Be Excellent To Each Other

I feel it appropriate that amid the happiness we should have a dead serious thread where we can address the serious issues of the day. Reason is that there is stuff happening all over the news that is starting to impact our daily lives.

Until recently the economic bollocks in the news seemed to be having little impact (on me at least). Sure higher bills were a pain and fuel was a killer, but business levels were still fine.

Are you seeing the effects of the economic slowdown in your businesses? I'm finding that new business enquries are drying up which is a little worrying. There's work to be getting on with, but by Christmas things could start to be looking more serious. Having not traded through a recession before, I've got no experience of what to expect. Does a 3% drop in the economy translate to a 3% drop in new trade for my business? Or, more likely, will there be a bigger impact?

Are you in business? Are you seeing a slowdown? What are you doing to counteract it? Do you think this is going to be drawn out?

Libraries can only increase lending in such times, though our budget may shrivel. The 2% pay cap is frustrating too. More upsetting is that one of my friends has already been made unemployed because of it, and she's just taken out a mortgage on a flat. She's pretty clever, so I have confidence she'll find another job, but still...

As you say, its you self employed guys and gals I worry for. Hope you muddle through.

Oh, and Norman Tebbit's dead? When did this happen?

EDIT: Ahhh. Just 'dead serious'. I honestly read it as, "Norman Tebbit Dead, The Serious Thread'.

While I have sympathy for people with pay caps, sometimes I do feel like reminding them that if you are self employed you don't know what you'll be getting from month to month. Sure, when times are good you can do well but when times are hard or you need to invest in the business that's money you don't end up with. At the moment I'd settle for 2007-2008 levels of income frankly with no increase!

It is swings and roundabouts. Everyone will end up worse off, but the self employed can't protest to anyone or have any say in how much pay increase they can afford.

I don't know how it will pan out. I've not traded through a recession so I have no idea. I do know some industries are hit harder than others as are some areas of the country. A downturn I can cope with but the stories of "a switch being flicked" over the last couple of weeks seems to tally. The enquries have seemed to stop overnight and the number of freelancers looking for work has gone up.

Oh and the thread title is nicked from a regular section in the letters page of Your Sinclair. And he's not dead.

An embarrassed

True. I have it way better than most people. I think its left over chargrin from past years when the economy was okay and we kept getting below inflation pay rises year upon year. I don't have much to complain about at the mo'.



Aw man. Sorry to hear that. Hope that's just everyone catching their breath and scratching their heads, and that things pick up again pronto.

I was wondering how much in donations they'll get for Children in Need this year, as there won't be as many businesses looking to offload some spare cash.

Oh fuck yes. I have never worked through a recession/slump whatever we're in, but my Spidey Sense is telling me that I wont like it.

I am a quantity surveyor, my job centres around telling people how much it will cost to build things such as offices, supermarkets, houses, shopping centres and factories. I've worked on £20,000 toilet extensions to £150m city centre redevelopments and I really like my job. However, If people don't want to build these things then there isn't an awful lot of quantities to survey, so no work means no money and no money means no more gold plated teaspoons at Chateau The Egg. Needless to say, that at the moment things are incredibly nervous, no one is lending money to build without a tenant or purchaser in place and projects (that were once upon a time fairly lucrative ie 6 months ago ) are simply being postponed and put in boxes in the basement until such a time that tenants or purchasers are found. No one is building speculatively and work is seriously drying up; these jobs were in our annual fee forecast one week and out the next and that's how quickly things are changing. Luckily we are quite diverse so we weren't soley dependent upon the residential build otherwise things would already be quite sombre.

On top of this, I have very recently left a large international firms of consultants to join what is effectively a two man band*. Whilst I knew that they were very different I knew that the smaller company was the better choice in the long term (eventual share options, better working conditions etc etc) I was reluctant to leave my old job because I thought that I had job security. In fact it was one of the reasons that I nearly passed up the opportunity to move on. My old firm were the one of the only practices to not make redundancies during the slump of the early nineties. Within the last fortnight everyone in that company has been put on redundancy notice and they are expecting 100 people be sent packing next week. That doesn't bode well.

