As with this coalition stuff, entrepreneurs have to be good at making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Last week you may recall me banging on about how inefficient democracy was a means of getting stuff done. Well, judging by the apparently rapid progress of all the coalition stuff this week, I may yet have to eat my words (never my forte). I'm normally pretty cynical about politicians, but after watching the Dave & Nick love-in the other day, even I was left feeling reasonably upbeat about the chances of it working out. Who knows - maybe this will be a new political dawn, where former rivals put aside their personal animosities for the sake of the national interest.

Or maybe not.

Still, given all the dire warnings after the Election about how disastrous a hung Parliament would be, all this new-found coalition optimism got me thinking about something my old non-exec said to me a few years ago. It was just after my most important employee - the guy in charge of sales - decided to defect somewhere else for a pay deal that was about twice as much as I could afford to offer him.

I must confess I slightly panicked when I found out. I had no idea how I was going to replace him, and I knew that the two sales people who worked directly for him would take it really hard. At that point, we were a bit smaller than we are now - and when you're that size, the loss of key people can be the difference between success and failure. So I rang this wise old boy for some advice, and this is what he told me: 'You have to remember, SD: every problem is an opportunity in disguise'.

Now at the time, I really wanted to smack him with something. What a load of trite nonsense, I thought. There's no upside to this problem whatsoever, I thought. The old codger's lost the plot - it's so long since he's been at the coal face that he doesn't recognise a crisis when it's staring him in the face, I thought.

Irritatingly, though, he turned out to be right. To be fair, so was I, at least to some extent - I had a look around for a replacement, and couldn't find anyone that I liked or trusted enough to give the job to. So in the short term, I decided to run the sales team for a while myself, to make sure the two remaining staff didn't feel abandoned. And when I did, it soon struck me that one of them - although still pretty young and inexperienced - had a lot of potential. So I spent a lot of time training and mentoring him, and six months or so later, I put him in charge of sales. To be honest, he was still way too inexperienced for it, but I decided to take a punt - and it paid off big time. The guy in question is now the character I've previously referred to as Mammon, my top salesperson and, after me, probably the most important person in the business. What's more, he's much better now than his predecessor ever was. So losing the first guy did actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

Since then, whenever I've lost someone good, I've tried to use it as an opportunity - a chance to bring in new skills and experience that we don't already have. The thing is, no matter how unpromising the situation looks, there's almost always a way to turn it to your advantage. And the better you are at that, the better you'll be as an entrepreneur.