Entrepreneurship

You may have noticed that I've been steering well clear of the cr**t cr**ch in these blogs so far. That's partly because I'm assuming you'll all be sick to death of reading articles about it – I know I am. And it's partly because I don't talk about it on principle, particularly at work. I agree entirely with Sarah Hunt's piece the other week: as MD, it's your job to keep your staff positive, and the best way to do that is to ban doom and gloom from the office altogether.

The problem is, it's getting harder and harder to ignore. Business news is suddenly top of the agenda: instead of being the boring bit buried away in the middle of the newspaper, stories about the economy are suddenly dominating the front pages. When you go out to the park on a Sunday afternoon, you see couples fighting over the business section, instead of using it to wrap up the remnants of their lunch. Even my mother, who wouldn't know a fiscal rule if it jumped up and bit her, has suddenly become an expert on the business world. I rang her up last weekend to hear all about my second cousin's wedding, and she spent half an hour telling me about Robert Peston's blog on the BBC (it looks like he's well on the way to becoming an extremely unlikely Thinking Woman's Totty).

In fact, I've noticed that my job has suddenly become a lot more interesting to all kinds of people. Previously when I told strangers what I do for a living, they'd either glaze over completely, or give me the kind of sympathetic look you normally reserve for the recently bereaved. Now they're desperate to talk to me about interest rate cuts, or the latest high street spending figures, or Government red tape. It's nice to be moderately trendy for once in my life, I guess. But to be honest I'm starting to pine for the days when people left me in peace. After all, there are only so many times you can hear the question: 'So how's the credit crunch affecting you?' before you start wanting to stick pins into your eyeballs.

I suppose the only reason I can afford to be so blasé about it is because my answer is still: 'not much' (clients are being a bit more cautious about spending decisions, but we haven’t actually seen sales drop off yet – touch wood). Indeed, if it wasn't for all the doom-mongers on the high street (which I'm not helping by single-handedly keeping ASOS in clover), I'd be tempted to think that Peston made the whole thing up as part of a world domination plan. But I figured that if I'm getting hassled about it, my staff will be too – and since they know less about the underlying health of the business than I do, they're more likely to worry about it. So this week, in the wake of Bradford & Bingley and all the drama in the US, I decided to break with habit and talk to them about it.

And actually, I'm glad I did. By mixing positivity (‘so far we’re doing ok, and we’re going to keep doing ok because we’re great and great companies always win’) with pragmatism (‘times are tough so we’re going to have to work our little cotton socks off’), I think I left them with the right mix of cautious optimism and stone-cold fear. Should keep them all on their toes for a while...