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If you’re chewing your nails wondering if you’ll have a job next week, let me announce officially: things are getting better. And the source is impeccable.
This isn’t because I’ve been slipped a secret Treasury report. (It did happen once, but that’s another story.) It’s because companies are booking training again.
The bad news about running a training business is that your core product is almost the first thing that companies slash when profits drop. So you can imagine how much fun it’s been over the past nine months.
When you’re struggling to survive and having to make whole departments redundant, a training budget is a luxury on the same level as mink-lined lavatory seats.
Trying to drum up business by calling up old mates and regular clients provoked the identical response: we fear that any light at the end of the tunnel is probably an oncoming train.
Once, it was a battle to get through the media centre doors. Lunches were costing us hundreds a week. No more. The place was quieter than a Fulham home match. To think I was whingeing because I was so busy.
Many tutors felt that they’d fallen out of favour. It wasn’t that: just nothing for them to do. Talk to the bank? Huh! They were too busy saving themselves.
Another six months at that sort of level of inactivity and we would have joined the one in 55 companies that has sunk beneath the waves.
But the past month, thank goodness, has been healthier. Black figures rather than red. The phone’s been ringing. The website’s trebling, quadrupling its number of hits.
So take it from me, boss of Bellwether Business: the world isn’t going to end just yet, because it’s training again.