I am concerned, and I think I have looked at all of the financial shennanigans in a similar way to you. I really did think that it would sort itself out fairly quickly as so often we have been told that the boom bust cycle was a thing of the past. (Okay boom bust will always exist but not to such a massive degree). I think now is the time to start that 75 quid a month food budget!

Luckily the people that I work with are very good at marketing themselves and the business. They've been going for 20 months and really have done a good job at building a reputation. It's a new business that has alwaya needed to promote itself. Whilst we do have work we're just not as busy as we would like, but at least we're out there trying to drum up business and trying to make opportunities.

I find that it's tough getting my hopes built up at breakfast with news of billions being injected into the markets in the morning only to have them dashed at tea time by being told it's not enough!

The only up side to all of this is that we have a basement full of projects ready to go, as soon as things sort themsleves out we really will be laughing. But I think that it's going to be rocky along the way.


*Two pretty ace blokes actualy so work is now fun again.

And if I've got this right, Nervie P's cardboard library!

(The temporary buildings Blu Tack'd to the old WNO building by the Brains bridge)

Sorry, wasn't having a dig at you at all. I was trying to (badly) pass comment on the unions, tube drivers, etc that you see on the news who complain about only getting x% increases. Makes me furiously angry [CG Dimlie]

Ha! Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's where NP works.

Then that was one of my projects. A few million quid doesn't buy much does it!

edit - although I love the fence of books.

You have to fight it out. You can move faster and think on your feet better than bigger companies. One thing I've never done is operate a rate card. By avoiding rate cards you can quote for jobs on-spec, so if you really want/need the work you can drop below market rates. That comes in handy sometimes when growing the business. If you see a job you think can advance the business, you give a good rate on it. Likewise I always go the extra mille for charities to ensure I can work for them no matter what the budget. This works well for them but also works well for me because medium sized charities are well known so it gives you kudus.

But I am aware that people will be reducing their marketing spend so I don't know what will happen. It's hard to judge on a few weeks alone because I often suffer mini slumps for no reason and then have totally mad periods (June to September was mad). It may be that because I spent 3 months with my arse on fire I'm suddenly noticing this more.

The world won't end tommorrow. My client base is spread across a wide range of industries. But I do know that marketing budgets may be one of the first things to get slashed (although ironically I've just upped mine).

And without doubt the media is blowing this up. You only need to look at the BBC website news pages to see that. The slighest move in shares and the news stories flip flop between good news and disaster.

It is. And now its raining and the building is coming apart again. Can somebody pass me some selotape please?

This is very true. On the upside though, they're also one of the first things to get ramped back up again as soon as the upswing starts.

The insurance industry seems to be chugging along without too much trouble at the moment. The only problem is where the companies have invested their assets. If they're heavily reliant on Lehmann, or banks that have got into the shit (which is just about everyone other than HSBC) then they might have some liquidity issues, but I'm assured that we're okay in that department (I sit next to the investments guy in the office). I know from the accounts that we've got as much money in the bonus pot as we did last year, but also that the company is a lot less profitable (almost entirely due to investment income - we're still making money from underwriting).

So I can see that they'll probably reduce bonuses* to allow them to pay more dividends to increase confidence in the business, and will blame the lack of pay rises on market conditions.

Hell, as long as they don't make me redundant, I'll be happy, with things being the way they are!








*please note - these are not ridiculous investment banker style bonuses

We're ok, our stuff makes company's ERP financial systems (JD Edwards or Oracle) actually work properly and we have no good competitors.

Companies are suddenly very, very interested where their money is going and we can tell them that better than anyone else. We're having to renegotiate a couple of maintenance contracts but that's about it. We also launch our proper .net version this week (ribbon and everything) when previous it's been in our own language and ugly as sin. So there's a likely boost there too.

I work for a company that helps people get into business, whether going self employed or otherwise.

I've seen a slow down with people not wanting to risk it anymore.. but there has been an increase in the people looking for help as they're struggling. Strange times indeed!

I work for a company that relies on Government military expenditure, which is normally one of the first things hit in a downturn, so things are begining to look a litle bleak.

Really? In IT, during times of recession, everyone flees to civil service and military projects, as they are the most sheltered.

