Oops! Did I mean FIRED?

Actually, no!

As Lord Sugar’s new edition of the UK’s The Apprentice gets under way this week, we have to ask ourselves why do all these thrusting young entrepreneurs want a job?

What is it about the mystical value of ‘I’ve got a job’ that makes them delighted?

Is it the sense of ‘I’ve won , phew, safe at last, never going to have to work so hard again in my life’?

Or is it that these thrusting entrepreneurs who join the programme are really just sales directors in disguise using that old trick of applying for the next job to get an increase in pay?

This the question I’m left with – if these contestants truly were entrepreneurs then why are they accepting a job?

Is this programme really about getting a job, after all?

Perhaps, to be fair, the job is seen as temporary anyway but an opportunity to learn alongside some very successful business people?

Still, putting the show to one side for a moment, why is so much of our culture focused on achieving a job or employment?

Governments talk about saving jobs, newspapers report jobs created and jobs lost. People who have jobs can (or used to be able to) get a mortgage and buy a house, buy a car and run up credit card debt on holidays and too much shopping.

A job, perhaps, is seen, subliminally as a ticket to spend. That might explain why everyone wants one. And answers the question of why Lord Sugar’s show is really just a job candidate contestant show.

This modern obsession with jobs is also one of the biggest barriers to entrepreneurial activity – that is, lots of work, little pay in the early days and lots of opportunity to lose money.

Fathers-in-law are in favour of jobs, because it means (or used to mean) job security and the ability to safely raise a family. The fact that this no longer applies sometimes takes longer to reach the older generation.

Perhaps it is time for Lord Sugar to express his deep regret at tying people to employment; by burdening them with massive tax rates, the illusion of wealth via debt and credit cards and the subsequent disappointment when the job career fails to develop as hoped, and all the wasted years that could have been fruitfully used trying and failing and trying again to create a business with long term residual value.

Lord Sugar, next time you deliver the bad news, I hope to hear you say…

“…with much regret and a heavy heart, you are HIRED!”

… and to your winner, you can rightfully say, “congratulations, you don’t need a job“.

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* I am much indebted to my youngest daughter and her very good school friend who came up with this headline. They are both 11. Who says the young can’t make it in business?

He explained that he felt confused that the Tories should wish to diminish entrepreneurial motivation, but acknowledged that there is a problem with ‘individuals who manage private equity funds who somehow magically turn their commissions made by creating gains for their clients from normal income into a capital gain.’

It seems as though that the Coalition are struggling to make distinctions between enterprising individuals and tax-dodging schemers. Hopefully George Osborne’s speech tomorrow afternoon will clarify a few things for Rags to Wreckages readers.

Alan Sugar

Alan Sugar, a UK entrepreneur with more than his fair share of grey hair, stoked controversy by stating that 85% of UK businesses that failed to receive bank finance had nothing to complain about.

Amid the controversy of whether he actually said this or not, we can still ask ourselves whether he has a point.

Essentially, he is saying that the reason that businesses don’t get finance is because they aren’t good enough.

His description is that many entrepreneurs are living in a Disneyworld.

Okay, let’s start with what did he actually say. He said

“The problem is that some younger people who have lived through the last 10 years or so of business and prior to that 10 years they may have just come from education, they lived through that period of the last 10 years where they think the irresponsible manner in which the banks dealt is the norm.

“Let me tell you, you lived in the Disneyworld, you have lived in the unrealistic Disneyworld in the way banks dished out money.”

“The moaners are bust. They are bust and they don’t need the bank – they need an insolvency practitioner.”

Okay, actually, he has a point.

Perhaps it is not so much our education or some people’s youth - but perhaps it is because our businesses became more and more unhinged (or leveraged) and the value they added became less and less clear.

Not so much that we became lazy during this period of excess – I certainly worked harder than ever – but we became relaxed. Relaxed about profits believing that so long as revenue was growing, we could always sell the business. Relaxed about staff performance, knowing that replacing mediocre staff was hard and may not deliver any improvements.

It is certainly true that during this time of excess we’ve seen huge salary and employee wage rises. Which is understandable, because you now need to earn a small fortune to buy a small flat.  Again, perhaps we became to relaxed about profit and too willing to share it with those who didn’t put up the risk in the first place.

We’ve also enjoyed higher taxation during the boom years which has swamped the public sector in money and built weak competitors that are poorly attuned to drought conditions.

Essentially, we have lived, as entrepreneurs, too well for too long and the arguments for the war on talent etc has encouraged us to turn a blind eye to poor or average staff performance and that coupled with the increasingly restrictive employment  legislation and ‘fear of losing good people’ has perhaps been the root cause.

Still, Alan Sugar is right when he says most businesses are not worth investing in. Especially those businesses built in the boom years and used to the easy sales that came with that time.

We now face a period of hard work grinding out results and delivering clear value. And that requires a major shift in the way we run our companies. It has been argued that the success of new start up businesses – or restarting enterprises -  is down to the quality of implementation and not the idea. This is a major shift in thinking.

The good news is that in this environment we can forget about our competitors and their threats to steal our carefully nurtured talent – we can now just get on with paying a fair rate for a great days work and focus entirely on the quality of implementation.

As entrepreneurs we have the opportunity to turn our businesses around or begin again, but this will be achieved mainly by going back to the simple things, making a profit always and being intolerant of mediocre performance from highly paid staff and becoming crystal clear about how we add value to our customers.

New businesses need to be value driven, they need to be grown without debt or with small business angel investments in order to prove the business model. And all business investment needs to be justified in clear revenue terms, questioned on a regular basis and pulled if it fails to achieve its objectives.

Growing a business without debt is hard work, but it is the most certain way to achieve success as it allows you to adapt your business model as you learn about how the market responds to your offering.