There are thousands of business consultants: every consultant adopts maxims, which if you only follow them you will become rich beyond your wildest dreams.
The guy I am following, the philosopher Roger Scruton, is advocating a greater need for pessimism in the second decade of the 21st Century. In business terms I am interpreting this as a dismissal of the glib optimism of the first decade, where fair weather sailors were inevitably proved right – because it was fair weather.
With this philosophy in mind, and with the intention of dousing false optimism, I offer a series of three maxims, intended not to make you rich, but to keep your business afloat.
The first one reinterprets an old and in my view false maxim
Brill Maxim number 1
‘Look after the pennies and the pennies will look after themselves.’
This apparently circumlocutory statement directly attacks ‘meanies’ who spend valuable company time picking on the tiny extravagances of others, choosing second class post, or buying inferior equipment on the false premise that you will make the company vast profits – simply not true – the correlation between making tiny savings at the expense of investing time and effort trying to make big sales deals wastes effort, talent and blunts the direction of the company.
Take the meanies out of your company and replace them with good sales people.
