THE CURSE OF NEGATIVE NELLY

When you’re working hard to keep a small business afloat, there’s no room on board for a crew member who’s an eternal pessemist, says Guy Grieve

There is no room for pessimists in Guy Grieve's business

During the past 11 years of founding and running The Ethical Shellfish Company in remote rural Scotland, I have learnt much. It’s been a ‘Red Neck’ MBA of sorts.

From distribution to accounts, from packing and catching to marketing and sales and much more, it’s been all about hard lessons taught outside in a hostile world that is a long way from the cossetted land of theory.

One of the key early lessons I learnt was the absolute importance of building everything from the customer back. To understand what exactly my target customer really wants and to discover this for yourself, not by spending endless hours looking at research and other abstracted marketing or by paying some nitwit student in a public relations company, but by meeting your customers. And then, armed with firsthand feedback, we were able to tailor our operation to exactly match what our beloved customers needed.

We also learnt that there were no shortcuts. And that the smart-arsed, quick ideas that seemed so wonderfully clear cut didn’t work. We learnt that for every problem there was a simple, straightforward answer which was invariably wrong.

So it soon became apparent that we had to build our business around the belief that yes, the numbers have to be good but above the figures we need to work with good people. And time and time again it’s the relationships which we have built that have saved us money or lifted us out of the jaws of disaster during times when the numbers would have deserted us in a second.

In fact this issue of people gets to the very heart of things. Just as one can have a near perfectly built boat – but without the right crew it’s nothing. So with our tiny fishing business we have learned how important it is to find and keep working with people of good character no matter what the cold detached numbers might tell us.

HR is, of course, the black magic of every endeavour. Get it right and you’ve got something rugged and dependable. Get it wrong and you will quickly find yourself living in a petty, claustrophobic and negative realm full of the kind of annoying bitchiness that might easily drive one to drink.

Remote rural business can become islands of happiness, light and thrift or hellish isolated cantonments of pure blackness.

One of the greatest dangers for hapless employers is to find themselves having to deal with negative people.

Negativity is utterly deadly, for the negatron employee becomes an active agent of destruction. Generally these bleak people are deeply unhappy themselves and yet for many reasons simply cannot accept that they are the cause of their unhappiness.

Typically, these loost souls blame everyone else but themselves for their sad lives and rapidly these people become deadly for the business as they actually want things to go wrong. In fact they need things to go wrong in order to justify their dismal world view. They long to shrug their shoulders and say: ‘I told you this was going to happen.’ And of course they know nothing about just how hard it actually is to establish and run a business.

Sadly the law makes it impossible to immediately root these funereal types out of a business. In fact the road to ridding one’s enterprise of these enemies within is endless and costly. In a remote place where people are scarce, and really good people even scarcer, it’s an unnerving place to be as an employer.

So is having a negative worker better than none at all? Once upon a time I’d have hesitated to answer this question. However, now I can answer with zero delay. If you’ve got a pessimistic pest in your business who thinks they’ve got you over a barrel just give them both barrels. Do your legal working out and tell them to ‘Go forth and be fruitful’ though not in those words.

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They need things to go wrong in order to justify their dismal world view