My blog

Tag: Business

  • Iain Dale on his experience as a business-owner: “There were a couple of times when I nearly couldn’t pay the salaries”

    Iain Dale on his experience as a business-owner: “There were a couple of times when I nearly couldn’t pay the salaries”

    Iain Dale

    I’ve now founded or run seven different companies. Tony Benn called me once his favourite Thatcherite entrepreneur and I’d say to him, “Well, how many Thatcherite entrepreneurs do you know, Tony?” and he said, “Well, you’re the only one.” 

    I suppose all my companies have worked to one degree or another but I’ve never particularly made any money out of them – but then I never went into them to make money which is maybe a mistake! But then most of them have revolved around books and publishing – and anybody who knows anything about books and publishing knows that it’s not a particularly lucrative area.

    But I’ve employed a lot of people over the years. I would like to think that most of them would think I was a good employer, and that I treated people well, and that I paid them decently. You learn a lot from running your own company. I remember when I started the bookshop Politicos in 1996, I don’t think I really comprehended that cash flow is more important than profit at that time. I started off with very little money myself – perhaps around £20,000 to put into from a pay off from a previous company. I raised another £40,000, but it was madness to start a business like that, with essentially no working capital. 

    I did it for seven years, and it was always on a financial knife edge. I was always thinking about, “Who do I pay now? Who do I put off paying?” There were a couple of times when I nearly came close to not being able to pay the salaries at the end of the month and that really concentrates the mind. 

    Anybody who employs people knows that you make some wrong decisions. I was saying all this to the managing director of a FTSE 250 company in the late 1990s. I’d just employed somebody as a bookshop manager, and had to get rid of him after about a week because I just knew that he wasn’t up to it and that I’d totally misjudged him from the interviews. He said: “Don’t beat yourself up about it. If I get one in three hires right, then I think I’m doing well.” So that gave me a lot of comfort, actually.

    I have had to sack people too. Anybody who thinks that an employer finds that an easy process is deluding themselves. It’s awful. Often it’s happened that I’ve had to get rid of people for different reasons – and it’s probably the main reason I don’t want now to start another company. I don’t want the responsibility of it – and it is a huge responsibility. 

    When I was running Biteback Publishing, I think at one point we had 20 employees –  and that’s the most I’ve ever had at any one time. And I really thought, “If I make one wrong decision here, I put 20 people out of work”. That to me was the biggest responsibility that anyone can have. I left about two and a half years ago now, and I thought I would miss it. In actual fact, I haven’t missed it as much as I thought, and I think I know why. It’s because the responsibility of it all preyed on my mind a lot more than I realised at the time. It’s such a relief not to have to worry about cash flow anymore.

    So all in all, I like what I’m doing now, especially the radio broadcasting. I actually don’t enjoy writing; in fact I have a major case of Imposter Syndrome about that. I’ve always been able to talk. If I never appeared on television again, it wouldn’t bother me at all, and as a result I’ve done very few television programmes. Writing for me is really a way of bringing people to the radio programmes. Really I’ve edited about 40 books but only written two. So I’m very lucky to do what I’m doing and I don’t miss my life as a business-owner one bit.

  • How to create more leadership opportunities for women

    Patrick Crowder

    While things have come a long way, there is still much work to be done to increase the representation of women in the workplace, especially in top-level roles. According to the female leadership non-profit Catalyst, only 34% of UK companies have a female directorship. Change in this area is not coming quickly, with only a 2% increase from 2019.

    The leadership consultancy Impact International has assembled a report which shows the best ways to create more leadership opportunities for women. The first is to promote internally rather than looking outside of your business for top-level hires. By prioritising skills over board experience, a business is able to find excellent candidates for top roles who may not have had the opportunity to serve in such a position before. Many candidates with years of experience serving in senior roles are men due to higher promotion rates and more opportunities, so it is worth looking to women who already work in your company and display leadership potential rather than discounting them for lack of formal experience.

    Leadership training programmes are another great way to elevate the skills of your entire workforce, while providing women with an opportunity to lead which they may not have had in their professional careers. Additionally, having employees of all genders working together on leadership programmes can have the effect of removing deep-seated stereotypes and expectations of women in leadership roles which some employees may not even know that they have.

