Even for businesses like mine, postal strikes are a pain. And they seem totally self-defeating.

Fortunately, I'm not in the distribution business. But the Royal Mail strikes are still a right royal pain in the neck, even for me. The golden rule for every business at the moment, as everyone keeps telling me, is to watch your cashflow. Whether you're worrying about dwindling income or increasing costs, you need to make sure that you have enough cash in the bank to pay the bills and pay your staff. And that's not easy when a sizeable chunk of this income is languishing in a sorting office somewhere in North London, while lots of postal workers stand outside shouting at management (assuming strikers still do that these days?).

In some respects, I'm surprised by how many of our clients still pay us by cheque, rather than via electronic transfer. In this day and age, it seems amazing that people still transfer money by scribbling on a bit of paper that could end up anywhere, rather than opt for the greater security of electronic banking (well, apart from when some brain-dead bank employee accidentally leaves your account details for all the world to see on the 7.32 from Paddington).

But in other ways, it makes perfect sense. I've always tried to be a good payer, but in the early days we used to pay people by cheque because it bought us a few extra days of having the money in the bank. Now that a cheque can take an age to arrive, and then another few days to clear, you can effectively extend your payment terms by two or three weeks. Nobody's going to admit to doing this, but I bet it's happening (we’ve definitely thought about it a couple of times).

I don't know anything about what's going on at Royal Mail, so I have no idea whose fault all this is. But it’s patently obvious to anyone with a brain that the service is never going to recapture its glory days. Just about the only thing I use it for these days is getting internet shopping delivered, and I noticed that Amazon was quick to make alternative arrangements when the latest strikes were called. So I’m not quite sure what the unions are hoping to achieve, exactly – there’s surely no way the service can support anything like the same number of staff it had a couple of years ago.

Anyway, like I said, what do I know. All I really care about is getting my hands on the money people owe me, so I hope to goodness that someone manages to sort something out before I start getting calls from my bank manager. And in the meantime I plan to do my own little bit to hasten the Royal Mail's demise: I'm going to start trying to get all new clients to agree to pay by electronic transfer rather than cheque, as a condition of trading with us. Presumably I won't be the only person doing this, either. Yet another reason why these strikes seem a bit self-defeating.

Sometimes it's good to get things out in the open. But I'm not sure mediation is really my forte.

You may recall me mentioning a certain amount of simmering alpha male tension between my new boy Ace and the previously-unchallenged salesman-supreme, Mammon. My HR lady has been on at me for ages to nip this in the bud, but I wasn't too concerned: a bit of competition wouldn't hurt anyone, I figured, and if it spurred them on to greater heights of salesmanship, who was I to complain?

Well, I'm not saying I was wrong (I rarely admit to that at the best of times). But I decided this week that it was time to step in. What happened was that Ace came to see me on Monday whinging about how unhelpful Mammon was being. Ace is still working his socks off to try and push our new product out to potential customers - and with very few people apparently in the mood to buy anything at the moment, it's proving a tough ask. So Mammon's apparent reluctance to scour his contact book for potential leads has not gone down well. At all. 'This is not easy, SD, and it doesn't help when the people who are supposed to be on your side don't lift a finger to help', he whinged.

Now I wasn't entirely surprised by this. Salespeople guard their contacts with their life, because that's where their commission comes from. If you've spent months wooing someone, you don't then want some jonny-come-lately waltzing in and hoovering up some of your client's budget spend. On the other hand, Ace clearly needs all the help he can get. And I need Mammon to start acting in the best interests of the business as a whole, not just his own pay packet (admittedly this probably means his incentive plan is wrong, so I need to look at this too).

Anyway, I could see that this had the potential to escalate from a drama into a crisis, so I decided that the three of us were going to sit down in a room and work this out. Naturally, the idea of this appalled me. I don't mind having a go at people when I have to, but the prospect of brokering a peace deal between two grown men just isn't my cup of tea. I have many strengths, but mediation isn't one of them. My natural inclination is just to bash their heads together and tell them to stop acting like little kids arguing about who has the hardest conker, but that's not really the done thing in these circumstances. (Back in the old days, I was once rejected from a graduate recruitment interview for being 'too forthright', which I think is a euphemism for 'blunt' or possibly 'rude'.)

Nevertheless, I called the meeting - and my only consolation was that the two of them were even more embarrassed about the whole thing than I was. As they sat across the table looking at me like sheepish teenagers, I encouraged both of them to say their piece to the other, and then (on the advice of HR lady, and against my better judgement) told them to talk about something they admired in the other person.

Words cannot express how exruciating that bit was.

Still, painful as it was, it does seem to have cleared the air a bit between them. And if it gets the two of them to work together and generate me some more new business, I suppose that meeting will have been worth every cringeworthy second. But I've no idea how professional mediators actually do this stuff for a living.

An entrepreneur I know was boasting to me the other night about how flexible working has helped him get through the recession without a single redundancy. Apparently he offered everyone the chance to set up a job-share or spend more time working from home – and got enough takers to avoid lay-offs. I made suitably approving noises, and I even meant it to an extent – anyone who’s managed to keep people in work deserves a pat on the back. But although this probably sounds harsh, I’m not sure job-sharing is necessarily a better business option than redundancy...
 
The big fallacy of job-shares is that if two people do half a week each, you end up with a full-time equivalent. But you don’t really. Inevitably, things end up falling through the cracks between the two, or deadlines get pushed back, or service levels suffer. As a business, you only have half the amount of knowledge of the role present at any one time. So when random questions come up, as they invariably do, you’ve only got a 50-50 shot of being able to answer them.
 
