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.