If you’re self-employed and running your own business, you tend to work very long hours. People put themselves under tremendous pressure. The upside is there is sometimes flexibility in the working week, compared to the traditional 9-5. If that gives you the occasional Wednesday off, from my point of view that’s a good thing. Liam Fox’s remarks about fat, lazy businessmen who would rather play golf than make deals draw attention to the odd Friday afternoon off rather than the working weekends or the laptops taken on family holidays that I think are far more common.
I’m one of three owners of a company importing food from all over continental Europe, selling mainly to supermarkets. Our turnover is £51m, we directly employ 32 people and many more indirectly. This year we are growing at more than 20% in terms of volume, but the issue is profit margin.
I typically work a 10-hour day, which is fewer hours than I used to work, and far fewer than many others. But when you have your own business you can almost never switch off. You’re always checking your mobile phone for emails, or maybe for the exchange rate. Customers need dealing with and deliveries get stuck at Calais – or a few times, recently, we’ve had stowaways on our trucks discovered at our depots.
The world of British retail expects you to react almost instantly: a presentation is often demanded at very short notice. I think the culture has become quite macho; I’ve worked an 80-hour week for the sake of it. The industry could probably function quite well under less pressure, but the big four supermarkets, who are key customers, are under huge pressure from competition with one another and the discounters, so it’s not their fault.
I’m a mediocre golfer. I’ve been playing for eight years and other than family and work it’s one of the biggest things in my life. I try to play every weekend. Our local pub has a golf society and I play a few times a year with them too. Do I play on weekdays? Very occasionally.
It’s bizarre to associate golf with being overweight or lazy, because golf is a form of exercise, and good golfers are incredibly skilled. The reason I love golf is because it’s so hard – you’re hitting a little ball with a big stick and when it goes right it’s the best feeling in the world, but it so often goes wrong. For me, being outdoors is the most important thing. It’s a relief to spend three or four hours in the open after 12 hours in the office. And I think it’s a good fit for people who work in business because we have a competitive streak.
Fox was talking about exporters, but it felt like a cheap shot at all businessmen. To talk about fat, lazy politicans would probably be an equally cheap shot. Golf is such an easy target – it has a slightly elitist, Jaguar-driving image that, like most stereotypes, has some truth to it. But it’s less like that than it used to be.
Our former chairman, who is now in his 70s, did a lot of deals on the golf course, but I don’t think I’ve ever done one. There are a number of people in my industry who like golf, and once or twice a year we might meet and play, but that wasn’t my reason for taking it up. It can be a useful topic for small talk in the lift on the way to a meeting, but it’s not the only one.
I’m not the only person who is working very hard and is very disappointed by the decision the British people took on 23 June. As an importer, Brexit is definitely bad for us. Why Fox chose to put down the very people he said were going to benefit from us quitting the EU, I don’t know. He must have had PR training – didn’t it stretch to not saying stupid stuff? One of the main reasons given to encourage people to vote leave was that Brexit would fix the trade balance, so we’d export more and import less. So it’s a self-destructive gaffe like Gerald Ratner saying his products were “total crap” to attack the exporters who are supposed to make a success of it.