    If you are interested in elevating your business by helping to end gender inequality at the top levels of management, there are many resources available. The non-profit Catalyst is a good start, as well as the women-led research company Seramount which has researched and advocated for gender diversity since 1979. The tools to make change are out there, and it is up to businesses to put them to good use.

    Credit: https://www.impactinternational.com

    https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-on-corporate-boards/

  • China Focus: Behind the Red Wall

    China Focus: Behind the Red Wall

    Our Woman in China gives us her take on the nuclear arms race in education between China and the rest of the world

    This is going to be quite a year in China. There’s going to be about eight and a half million graduates in China – and that’s a figure which dwarfs any figure you can imagine in the UK. They’ll be graduating into the toughest job market in living memory.

    It’s worth considering the history. Before 1990, China’s was essentially a planned economy and everybody had roles given by the state. Since then, the economy has grown by around ten percent a year. Unemployment has been incredibly low. Now lots of factors are happening at once. With Covid-19, there’s speculation that you have 100 million unemployed people in China right now.

    Concurrently, you have automation which is happening dramatically in China, with every company becoming leaner. So all these graduates are going to be piling in to this very problematic situation. And there is such faith in education in China. In the 1980s and 90s, if you went abroad and studied, let’s say engineering, and you came back to China, it’s quite likely you’re a millionaire at this point, or senior in the government. Why? Because you brought back information that was incredibly valuable and gave you a massive strategic advantage. Because of that, you now have a generation of parents who believe education is a fast track to employment. That’s heart-breaking as the young today are ill-equipped for the modern world in terms of creativethinking and communication skills.

    It’s an incredibly depressing situation. I speak to a lot of students doing undergraduate degrees and they’re looking at the realities of the economy and thinking, ‘Should I go and get a Masters?’ But even that doesn’t guarantee a job now – when for their parents’ generation, it did.

    That means there’s a major problem for Chinese students studying in the UK: they’re not getting their return on investment. In China, these young people are called ‘sea turtles’: even after having studied in a good, solid university in the UK, they’re unable to get jobs. All this will be detrimental to the higher education system in the UK. There are 900,000 graduates from UK universities in China, and there could be a big shift where Chinese students start to wonder whether it’s worth studying abroad if you don’t get a job at the end of it.

    I don’t think the effects will be felt immediately. Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard. These wealthy people will have better connections, and so they’ll end up with jobs and power, and will end up running the country and the biggest companies. That’s a powerful example; it might take 20 or 30 years for these trends to be felt.

    Working against all this is the fact that China is going to go global at some point. So if a young person understands the UK, they are going to be a natural person to go and work in that London office at some point. The historical trends are clear. In the 50s and 60s, China was all about manufacturing; suddenly in the 70s and 80s, we had Sony and all these other companies booming around the world. But global China is in the future. This year’s graduates will fall through the cracks because none of this will have kicked in yet.

    As someone who has been here for 15 years, I would say the UK doesn’t understand that China is absolutely zero sum. China doesn’t want its students to go to the UK and spend lots of money. It wants to learn as much as it can from the UK, the US and Australia and then it wants to export its own education. You only need to read the state media to understand the undertones of what they’re really thinking and what they’re really plotting right now. The longerterm goal is that they don’t want to send anyone to the UK. That’s not explicit, but I would guarantee you it’s the case if you speak to the highest levels of government in China. Why would they want to give money to the UK?

    I’ve probably become a bit more patriotic since I’ve been here: if I had to back a team, I’d like to back the UK. The UK education system is filled with people for whom education is a vocation. They believe in the system. They’re autonomous, and opinionated: it’s filled with brilliant people. In China, nobody has any autonomy; it is control-based. I don’t want that system to win. China’s version of history is that there is only one version of history. Our discipline of history is that you have analysis and the past is open to interpretation. It’s not a good thing when education is used as a weapon to control a population or to politicise everything. I would love to see the UK compete, but I fear that a lot of UK universities are very slow, siloed and very complacent. China is moving incredibly quickly.