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...