Real Business

Some years ago, when our business became successful and we started to create cash, I was warned that a private business with money in the bank may have to pay extra tax.

The adviser needn’t have bothered – every time a cash pile is about to appear, we find a new project that soaks up the money. We have just found another one.

In 2005, Alex persuaded me to buy a pub, The White Eagle. Our new holiday cottage on Anglesey was in a culinary desert.  Alex doesn’t like cooking, so a pub of our own was the perfect solution.

But Alex doesn’t do mediocre. She knocked it down and spent £1m to create the best dining pub on Anglesey. It worked. Turnover went from £200,000 to £1.2m in no time.

When The Maelog Lake Hotel – in Rhosneigr, 15 minutes away from The White Eagle – came on the market I didn’t take much notice. But James did. He saw The Maelog as a way to develop another pub, plus more holiday homes for our colleagues.

I sometimes wonder whether James is becoming exactly like his mother. Five months after buying The Maelog, James suddenly said: “I think we’ll have to knock it down!”

Two months later, he took a few of us to Newquay for lunch at Fifteen, the restaurant concept conceived by Jamie Oliver, which doubles up as a training school for young unemployed people.

“This is my idea for The Maelog,” announced James, who was already seeing success with his employment programme for ex-offenders, including a workshop in Liverpool Prison. “We would bring new hope to many young people on Anglesey,” he said.

When Alex and James have an idea, nothing stands in their way. They share their dream for The Maelog, but they won’t find it easy to get what they want. The project will be run as a charity; they need to attract funding, satisfy the Charity Commission and get planning permission.

Now, we’re used to doing our own thing. Normally, we don’t answer to shareholders and have never been curtailed by bank covenants. But before The Maelog gets the all-clear, we’ll have to satisfy several agencies’ best practice and good governance criteria.

We’ve already had a hint of the hurdles ahead. For three years, we have tried to get our fair share of the government training billions (much of it is siphoned off by training agencies before a fraction filters through to shop-floor training).

But our successful apprentice scheme failed to fit in with the government process – we had to learn how to tick the right boxes to claim a modest bit of the money on offer.

Our people prefer repairing shoes to paperwork, so we have given Amanda from finance the role of company box ticker – she now spends her life filling in forms for everyone else.

With passport photos producing five per cent of our turnover, we were keen to capture the data when it was proposed that passports become biometric in 2012. That’s why we completed our first PQQ (pre-qualification questionnaire), which was the first part of the procurement process carried out by the Home Office.

We soon discovered they speak another language altogether. The questions were so difficult to follow, we were advised to employ a consultant. So we asked our auditor, who apologised, saying: “You can’t use our senior man, he wrote the questions for the Home Office.”

The questionnaire hinted that to gain government approval, we would need to acquire some new qualifications. “How do we pass the test?” I asked.

“Go on a course,” I was told. “I’ll give you the names of a few consultant service providers.”

It was at this point that I realised that our country isn’t run by the government or its civil servants. We are controlled by consultants,
who believe the world is run by processes in preference to common sense.

By getting involved with these projects, Timpson’s independence is about to be challenged by obstinate bureaucracy – Amanda may have more work than she can handle.

So far, I haven’t found a way to beat the system but, for the sake of the young people on Anglesey, I hope the system doesn’t beat us.