My dad’s accountant used to say to him “you can fill a bucket with a teaspoon”.
This week I watched a free webinar which I’ve not done a lot during lockdown, but it was from the London Business School and it was with Sir Jim Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe is the founder and two-thirds owner of INEOS which for a long time was ‘the biggest company you’ve never heard of’.
I know that nobody will click this link but you really should because it’s an extraordinary bit of work, so click here.
If you run your own business it’s well worth listening to what Ratcliffe has to say, despite the fact that he’s estimated to be worth approx. $20 Billion and runs a company which turns over $60 billion a year.
His company has a head office with 20 people in it and it’s still privately owned with only three individuals at the top.
That’s quite a tough thing to do.
When he was asked about leading through turbulent times in the webinar, he said that he hadn’t put much in the way of guidance into all the companies that INEOS owns except for finance control at board level.
This means that he said that you can’t buy pens in any of the businesses or office chairs or printers unless it’s signed off by a Director in the business.
When he was pushed on this in the questions about how onerous it might be, he explained that the way the process worked was that Directors in each of the businesses that INEOS has would have to sign at least 100 pieces of paper a day to authorise payment, five of which they would look at and 95 of which they wouldn’t.
The real trick was that nobody in the organisation knew which ones they would look at and which they wouldn’t.
That is an extraordinary lesson in governments and management.
You can’t see everything and you can’t look at everything but you can look and check and get a feel for what’s going on.
Also in these times if you run your own business (and I mean even if you’re a Dental Associate) you would want to be signing off your finance at board level for every single purchase you make until you have a much better idea of where things will be a year from now.
Blog Post Number - 2399
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