True. And people still need to sell.

I probably need to diversify. If things get bad I can start advertising the CD and DVD duplication. I do a little bit of it, but only for my customers and people who seem to find out I do it. Thing is that it's not terribly profitable.

One of my jobs is with a small salvage company. We've seen a worrying drop in enquiries and orders, and rough times have already started. I've responded by looking at their rather poor marketing efforts and planning my budget without including most of the money they'll owe me over the next couple of months. If things go well they can pay me back when business picks up, and things are more likely to go well if they don't have to shell out on me. At any other place I'd do nothing of the sort, but they've been good to me many times, and I can manage without for a while.

It is rather worrying, not so much for my job but for the business - most of the money's been tied up in stock for ages, and a lot of that stock is rather niche, and this isn't a good time to sell a novelty architectural doodad.

I'll probably suggest a sale and concurrent promotion in the local and trade rags tomorrow. I was always a little uncomfortable with some of our prices. It could go either way, really. I imagine it'll get a little better in a month or two when the bigger companies and councils that respond to this kind of financial uncertainty by freezing all spending indefinitely have put together a plan to ride it out.

I work for a company that makes e-commerce website for people - we're not quite sure how it's going to go, but it may actually work in our favour, with people opting for an off-the-shelf product like us rather than spend the extra on making their own. I think we're in a decent position financially as well, as we got a bunch of capital just before all this stuff blew up.

I'm hoping that there are another few interest rate cuts before next summer, as that is when my fixed rate runs out. I'm hoping I'll be able to re-mortgage at 3% or something.

Law firms are laying people off in droves at the moment, but mainly in the property departments (for obvious reasons - even commercial property transactions are way down) and the corporate departments (mergers and acquisitions work is down, as companies generally don't currently have access to the money they'd need to buy other companies).

We've been a bit slow for the last few months, but thankfully we do a lot of public sector work.

Things don't seem too bad here yet. The company I work for deals with Employment Law and Health & Safety so marketing are pushing the angle of 'if you're having to make redundancies, are you doing it properly?' kinda thing, which is obviously sad to see but got to play to your strengths I guess. On the H&S side of things, they're pushing environmental stuff hard as that's been pretty topical this year too.

Oh, fucking great.

You'll not be looking for a training contract for at least 18 months, mate, and according to E&Y the recession is going to be a short and shallow one, so all will be well.

Anyway - you don't want to do property or corporate. Trust me on this.

Seen alot of this stuff this year. Made one video about energy performance certificates, and spent two days covering a conference a couple of weeks back for a large corporate where they spent an inordinate amount of time banging on about the environment.

Well, I'm fortunate in that the company I work for put a headcount freeze on a few years ago, so I'm one of the few fortunates that was taken on permanently. As a result, I imagine there are others on my team who'd get the chop first (as harsh as that sounds) and even if I get booted out myself, I'll at least get redundancy. Even my own manager is a temp!

The electronics factory up the road from here just sacked most of its workforce.
It sounds like they had plenty of work to do, but HBOS withdrew a loan that they were operating on, so they weren't able to buy materials or pay anyone.

I'm sure on the TV the other day it was said the Government was just going to spend lots more money instead. Hence get lots of project scheduled for a couple of years ago started ASAP instead so that money gets into peoples pockets.

Granted probably more tax later but at least we’ll have jobs.

It is debated by economists as to whether this reasoning is sound or not; see the parable of the broken window for a discussion.

Well it worked for Hitler (subs please check).

The problem with Keynesian deficit spending during recessions is that it assumes you've spent the good times paying off debt, so you have some spare cash to lug about. I'm pretty sure we haven't done this, although I think we're in a better debt position than people like the USA, Japan, France and Germany.

Didn't Mr Blair actually write off our debt from Africa?

It was a G8 thing rather than specifically Blair, but then the total owed by the major African countries to all the G8 nations was only $40bn. Compared to the US national debt of $10trn, it's peanuts.

