’s a win-win), but I knew that he'd need a bigger upside. And it’s a tricky balance: you want to get a good deal; but if you go in too low you look unrealistic or even naive.

So I worked myself up into a right lather the day before we met - calculating about a million scenarios, talking to people who'd done this kind of thing already, and so on... only to walk into our meeting and hear him ask for exactly what I was going to offer. Next time, I’m going to ask the question before I waste a day fretting about it.