The most enjoyable session at the excellent RAW 2010 conference last month, for me, was the live interview on stage between hilarious scouse comic John Bishop and Peter Hook, musician and sometime nightclub owner.
Hooky, as his mates call him, created a fortune from record sales as the songwriter and bass player with Joy Division and New Order. The trouble is, that fortune was then ploughed into what was possibly the worst-run business in the North West’s commercial history, the Haçienda night club.
He told the tale of how the people who lost money on the bestselling 12 inch single of all time – New Order’s Blue Monday – also conspired to draw up onerous contracts with the brewery, the landlords and the bridging loan people. Even if they could have done a deal with the drug dealers and gangsters, you just know it would have been a bad one for Factory.
I’m enough of an anorak to have read his book, How Not To Run a Club, and can tell you with some excitement that it’s a riotous read. He clearly had the time of his life, even though he was lugging equipment around for £10 a night even as New Order were selling millions of records.
His initial reflections on the collapse of his venture were that, “well, we had a laugh”. But his accountant has told him that when he’s poor and old, and the money dries up, he’ll get bitter.
Hooky, now with that book to promote, a brand to exploit and a pension pot to fill back up, is much more of a commercial animal these days. He’s reopening the old Factory HQ on Charles Street with a new club called FAC251. He also owns the rights to the Haçienda name, and is doing it with someone else’s money as well.
There’s a danger that some of these business events make entrepreneurship sound glamorous and exciting. It can be, but the harsh truth is that it’s also punctuated with moments of bum-numbing tedium; contracts, mandates, agreements, warrants, management accounts, balance sheets.
So here’s the lesson I took from his book and his entertaining talk to an audience of entrepreneurs and wealth creators. Get the details right. Read everything before you sign it, spend time working out who your trusted advisers are and then listen very carefully to what they say.
Michael Taylor, editor