As I may have mentioned a million times, one of the things I hate most about running a business is HR. That’s why my HR woman is worth her weight in gold – a bit like Mr Muscle, she loves the jobs I hate (she’s also highly corrosive, like Mr Muscle, but that’s by the by). And this week, when I belatedly read about this new EU law that will allow staff to claim back holiday days if they end up being ill, I was reminded exactly why it annoys me so much.

Has there ever been a more ridiculous, bone-headed, exploitable (?) employment law ruling than this? Even by the usual standards of the Brussels straight banana brigade, this really takes the biscuit. Are they seriously telling me that one of my staff can come back from a fortnight in Magaluf and swear blind that they spent a day in bed racked by the screaming abdabs, and I’d be compelled to reinstate a day of their holiday (which incidentally, I think they’d even be allowed to carry over into the next year if they wanted to)? As if people aren’t going to take advantage of that…

I know sick leave is always a matter of trust, to some extent. Unless you go round and take someone’s temperature, you’re going to have to take their word for it that they’re poorly. But although I know my staff are, on the whole, a pretty trustworthy lot, there are always some people who are off more than others, or catch a cold in a stiff breeze, or seem to take a suspiciously high number of Fridays and Mondays off. At least when they have to call in sick to their line manager, it feels like there’s some degree of scrutiny on the day itself – if we’re talking about sickness on holiday, that’s a very different kettle of fish.

I remember it happened to me once; I was at a wedding on the Saturday, so I took the Monday off so I wouldn’t have to rush back on the Sunday. But I managed to catch some kind of horrid lurgy from some screaming brat at the reception, and ended up spending the whole day in bed. Still, I didn’t feel robbed. It’s just tough luck, isn’t it?

Whereas nowadays my younger staff will be able to jet off to Ibiza for an all-nighter and then claim their next-day hangover as a sick day. And I’m not even sure I could argue even if they were totally honest about it (well, they are ill, right?). Which brings me to another reason why this is a stupid idea: presumably you’re actually more likely to get ill by going on holiday than you would be at home, one way or the other – so why should the two be treated equally?

Either way, this strikes me as a potential nightmare for small business owners. And it might be bad for staff, too, because I’m sure some people will make their sickness policies less generous as a result. You really do wonder if anyone in Brussels ever actually thinks this stuff through...

One of the things I’ve found hardest about running my new business, I think, is working out how much overlap there should be with the original one. On the one hand, I’m keen for the new venture to have its own identity – I want to develop a real start-up vibe, with all the energy and us-against-the-world mentality that involves. But at the same time the two of them (Ace plus a junior meeting booking guy) are literally working side-by-side with the rest of the business, sharing many of the same resources. So should I treat them as two divisions of the same company, or two totally separate entities?

I guess some of you may be thinking that it doesn’t really matter. After all, they're both going to be working in the same room for the foreseeable future, so what difference does it make either way? Isn’t it just an arbitrary semantic distinction? To be honest, that's what I thought to begin with. But now I'm not so sure.

The thing is that this stuff does seem to make a difference to the way my team perceive both their roles and mine. Take Ace, for example: he wants to feel like he's effectively running a start-up, not like he's heading up a division of a small company. That's the only reason he signed up. Equally I want him to feel like he's getting a greater proportion of my time than any other bit of the business - partly because he'll feel more supported, and partly because he'll feel under more pressure to deliver if he thinks I'm looking over his shoulder (which is never a bad thing).

On the flipside, I still want the people in the original business to feel like that's the main thing, the main focus of my concentration. I don’t want them thinking I've lost interest because I’ve got a new toy to play with.

I was telling my domestic goddess friend about this the other day (not sure why – professional mentoring isn’t exactly her thing), and she reckons that it's a bit like what parents go through when they have a second child. Naturally your instinct is to spend most of your time worrying about the new arrival, but in fact, you need to spend almost as much time looking after the first kid, to make sure they don't get consumed by jealous rage and start attacking the baby with cotton buds. My situation technically ought to be easier, because grown-up professionals ought to be slightly less needy than teething toddlers. But, as I'm sure you'll agree, that isn't always the case.

On balance I've tried to keep the two bits fairly separate - so we have separate team meetings, and separate social events, for instance. I was going for a kind of devolution model of limited independence, so the new business would be a bit like Wales (and not just in the sense that it’s a net financial drain on everyone else). But that creates problems in itself - it means most of the original staff have no real idea what the new business is doing, and specifically, what Ace is doing to keep himself in Ralph Lauren. And when it comes to the more informal stuff, it seems a bit artificial to start splitting them up, particularly given the size differential.

