I was at an event on Monday and got talking to the CEO of a biggish company. He’d been there a year, during which he’d had to get rid of a fifth of the workforce because it was doing so badly. This made me think two things: one, I’m very glad it hasn’t been necessary for me to sack that many people, given how stressful it is to sack just one person. And two: I wonder if I’d actually have been able to do that, even if it was necessary?

The thing is, this guy came in at a time when it was clear the company was struggling. Results hadn’t been great, and we were clearly on the verge of a nasty recession. He himself had no emotional ties to the company; in fact I think he was specifically recruited because in his previous job he’d had some success in stripping out costs. In other words, he more or less had a mandate to do whatever he thought was necessary. He could look at everything dispassionately, make a call about what worked and what didn’t – and nobody would blame him for whatever he decided because they all knew what was coming.

Compare your average entrepreneur coming into this downturn. Some of us – including me – probably haven’t experienced an economy this bad. In fact, if we’ve made it to this point, the chances are that we’re largely used to managing growth. What’s more, having built our little companies from scratch, it’s hard not to feel a degree of emotional attachment to the people you’ve hired, and the way you’ve set the whole thing up. To me, that means it’s almost impossible to look at your business dispassionately, and even harder to decide that you need to chop one-fifth of your staff.

I spent most of the next day thinking about what this guy would do if I persuaded him to come and run my company (admittedly this would be a fairly big step down for him, career-wise, but bear with me). Coming into it with a fresh pair of eyes and no vested loyalties, what would he think needed to be changed? Who would stay and who would go? What would he think about the new venture? In fact, at one point I even started wondering if maybe I should make this a regular exercise – every six months, I could sit down and pretend to be a brand new CEO.

But the problem is, you can’t really do it. It’s just not possible to dissociate yourself from your own company. Not that I have kids, but I imagine it’s like trying to decide whether your kid is objectively good-looking; there’s too much of you in there for you to be objective about it. Besides, maybe entrepreneurs ought to trust their instincts; if they think something will come good, even if it’s not showing any signs of doing so, then perhaps it should be given time. OK, so corporate bosses might not be so forbearing – but then maybe that’s why they’re salaried employees, and not company owners.

So much though the idea of a new broom sweeping clean sounded appealing at the time, I’m clearly not going to be able to replicate it. And since I’ve no intention of appointing an outside CEO any time soon, I guess the business will just have to lump along with my instincts, for better or worse.

One of the reasons I’m particularly worried about July and August this year (as I moaned last week) is because of the new business. This would be a difficult time for it anyway – we’re a few months in, the initial excitement has worn off a bit, you’ve exhausted your easy wins and new business is more of a challenge. Throw in a global recession (and I’m not seeing much sign of an upturn yet, whatever people say) and the fact that we’re entering the slowest part of the year, and it’s making me very nervous. Indeed.

It’s not that things are going badly. I mean I wouldn’t say they were going brilliantly, or exceeding my wildest expectations (although I always have high hopes for these things). But we have clients, some of whom actually seem quite excited about it. The platform’s coming along well, now we’ve persuaded our IT people to start conversing in English. And the new guy I brought in to run it seems to be doing a pretty decent job – he sounds good on the phone, he’s impressive in meetings, he’s got the pitch down to a fine art. But I’ve got this little nagging voice in the back of my head that keeps telling me we should be doing better; that we’ve lost some of our early momentum.

As you’d expect, the new guy doesn’t think there’s a problem. He reckons our sell is perfectly fine, but the people we want to buy it just aren’t doing so, perhaps because they’re too busy thinking about the Ashes or their fortnight in Majorca to sign on the dotted line. But I’m not really sure I buy that. It feels like a cop-out. Generally, my view is that you have a good product, and you sell it properly, then people will buy it. So if they’re not buying it, there must be something wrong with either the product, or the sell, or both.

The thing is, I’m a big believer in cutting your losses early. I’ve never been the type to die wondering; I’d much rather try something and watch it fail than sit around wondering what might have been. In fact, I’d go even further: as an entrepreneur, if you never fail, it’s because you’re not taking enough risks. Because basically you never know if a business idea is going to fly. You can research it, sense-check it, test it with potential clients – but although that might mitigate the risk, it won’t remove it completely. At some point you’ve just got to have a punt. And it stands to reason that you’re not going to be right all the time.

So for me, being a good entrepreneur is not so much about having brilliant ideas; it’s about trying things out, and not being afraid to jettison the ones that don’t work. Look at Branson. He doesn’t get it right all the time – for all his successes, he’s had plenty of failures too. The key is not to be sentimental or proud about it – if something isn’t working, you need to stop throwing good money after bad, and turn your attention to something else that might. (Personally I think girls are a lot better than this, because of the whole macho pride thing, but then I would say that). Otherwise you end up spending more and more time on it, convinced that will fix it, and the rest of the business suffers as a result.

In other words, I’m not going to hesitate to pull the plug if it starts grinding to a standstill. It’d be painful, but it saves a lot more pain in the long run.

