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...