Category: Industry Mole

The Russian government insists that Vladimir Putin has no opinion about Brexit. If so, he must be unique. I suspect that, like me, you have long since stopped listening to the posturing and pontificating on either side of the campaign – although the celebrity endorsements can be quite amusing. For every Sir Michael Caine who wants us out, there’s a Paul Cook, the Sex Pistols drummer who insisted that Brexit isn’t “punk”. Glad we’ve got that cleared up.

Noel Coward put it best: “The customer’s always right, my boys/The customer’s always right/The son of a bitch/Is probably rich/So smile with all your might.” Sometimes, it can take a lot to smile. Like the other day, when a customer phoned me just after we’d done a reasonably complicated rush job for him at a nanosecond’s notice and complained that he thought our prices were a bit steep.

Word of the year for 2016 seems to be ‘smart’ – five letters that when put together means something incredible, intuitive and beyond all other normal things.

We tried again in 2015 to recruit a sales rep that would be ‘in the field’ every day, bringing in new, lucrative business for us. They came on board in April, having spent the past ten years working for the three largest companies within our market sector and with a good track record of sales. As usual, it ended in tears four months later with minimal sales and lots of excuses. Our mistake this time was not realising that we had recruited an average account manager. What we actually wanted was a hunter gatherer.

At this time of year I like to spend some time talking to friends and foes in the industry and catching up on what everyone’s been up to. General consensus is that it’s been a busy year and I’ve yet to speak to anybody that isn’t happy with how things have been recently. Even the “stack it high, sell it cheap” brigade have been increasing their print prices over the last two years.