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...