Principles

There is no date by which we are obliged to sell, so the calendar does not enter our arithmetic. The warehouse roof is fixed before it lets water in. The vans are replaced before they start causing the crews trouble on the road. A young person is hired and trained alongside an experienced technician for as long as that apprenticeship takes, not for as long as the year’s budget holds out. And there is a second in command able to keep the operation running on the day the person who always decided is not there.

There are years when our numbers look worse than they would if we decided on twelve months. Those are years we accept, because the obligation we carry, and it does not pass to some other owner a few years from now, is to hand each company to whoever comes next in better shape than we received it.

Every decision we take about a company reaches, sooner or later, somebody with rent to pay. That does not make hard decisions avoidable, but it obliges us to take them slowly, to explain them first to the person affected and only then to everyone else, and not to say “synergy” when we mean redundancy. We will not win a deal by treating someone lightly.

Neither of us asks another person for a risk we are not running at the same time. It holds inside the group: we do not ask a manager for a hard decision whose consequences do not also reach us. It is also why we do not promise anyone a result that does not depend on us.

Each customer relationship stays with whoever built it, even when estimating or planning come to be shared across a region. Whoever answers a breakdown has to know which boiler it is, where the distribution board is and what happened last time, and whatever we share has to help with that, not replace it. It costs us some of what centralising would save, and we accept that cost.

Everything written on this page is easy to keep to in a good year. The test is the year when keeping to it costs us a deal, a customer or a number we promised, and that is the year we should be judged by.