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.