For most people, July and August are the two best months of the year. The sun is blazing; the days are long; there’s tennis and cricket on the TV – life seems a bit more fun, somehow. But for me, as a business owner, they’re an absolute nightmare. In fact, I’d quite like to have them banned.

The problem is, all of these things serve only to distract your staff from the considerably less fun duties of their day-to-day grind. It’s hard enough at the best of times persuading sales people to make 30 calls a day, or getting HR people to re-do your appraisal forms – but it becomes twice as hard when they spend half their day looking out of the window, wishing they were sitting in the park with a White Magnum. At least when it’s cold and dark, people appreciate being in a nice warm office.

Personally, I blame the school holidays. Because we spend our formative years associating the second half of July and August with being out of school, hanging out in the garden driving our parents to distraction, I think there’s still part of us that just zones out at this time of year. I feel it myself, and on the basis that I’m likely to be slightly more motivated than the average punter (not least because it’s my business), I’m sure it’s a pretty widespread phenomenon.

Then there’s the issue of those who are now experiencing the school holidays from a different perspective. While it’s great that the end of term usually means the roads and the trains are quieter, it also means that any of your staff who are parents will probably either be taking time off (no doubt to join the screaming hordes heading to Europe on package trips); feeling guilty about not taking time off; or in some cases, recovering from their time off (since they probably manage to get away with seeing a lot less of their howling offspring for the rest of the year).

What this means is that there’s a strong temptation to let things drift. It’s just too convenient an excuse to slack off. Nothing happens in August anyway, people say; let’s pick it up again in September when everyone’s back. People are so desperate to get out of the office that they try a little less hard; they’re a bit more inclined to let things slide. And before you know it, those two months – that’s one-sixth of your year, remember – have slipped by without you even noticing.

As you may have noticed, I’m a little paranoid about this. So every June, I round up the troops and spend ten minutes haranguing them about how important it is to keep the pace up throughout the summer. The upside of these two months, as I see it, is that if people are around they generally have a bit less on their plates, so they might have more time to talk to us (and by ‘talk to us’, I of course mean: 'give us their money'). And thereafter, I bribe everyone with ice cream as soon as the temperature gets above 25 degrees...

I was reading something in MT this week about the problems women face when they come back from maternity leave. And although I was shocked by the statistics, and hate the idea of anyone assuming I can’t do something for a gender-specific reason, I must admit that as a small business owner, I can’t help but get a sinking feeling whenever one of my staff announces that she’s pregnant…

The thing is, pregnancy doesn’t have much of an upside for me. Professionally speaking, in a small company like ours, losing a key member of staff for an unspecified period of time is a major pain in the backside. For a start I have to go through the rigmarole of hiring a replacement – and the chances of finding someone brilliant who wants a temporary job at precisely that time are slim, to say the least. Even if they do turn out to be good, it’ll still take ages to get them trained up to the same level. While at the same time I’m shelling out a not-insignificant sum in maternity pay to someone doing zero work (which frankly, I can live without at the moment).

And if Mum does eventually decide to come back – at which point she’ll probably be completely distracted and resentful about being away from her spawn – you either have to keep two people in the job, or you get rid of the cover person and lose the benefit of all that training and experience they’ve accumulated in the past year.

I’m prepared to admit there might also be a personal element to this. As you may have gathered, I’m not really the maternal type, so I don’t really get it. But regardless of that, once you’re the ‘wrong’ side of 30, you’re socially conditioned to feel like a barren old maid when you hear about someone younger than you getting pregnant. There’s nothing like it to make you feel well and truly ‘on the shelf’, as my mother delicately puts it – even though I hate that concept with every fibre of my being.

That’s not to say there aren’t advantages. At least in my experience, the people concerned have always been thrilled to bits about getting pregnant. And I like having happy people in the office, because they tend to make other people happy too. A happy workforce is a productive workforce, after all (when they’re not looking at blurry X-ray photos).

Now I’m painfully aware that I’m part of the problem here (not to mention a disgrace to the sisterhood). As long as people like me see pregnancy like this, mothers are always going to be second-class citizens in the workplace, and they’re always going to be a minority in the upper echelons of the workforce. I firmly believe that’s a bad thing.

So I’m trying to teach myself that it’s really an opportunity (apart from the old maid bit, obviously). Generally speaking, I’m pretty good at that – when you’re an entrepreneur, it kind of comes with the territory – so I see no reason why I can’t ultimately do the same with maternity leave. Maybe I can find a replacement that’s even better? Maybe I can promote a junior person to give them more responsibility? Maybe it’s an opportunity to re-think the way we deliver a particular product or service?

One of my friends – whose feminist views make me look like Bernard Manning in comparison, admittedly – goes even further. She reckons that when the woman returns to the workplace, she’ll rise to even greater heights due to her new-found confidence, resourcefulness and multi-tasking skills. It’s a nice idea, though I’m not sure I buy it yet. Although if I ever do get round to having babies, people had better start saying that about me.