As pioneers of international commerce and industry, it is our responsibility to put an end to this recession nonsense. Globalisation has allowed us to develop as a race more than any other phenomenon, including sliced bread and hateful touch-screen phones. Cave-dwelling druids and those who use drugs more often than shampoo may moan about the loss of quaint local identities, but academics, business masterminds and even ornithologists all concur that it’s the way forward.
Cost cutting has to be considered, but any suggestions of tents in lieu of hotels, goats replacing hire cars, notepads in place of laptops, payphones instead of BlackBerrys, the West Midlands rather than Western Europe, should be scrapped instantly. More time off sounds good — a four-day week perhaps?
Further education might help, too. It’s an opportunity to do that IT course to outsmart the sharp-suited juniors at board meetings, with their threateningly low salaries and sickening energy. An MBA could be wise: with yet more letters after our names we would start to look like alternative medicine practitioners on paper, yet our new skills could actually be useful. After all, it’s not as if those funds put aside over the last ten years are going to accrue much interest in the next 12 months.
We need to fight for sales; we need to be ruthless and shrewd. Ask car dealers at the end of the month or WI representatives just before a church fête — they are the experts. If you can’t get an appointment, just turn up and storm in. If you get escorted out, try and sell to the security guard. You never know, he may be in the market for enterprise level PEG link diagnostics software. We might not be able to wine and dine customers to the same degree as before, but ten cans of lager can be just as effective for contract completion as two bottles of vintage Champagne.
Oil prices may have dipped briefly, but a litre of super unleaded is back over the 105p mark. Even when you remove the 65 per cent taken by Gordon to be shared between bankers’ pensions and your MP’s gold-leaf water feature, there is still a steady flow of the green stuff heading East. Doing business in Dubai et al is so much easier — there’s a corporate vivacity that’s as enthralling as it is profitable.
Recession is just as much a state of mind as it is an economic situation. It will weed out the annoying useless people within your organisation and knock out some of your competition. It will hone us so that when those property developers in Westminster and the imaginary money people in the City sort themselves out, we will be in a perfect position to start developing our own gilded water features.
Our seasoned traveller circles the globe in search of business, soft beds and good breakfasts
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