Category: Industry Mole

I spilt some water on my keyboard. Not a lot, it popped up when I opened the bottle. I wiped it away immediately, even gave the entire laptop a (to be honest, well overdue) clean and tried to get back to work.

About ten years ago, when one of Mole Graphics’ largest customers went bust, owing us a shedload of money, I spoke to the bank about a loan. They were polite and enthusiastic until they ran the figures. We were not, they said with a tinge of regret, eligible for a loan unless I could persuade two of our other large customers to confirm, in writing, that they would continue to buy print from us for the next five years. I tried to explain that I could probably get these letters but, given that many print buyers changed jobs every couple of years, they would be essentially meaningless.

Don’t you just hate chasing unpaid invoices? I don’t get involved that much. Our persistent, pertinacious and polite people in accounts do most of it but occasionally I’ll pitch in if they feel they’re making absolutely no headway or the client is being wilfully obtuse (which, to be fair, is relatively rare).

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about signs recently. That will come as no great shock, given that they are such an important part of Mole Graphics’ business. These reflections were prompted by a trip to the library to collect a potboiler crime novel. I realised that, depending on which sign you believed, it was either open straight through from 10am to 5pm or, as it turned out, closed for lunch between 1-2pm. I wasn’t the only one left dumbfounded: at the door, a three-year-old boy was trying to persuade his reluctant mum it was worth waiting for ten minutes until the library reopened and the nursery-style singalong – which, from personal experience, invariably features a round of ‘Wheels On The Bus’ – would begin.

“You’re fired!” I can’t wait for someone at the BBC to say that to Lord Alan Sugar after what feels like the 478th series of The Apprentice, a TV show that sheds about as much light on running a small company as Jack and the Beanstalk does on the forest products industry. For me, Sugar is a one-hit wonder, or maybe one-and-a-half hit wonder (Amstrad plus making satellite dishes for Rupert Murdoch), the Kajagoogoo of British business. To my mind his enduring profile says more about the paucity of the media’s imagination, than it does about his actual achievements or indeed the quality of British management.