So in short, I still haven’t really got a clue how to do it...

You may remember me mentioning that my HR manager is a bit mad. Not in the pencils-up-the-nostrils, ought-to-be-sectioned sense – more in the slightly hysterical, turns-every-minor-issue-into-a-major-crisis sense. Admittedly this can be pretty wearing at times, but I have come to appreciate it: she acts as a kind of early warning system for any forthcoming argy-bargy in the office. Her office tension radar is so highly attuned that she can sometimes spot a spat even before the participants decide to have one (and sometimes even when they’re never going to have one, but you learn to sort the wheat from the chaff eventually).

Anyway, this week she’s been fretting about the (apparently) simmering tension between my two top producers – the head sales guy, who I’ve previously referred to as Mammon (due to his love of the filthy lucre), and the guy who’s running my new venture, hitherto called Ace. According to HR lady, Ace and Mammon are on the verge of calling each other out for a duel, or whatever the modern-day office equivalent is (Prêt sandwiches at dawn, maybe).

Now I can’t say I’ve noticed this massively, but it doesn’t really surprise me. These two are very much cut from the same cloth: bags of self-confidence, ultra-competitive, always looking for the next big opportunity. So it was always likely that there’d be a bit of antler-locking between them – however subtle – with each one trying to prove that he was the alpha male of the office.

And to be honest, that doesn’t really bother me. I know people always talk about a sense of togetherness, everyone pulling in the same direction and so on. But I think a bit of healthy competition is no bad thing, particularly when it comes to salespeople. You hire them precisely because they have these competitive tendencies – that’s what drives them to keep picking up the phone. So you have to expect that they’ll want to beat the person next to them. As long as they can do that without being rude or aggressive or obnoxious to each other, that’s fine by me. Especially as my business reaps the rewards if they spur each other on to greater heights.

My only slight concern about the situation is that if they get too competitive, they might not be able to benefit each other in the way that I hoped they would. Because really, their skills sets are quite complimentary. Mammon’s a master at new business, the kind of smooth talker who can pick up the phone to anyone and charm his way to a meeting. Whereas Ace is a great account manager: he’s brilliant at working out exactly what the client needs, both now and in the future, and explaining how we can give it to them. So if they can put their egos to one side every now and then, they could actually learn a lot from each other. Though I know that’s easier said than done...

One of the things I like about September, as you might expect, is that everyone seems to reappear in the office all at once. I suppose some of them do it for family reasons, but since relatively few of my staff have kids, I can only assume that there’s some kind of subconscious back-to-school thing going on. Admittedly if they had any sense they’d all be going away in September when prices go down, and them not having any sense is bad. On the other hand, when they get back it means I can stop doing their job as well as my own, which is very, very good.

Covering for people who are on holiday have always seemed like a pretty thankless task to me, even before I was running a small business. You just have to squeeze more work into the same number of hours, while getting absolutely nothing in return – either in terms of cash or appreciation. One of my senior managers has been off for most of August, and I’ve got to say it’s been a nightmare. Instead of August being a nice quiet month, where all I have to worry about is convincing everyone else that it shouldn’t be a nice quiet month, I’ve instead spent the last few weeks chasing my tail.

The main problem is that this guy has several direct reports. So in his absence, I’m the next in line to look after them. Since one of the major reasons for his appointment was so I could get out of doing that – not least, if I’m honest, because I find it pretty boring – this prospect always fills me with cold dread. Inevitably, some stuff will kick off while he’s away, particularly if he’s knocked someone back on something and they figure I might be able to over-rule him. So I always end up spending most of my time dealing with various HR issues and management hassles, which is not my cup of tea.

Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the importance of this stuff – the coaching, the hand-holding, the ego-massaging. It’s just not really my thing. I don’t really enjoy it, and I figure that relatively speaking I’m not very good at it. I like to think my skills are on balance more on the big picture side, which is why I appoint managers to manage, and try to spend my own time working on the business, rather than in the business (if you’ll permit me to slip into jargon for a moment). That’s a better allocation of resources, right?

There is an upside though: you get to spend a bit more time with some of your more junior staff; they feel like they get to know you better (and you get to know them), while you get to see how good or bad they are at closer quarters. So although I always dread it every time it happens, it is actually pretty useful. Not that this will stop me moaning about it, you understand.