A big new win for my new venture reminds me just how up and down this game really is.

We've had a great week (and not just because of my toddler-like excitement every time I see a snowflake). On Tuesday, a new client just signed off on a big contract with my new venture, kicking off in January. It's our biggest win so far, and it's come in the week before Christmas, just as I was starting to doubt whether the sums were ever going to add up. It's moments like these that make all the hard slog worthwhile - although to be honest, I can't help feeling that it would be nice for life to be a little more boring sometimes...

The timing might sound a bit too good to be true, but I suspect it was more for their benefit than ours. My guess is that they were keen to get it sorted before Christmas so they could spread the cost across two years' worth of budgets (I love December for this - although it feels like there's a lot of dead time, it can be a great opportunity to pick up new business as people try and spend up their budget allocations).

Anyway, what do I care? All of a sudden next year's numbers look a lot better than they did a week ago, and that's about the best Christmas present I could have asked for.

As you can imagine, this was pretty exciting news all round. I was pleased for Ace, who's put in a lot of effort thus far for relatively little reward (although I'm delighted to report, from a childishly competitive point of view, that it was originally my lead). I was pleased for the new business's P&L, because this will keep the bank-managing wolf from the door for a while longer. And I was also pleased because deals like this validate the whole idea, and all the work that's gone into it.

When you're running a very small business (which this new venture effectively is, even if it's technically part of the main company), deals like this make a huge difference - to your profile, to your bottom line and to your general sanity. In the space of a week I've gone from worrying about whether I should pull the plug to thinking it's the best thing since sliced bread, before settling somewhere in between.

And that, for me, is basically what being an entrepreneur is all about. It's a life of extremes; one minute you're up, the next minute you're down - and if you work hard and have a bit of luck, you'll hopefully end up with more of the former than the latter. It can get pretty wearing sometimes. But I wouldn't swap it for the world.

Anyway I get the next couple of weeks off, apparently. So I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas. Here's to 2010 being a hell of a lot better than 2009...

Sorry about the terrible title. But today I want to talk about sacking people at Christmas time.

I raise this because I spent Monday night having a drink with a entrepreneur friend, who was agonising over whether she should wait until the new year to fire someone. Just to be clear, the argument wasn't about whether this person needed firing - her mind was made up on that score. The only question was whether she should get it out of the way now, or wait until January.

I sympathised to some extent, because it’s easy to think of convincing reasons not to do it. I've never been fired a week before Christmas, but I can't imagine it's very nice (equally I've never fallen off a cliff into a bed of barbed wire, but I'm pretty confident that's no fun either). In fact, I think it's fairly safe to assume that it would probably ruin that person's Christmas to a large extent. So it's a horrible thing to have to tell someone.

Then there’s the impact on the rest of your staff. Not only does it put a bit of a downer on morale in what is generally a pretty cheerful month, it also makes people look at you in a new light. It takes a certain type of person to sack someone just before Christmas, and some of your staff might not have realised you were the type. Equally, since lots of people will be away over Christmas, talking to their families about their jobs and reflecting on their place in the world after one too many Christmas sherries, there's a chance that it might take on an exaggerated significance. If nothing else, it's much harder for you to manage the fall-out than it would be ordinarily, simply because people aren’t around.

The problem is that as far as your business is concerned – and that has to be your key priority – the decision is fairly cut and dried. If you accept that nothing much gets done in the second half of December anyway, you don’t want to be paying someone you don’t even want to do nothing, and then pay them to do nothing again in January. Bite the bullet now, and those two weeks become part of their notice period. It sounds harsh, but unless you’re running a charity, you can’t afford to keep people on the payroll who aren’t delivering, particularly at the moment. And if you're serious about being an entrepreneur and building a great company, you have to be able to make horrible decisions like that, however much you may hate the idea.

Besides, I’m not even convinced that waiting until January is the humanitarian thing to do. Chances are the person concerned has an inkling of what’s coming (at least they should be, if your performance management systems are any good), so they’ll probably be fretting about it anyway. At least by getting it over with now, they can have Christmas off to lick their wounds, convince themselves it's all for the best, and focus on getting a new job in the new year. As for the impact on everyone else, it’s all about positioning: if you can persuade people that you’re doing this in the best interests of the business, which is ultimately in their best interests because it protects their jobs, then people aren't really going to hold it against you. And a bit of shock and awe every now and then probably doesn't hurt, anyway.

Still, easy for me to say. Rather her than me, was my overriding thought on the tube home.

At least the recession is forcing people to work harder at pleasing their customers.

I'm on a mission at the moment to try and find some upsides to this whole recession malarkey. I'm doing this because I am, at heart, an optimistic kind of girl, and all the constant doom and gloom is getting me down. This time last year, I figured the whole armageddon thing was, to some extent, a media-created storm in a teacup, so I'd be ok as long as I didn't read too many newspapers. But now it feels a lot closer to home, so it's not so easy to avoid (although ironically, the press seems a bit less gloomy - how does that work?).

And so to this week's ray of sunshine. As far as I'm concerned, the most important thing by far about going to a conference (as I did last week), is what you do afterwards: the largely tedious but usually fruitful business of following up leads. Obviously I start with the people who I think might give me work straight away, followed by those who have nothing for you now but may at a later date. But I reckon that even those who may never have anything for you at all are still worth contacting. If nothing else, it might mean that they say something nice about you to someone further down the line - which may be the difference between you getting work and not. Or they might end up in another job, where they can use you. It's a long game, but I think it's worth it.

As far as conference ROI goes, so far things are looking good: I reckon there's at least one project that we're almost certain to win (barring disasters), which we wouldn't have got otherwise. To me, that more than justifies the time I spent there (and the expense, had it not been free).

But that wasn't the recessionary ray of sunshine (I'm taking all the credit for that). No, I'm talking about the call I got from the conference organisers on Tuesday. In the good old days, I never really got the impression that events people cared that much about after-sales care: they were all about getting numbers through the door, and as long as people were happy to keep paying, they didn't give it too much extra thought. However, nowadays it's not so simple: they know they have to work a lot harder to justify their existence. Hence their follow-up call this week, to garner my feedback on the quality of everything from the guests, to the speakers, to the filling in the vol-au-vents (good, acceptable, indifferent, in case you're interested).

The catch to this, of course, is that they know as well as I do that if the suggested improvements involve them spending more money, there's only so much they can do. I might want the toilets wallpapered with gold lame, but at a time when they're already fretting about shrinking margins, that's not going to happen. Equally, for me the success or failure of the conference depends entirely on whether I get work out of it – and that comes down to me as much as them.

Still, at least they’re actually being encouraged to listen to their customers and work harder to give them what they want. With a bit of luck they might keep doing that once the recession is over. Assuming they last that long.