My career always gets walloped by down turns in the economy - but I'm not too bothered by it as I've felt it coming for the last 9 months. What I do get REALLY FUCKING PISSED OFF WITH ARE THOSE UNUTTERABLE CUNTS AT NORTHERN ROCK.
Our mortgage is with them and they're flushing their mortgage book as deals come up for renewal. This is because the well thought through bail out that Gordon and Alistair arranged involved them paying back the entire loan as quickly as possible, so all deals up for renewal or coming to the end of fixed terms are being encouraged to move on by them applying extortionate interest rates being.

So, they doubled our mortgage payments with two months notice forcing us into a very hostile mortgage market. We got a mortgage no problem, but get this, it was 2k less than our existing one (which is around 1.3% give or take a bit!) so including fees and buy out clauses it's cost us £6.7k to move mortgages because they owe the government a shed load of taxpayer's money because they're incompetent.

I want to burn down Northern Rock and toss those fuckwits from Westminster on the pyre. So, Christmas and my 40th birthday plans have been cancelled. Colour me impressed.

They're civil servants now. What do you expect?

They're not though, are they. It's only the later deals they bought options in the companies. With Northern Rock it was a bail out with the express intent that they pay back everything asap and go back into the real world. It just appears to be publicly owned but it isn't.

Still, I fail to find it getting stiffed out of nearly £7k in a depressed market where my income is down considerably funny in the least bit, so thanks for the considerate remark.

Oddly, it's not publicly traded, either - So what will happen when they do pay the funds back? Are there any Northern Rock shareholders any more? Who will own it once they've paid back the gubmint?

I suspect once the debt comes down a bit whatever's left will be sold off to someone with a bit of cash.

Rubbish of them to be penalising existing mortgage holders though - surely that goes against the whole purpose of the 'nationalisation'?

I don't think they gave any thought beyond stopping the run on Northern Rock.

Shortsighted and possibly very stupid for the government to be instrumental in people effectively losing their homes.

I'm unbelievably pissed off about all this - it's SEVEN FUCKING GRAND FERCHRISSAKES!

That sucks big fat hairy ones, mate. Sorry.

Geez dude, that's bad. If you don;t mind me asking, what was the 7k made up of? Did they bump up the rate and then make you pay a hefty early escape fee to get somewhere with a sensible rate? That's bloody harsh if they did. I read in the paper that Northern Rock are currently repossessing at about 20 times the average rate as well, so any kind of customer consideration is clearly being ignored.

That, I'm awaiting the same, soon.

I think they are very keen for the new nationalised bank not to set a precedent that will bring the country to it's knees, like Leyland etc did. So Northern Rock are going to be hard bastards.

But alot of people have lost alot of money over the past few weeks. I spoke to someone yesterday who had put a few thousand into a investment account only to see it virtually wiped out. Now granted that will eventually recover but to see hard cash you've put into an account virtually vanish overnight is pretty harsh.

About a third of the money is because the new mortgage is less than the existing one - basically it's the credit crunch in full swing. Regardless of the fact that the house was valued at more than twice the mortgage we needed (and that was three weeks ago), the rest is a early escape fee, legal fees, valuation and brokerage fees.

It's fucking stupid. They've been bailed out with taxpayer's money and they're screwing said taxpayers out of everything they can, including in a lot of regards, their homes, just so they can pay back the debt sooner rather than later.

So yesterday an email* was sent round announcing there will be a "Staff Consultation & Briefing" meeting for the company tomorrow, split in to 3 time slots with my area being in the last one. Nothing to worry about, just our annual review the company normally has this time of year. Although the "consultation" part is a bit worrying and the company hasn't had the best year. But if there was any bad news to give that would effect me they wouldn't have me in the last time slot surely.

This morning my boss asked my line manger what work I have on at the moment and what I have coming up.



I'm not feeling the most secure at the moment.

(Is it "an email" or "a email"? "a email" sounds right in my head but I know it can't be right)

'An email'. Hope it's not bad news, chap!

We had a letter go out today to everyone on the pension scheme. Telling them that they weren't any more, apparently.

Err, can they do that?

Well I think it was final salary and now it's "you can have back what you put in if you're lucky" or something. I'm not clear on the details obviously

I would've thought they could only do that to new starters, not existing members of the scheme...