This week proved how hard it is to get decent, informed, impartial advice on any kind of business decision.

As you’d expect, I’ve spent most of this week mulling what to do about the new business. And because I’m still quite torn, I’ve been doing what I always do: trying to get advice from other people. However, because it’s such a sensitive subject, that’s easier said than done. I can’t really speak to external people or current clients about it, because it would undermine confidence in the whole thing. My entrepreneur friends tend to be too bullish. And it’s hard to speak to internal people, because they’ll inevitably have some kind of personal agenda. In fact that’s true of almost anyone you talk to, I suppose.

Clearly the person who ought to have the best idea of how it's doing is Ace, the guy who’s running it for me. But he obviously has a fairly major vested interest in maintaining the status quo – he’s hardly going to tell me I should can the entire thing and put him out of a job (turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, after all). I took him for a drink this week to try and tease a bit of honest feedback out of him on how things were going, but he was pretty cagey. I tried to hint - without actually saying as much - that there’d always be a job here for him whatever happens, but I didn’t really get anywhere. Apart from anything else it’s a question of pride: he doesn’t want to admit defeat. (His view, for what it’s worth, is that we need to hang on in there until the market picks up a bit - all very well, but in the meantime he and it are eating up my cash.)

I also tried to gauge the thoughts of Mammon, who as my top sales guy, should really be my sounding board for all things new business-related. But I can’t help feeling he’s still a bit territorial about the whole thing. In a bizarre twist, he and Ace appear to have got over their mutual distaste and become as thick as thieves – so I was nervous that either anything we said would get straight back to Ace, or that Mammon would still see it as a chance to reclaim his spot as the undisputed alpha male of the sales jungle.

Then I considered running it past my HR lady so we could ponder the people implications, before remembering that she’s slightly barking and would probably spontaneously combust with panic.

In fact, I got so desperate at one point that I even tried to raise the topic with my mother. But she was plainly bored to tears by the entire thing, and after a few minutes of sympathetic noises deftly steered the conversation back to the latest developments on Coronation Street.

My usual go-to person in these instances is a guy I used to work with yonks ago, who acts as a kind of unofficial adviser to the business. But one of the things I like best about him is that he never really tells me what to do; he just talks through the problem, helps me figure out what’s important, and tells me to trust my instincts. Unfortunately in this case my instincts can’t make their mind up (do instincts have minds?), so I wasn’t really any better off.

I suppose that ultimately, there’s only one thing that has no agenda and will always tell you the unvarnished truth: the numbers. And unfortunately, it’s the numbers that aren’t looking too pretty.

secretdiary@managementtoday.com