Third yearbook in my ‘loo library’, says author

PROLIFIC author and businessman Robin Bennett has written the third in a series of light-hearted yearbooks, which he sees as ideal reading material for the smallest room in the house.

In The Entrepreneur’s Almanack, which is out now, Robin has returned to an old theme of his.

“It’s the last — or the last until I come up with another idea — of a series of short yearbooks that I’ve written,” he says.

“I’ve had a lot of fun doing ‘Bennett’s bog books’, as we call them.

“The last one I wrote last year was The Good Snooze Guide of Great Britain and the first was Field Sports, Foraging and Terrible Ordeals, the year before that.

“They’re kind of autobiographical and they concentrate on different areas of my life. This one is about my life in what we now call entrepreneurship.

“The almanack is slightly tongue in cheek, I’m slightly writing a parody of an almanac in that of course I don’t believe that you should never invest in coffins at the start of November, but I do believe in just keeping an eye on how the year changes and also how season changes inform the way a business works.

“I don’t mean if you’re selling tomatoes or something strictly seasonal. I think all businesses have a kind of seasonality to them.

“You didn’t say ‘entrepreneurship’ when I started out because people were very wary of that word, it would make you sound like a bit of a bighead. I’ve done a few books on the subject, in fact my very first book ever published which was years ago by Harriman House was on how to start low-cost, low-risk businesses. So that’s how I kind of started out on the writing journey anyway.

“But I’ve since quietly — just in case Harriman House are listening — always felt that you slightly had to be more businesslike about the whole question of being an entrepreneur.

“In fact, that’s not my experience at all. In my experience of being an entrepreneur, of starting 12 or more companies, none of them made me a billionaire but none of them have ever gone bust or ended up owing people money or anything like that.

“They’ve all paid their way and some of them have more than paid their way and my experience is you don’t have to be hard-nosed.

“I suppose the conclusion I reached after about 10 years was that in commerce you make quite cold, conscious business decisions and that’s how you move the business forward.

“I never really found that to be the case and then fast-forward 20 years into it and now I guess
30, 35 years, it’s a lot more subtle than that.

“I think there’s an awful lot of gut feeling in business, there’s an awful lot of divine providence in business that actually doesn’t get the attention and the acclaim it deserves.

“I think so many business decisions are taken on your gut feeling and actually that seeps over into day-to-day decisions.

“Most people, when they get around possibly to buying a house, frequently have decided by the time they reach the hall that that’s the house they’re going to buy, ‘there’s something about it but that’s the one for me’.

“Big decisions are made on this kind of what we call instinct — and I think that instinct needs to be celebrated.

“I think first and foremost that’s what The Entrepreneur’s Almanack is about. It’s sort of my throwing my hat in the ring and saying, ‘yeah!’.”

Robin lives in Queen Street with his wife, Helene, and their two younger children, Victor, 19, and Hortense, 16. The books are illustrated by their eldest son Jude, 21, who is studying business and modern languages at university in Bristol.

“Almost anyone can start a business,” he adds. “You don’t need to fit that calculating, very assertive mould.

“I decided that yes, I would listen to my gut. I also decided that when the chips are down — and by god they will be down sometimes — things will look absolutely awful at times, but having a sunny disposition and trusting to luck, there is a sort of an odd kind of power in that. I’m not treating it like a tool cynically, you have to feel it. But if you feel it, then go with that and run with it, you don’t need an awful lot else in business.”

His experiences in publishing and running businesses have combined.

“A good business is very much like a good story. They both have to have a good narrative and, good characterisation, because it speaks to people on a level which they can empathise with.

“I find giving a business a heart and a soul, and it’s all wrapped up with this optimism and everything else, is a real help and that’s what I’ve tried to get across in the almanac, that like a person’s fortunes, it goes up and down.

“It is a feel for the future, but like the other two yearbooks, because they’re just five-, 10-minute reads, I call it books for the loo library.

“I’m writing a 90,000-word book at the moment. Subject to tweaks, it’s called Dreadnought and it’s a family mystery set on an island and that spans the Second World War right up to 2037. It’s all about family eccentricity and the things that get said in families and don’t get said.

“I always find that intriguing about all the great novels like The Forsyte Saga and the absolutely brilliant Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, where it’s what’s almost not said, rather than what’s being said sometimes is more interesting.”

l The Entrepreneur’s Almanack, by Robin Bennett is out now from all good bookshops, priced £9.99. For information, visit robinbennett.net