And that’s the best-case scenario. It gets even more complicated if the two people concerned don’t actually like each other - which, in my experience, is pretty common. And I’m not totally surprised: if you’re doing exactly the same job as someone else, with exactly the same responsibilities, it’s hard to avoid an element of competition creeping in (after all, you've got no excuse if they’re better than you). Equally, if one thinks the other isn’t pulling their weight, it can quickly lead to resentment. Of course in an ideal world, both parties would see that it’s in both of their interests for the arrangement to look good, and thus make the other’s life as easy as possible. But it very rarely seems to work like that.

So the end result of all this is that nobody winds up happy: the two people are miserable, because as far as their manager is concerned the best they can do is half a job, and they might end up pulling their job-sharer's hair out. And it's bad for the business, because in this case a half plus a half doesn’t necessarily equal one.

In fact, as I see it, just about the best thing to be said for this kind of arrangement is that your willingness to do it tends to go down well with staff – not only with those who want to take advantage and spend more time with their children/ video game collection/ unfinished screenplay, but even among those who don’t want to take it up. I’m not convinced that this guy’s solution made his company anything other than less productive. But I bet it made the staff feel a lot happier about working for him.

I got a letter from the council this week about next year’s business rates bill. To the uninitiated, these are basically the business equivalent of your council tax – it’s what the local authority charges you for the privilege of employing a load of people in their catchment area (you’d think they’d be grateful). Now given that we’re still knee-deep in recession, and cash is tight for most businesses in the area, what do you think has happened to my bill? Is it going down slightly, perhaps? Is it being frozen until the economy picks up? Or maybe it’s inching up at the rate of the inflation? Well, none of the above actually. In fact, it’s going up by A THIRD.

I nearly fell off my chair when I read the letter. Are these people completely insane? Do they have some kind of perverse wish to kick lots of small firms while they’re down? Do they have a cunning plan to drive every business from their streets so they can save money on pesky stuff like road maintenance, and street cleaning, and rubbish collection? I know their budgets are probably under pressure too. But why are they taking it out on me?

Anyway, there’s no mistake (I checked). In fact, when I asked around, I quickly discovered that I’m by no means the only one facing a bigger bill. It’s not that I object to paying it in principle – I prefer it when the council actually does the stuff it’s supposed to, and makes the neighbourhood look decent (although I don’t see why I should have to pay more for the privilege of being in the centre of town – that’s why I pay more rent).

But here’s the idiotic thing: our bill has apparently been calculated based on April 2008 rental values, i.e. before the recession. So we’re going to have to cough up for far more than this place is actually now worth. How dim is that?

And the annoying thing about business rates is that nobody could care less about them, apart from business owners. Politicians know that if they promise incentives for start-ups, like the Tories have been doing this week, it’ll probably go down well with the voters. Whereas if they promised to reduce business rates, most of the population wouldn’t give a monkey’s. In fact, they'd probably tell you that because it's a local council issue, it's nothing to do with central Government anyway - while the local lot will say their hands are tied and blame it on Whitehall.

Either way, there's no incentive for anyone to try and keep rates down; they can just keep squeezing more cash out of us, and the electorate won’t bat an eyelid. And unless I get myself elected to the local council, I don't see that there's much I can do about it.

That’s the trouble with democracy, you see. Not enough votes for me.

I’m conscious that I may have come over a bit Richard Littlejohn last week, ranting on about Brussels and that holiday pay legislation. Sorry about that. I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of rabid Little Englander, because I’m really not. I’m also not very political, at least not in the sense that all these oddballs at the party conferences seem to be. It just tends to wind me up when politicians start confiscating more of my profits, or interfering in the way I run my business (any entrepreneur worth her salt has to spend a certain proportion of their time whinging about red tape – it’s the law).

But while generally speaking I prefer the Government to leave me in peace, I’m not from the ‘all change is bad’ school of thought. For instance, this week I was talking to an entrepreneur buddy about that High Court ruling on the retirement age last Friday (apparently it’s still ok to boot people out at 65). He was very pleased about this, because he reckons it’d be a major hassle for businesses if the rules were changed, and he’s keen to use the current set-up to usher one of his old-stagers out the door next year. He thinks the rule works perfectly well, and can’t see why the Government should want to review it.

Now I’m quite looking forward to retirement, as I suspect most people are – leisurely pub lunches, walks in the park, a spot of crown green bowls; maybe living in a house with my other retired friends swapping hilarious repartee, like The Golden Girls. And to be frank, if I’m still having to work by the time I’m in my 60s, something will have gone very wrong with my life plan (in which selling my business for a small fortune and retiring to a fabulous beach somewhere figures prominently).

But the way I see it, the retirement age was set when people didn’t tend to live much beyond their 60s. Now we’re quite likely to live another 20 years or so (especially women), so it makes complete sense to change it. Apart from anything else, the alternative is that those still in work will have to shell out a fortune in taxes to keep all these golden girls in clover, and as discussed, that doesn’t really work for me.

Still, what do I know, I’m not an economist. But one thing I am sure about is that relying on the retirement age for workforce planning is pretty limp. If the person can’t do the job, improve their performance or manage them out. If they can, why would you want them to leave? This friend of mine argues that it’s cheaper and less hassle just to wait until this guy hits 65 next year, but I think he’s being a bit weedy.

So later retirement is fine by me. See, I’m not really an anti-Government reactionary.