Entrepreneurs and The Bees Country Kitchen

One way or another, I've worked for myself for over twenty-four years. In 1991, just after Charlie was born, I started working freelance as an IT contractor. The set up was fairly simple: large businesses running mainframes would sometimes require additional staff for large projects and they would ask specialised recruitment companies to find staff. As a contractor, you'd send your CV 'round the agencies and they'd try and place you.

Back in those pre-Web days it was a pretty cumbersome process, not aided by the fact that many of the agents were pretty unscrupulous. I did all right, though, and I was only ever out of work once, for a couple of months at Christmas 1999, while everyone bunkered down, waiting for the blight of the Millennium bug, which never quite arrived and, where it did alight, was generally dealt with quickly and privately. 

I enjoyed some good projects during those years, working hard and, sometimes, long hours, but it's true to say that I enjoyed myself for the most part. There were lots of good people around and I'm still friends with people I've met from almost every contract that I ever took on. Occasionally it was a bit stressful but, as our American cousins might say, back then I didn't know from stress.

I started my own business properly in 2004 and I suppose the two defining characteristics of that were that, firstly, I was employing people, and, secondly, that I needed to find my own clients. The other not immediately apparent problem was that I'd never run a proper business before, and that's harder than it looks. 

Everything went pretty well for eighteen months or so but then, slowly but surely, the chickens started to come home to roost and showed not signs of leaving. I've always slept like a log but around the summer of 2007, I'd wake every night, worrying about where the next project might come from. And despite the support of those around me, I knew that, ultimately, the buck stopped with me; I was the only one who couldn't simply go and find another job.

That said, I would never have made it through without some of the people around me, notably Dan and Abi's mum, who took on all of the financial and administrative work, and, particularly, Steve, who's now my co-director, who displayed a consistently ox-like approach to the work that we needed to do pull ourselves forward. 

And during these years, I developed a strong affinity for anyone else who was running their own business. As the decade came to a close and I saw businesses going under on the high street, I'd feel a nauseous pang for every empty shop I saw. A small client of ours went under and when the papers came through, I saw the owner had put ninety thousand pounds of his own money into the business. I could keenly sympathise with the sleepless nights that he must have endured.

So, as you'll have inferred, I'm full of admiration for anyone who runs their own business, although to be clear, I'm not talking about some chief exec at a bank that fleeces its clients and reports billion pound profits, while he takes of home millions of pounds. The cad Fred Goodwin, for example, who oversaw the largest loss in the UK's corporate history, never lay awake at night worrying about paying the mortgage and feeding his family. No, I'm talking about the small entrepreneurs, who start and grow their own businesses. 

I mention all of this because on Saturday the Minx and I popped down to Chorley market to have lunch at The Bees Country Kitchen, which is run by our friends Mike and Sarah (the ones who DJ'd at the Minx's party last week). They only launched the business this year and it seems to be going very well. It certainly deserves to; their food is amazing. And chatting to Mike today, I felt quite drained listening to how hard they're working to get the business off the ground. I'm honestly not sure I could go through that again!

Over the years, I've heard both Tony Blair and David Cameron plus sundry other government ministers praise entrepreneurs for their hard work, citing them as the lifeblood of the economy, their hollow words and platitudes never showing any real sympathy or understanding of the hard work and stresses that are involved or, indeed providing any real support. Not that most entrepreneurs of my experience are looking for handouts. Just bear in mind that for the hundreds of thousands of pounds I've paid in corporation tax over the years, Amazon started paying theirs in May, this year: that's eleven years and £5.3 BILLION of sales to British shoppers for which they paid HMRC no tax at all. (Ref here.) If nothing else, I would like a more level playing field and a government that didn't let the big companies - hello there Vodafone, Google et al - avoid their tax while we work so hard to pay ours.

So, if you're going out to eat this lunchtime or to buy a book or a present for a friend, can I respectfully suggest that you turn your back on those tax avoiding corporate monsters, and go and find a small business to support? And if you're in Chorley and feeling peckish, you could do a lot worse than head down to the market and The Bees Country Kitchen.