The first type of entrepreneur
This essay covers two topics in my life. They run into one period so I am putting them into one story. I had the second part already posted, but it seems to have gone astray, so I'll have to rewrite it.
When I took early retirement and redundancy from Plessey, I did a bit of freelance writing for a firm in Hampshire. This was not a success so I went along the the Job Centre at Kingston. A firm in Kingston wanted a Quality Engineer. I applied for the job, and got it. But I didn't realise what I was letting myself in for. I reported direct to the Quality Manager. It turned out that he had previously worked for a nuclear company as a quality engineer. He had hope to advance his career by accepting a job as quality manager with this company. He too, had an awful letdown.
If anyone in the Quality Industry reads this essay he/she will fully understand what a cowboy outfit the firm was. My boss had written the quality manual to allow the company to gain a BSI accreditation to ISO 9000. It was then BS5750. This accreditation is to approve the way that the company managers its business. The whole accreditation started with the MoD accrediting companies to a Defence Standard. The Standard became a civilian standard, and later an International Standard. The requirements are a bit bureaucratic, but it requires a firm to maintain proper records and operate proper procedures. And all the controls are required to be written in the Quality Manual. The manual can, of course, refer to lower-level documents, but all these have to be strictly controlled as well.
To satisfy the old MoD requirements, the Quality Manager had to have to authority to stop production at any instant he decreed. But what is written may not always be what takes place.
The company manufactured and installed computer and display equipment for City Traders. And because some of the activity took place via telephone lines, there was a regulator that oversaw the equipment and that it met the GPO (later British Telecom) requirements. Every bit of equipment was recorded, including serial numbers of all printed circuit boards (PCBs) et cetera.
I was given the job of carrying out audits at the various sites where equipment had been installed. I was horrified at the sloppy way spares were stored. It was obvious that the actual installation staff were as sloppy in their methods as I later discovered the factory management was. Printed circuit cards were strew across the concrete floor in a store room. Other spares were equally prone to being damaged. My report back to my immediate bass was copied to the MD, but no improvements seemed to take place. Inside the factory huge quantities of cable and accessories were stored in a muddled heap on the floor of one of the store area. My boss was slowly going mad. He could see that at the 6-monthly audit of the business, BSI would probably have their ISO accreditation withdrawn. And that would reflect on the performance of -- who else -- the Quality Manager!
The software engineer who developed the programming of the computer equipment had all his records at his home. Drawing of various equipment that was e in the factory were haphazard, and no proper record seemed to be kept. All in all, the whole business was a shambles.
I gave in my notice, and went to the Kingston Job Centre looking for another job. But before I left, I discovered something that explained an awful lot to me. The firm were being bought out by Reuters. And putting two and two together, I reasoned that the MD (who must have had a controlling interest in the company) wanted to have as much business on the firm's books as possible to make the buy-out as profitable as possible. I can't imagine he was such a fool as to not know that disaster lay ahead but, of course, he would be out of sight when the proverbial hit the fan.
I discovered, for example, that PCBs installed in some of the cabinets had been removed after the Telephone Regulator had recorded their serial numbers, and the boards were replaced with older and poorly-repaired boards. The removed PCBs were then used on a new installation with another customer. I'm no lawyer, but I reckon that is theft.
I would loved to have been a fly on the wall in one of the offices of Reuters when they discovered the scam that they had been subject to.
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The more ethical entrepreneur
Firstly, the chap that fits the title of this blurb, although not his real name, I'm going to call him Martin, and I first met him when I applied for a job after leaving the firm I talk about above. Martin, I found was still interested in making money, but by a much more honest way. The firm that he then worked for, and I joined after leaving the cowboy outfit, rented electronic equipment to industry. Some special pieces of electronic equipment cost many thousands of pounds to purchase, but may only be used for a few hours or a few days.
For example, a special trial on an oil rig may need an oscilloscope that would cost twenty thousand pounds to buy. But they may only need it for a day. Although oil rigs talk of money in very large amounts, it would be total folly to pay that sort of money for the instrument to be used for such a small time. And if you keep the instrument for the same trial next year, it has to be stored and recalibrated. So rental provided a useful purpose for such cases.
Livingston Hire has since stopped trading so it is not improper to use their name. Livingston was part of a group of companies in a similar line of business. If a potential customer rang the sales office, the engineers knew what they were talking about and would be able to source a suitable instrument either from stock, or hired from an associate company.
It was common for Livingstone to procure an instrument urgently from the USA or Europe and have it delivered overnight to a Scottish airstrip where the instrument would be flown to the oil rig the following morning. Similarly, if the drilling company had a mishap such as dropping an instrument into the sea just before a trial, it is much cheaper to pay a thousand pounds to get a replacement quickly than to postpone the trial. As I said above, businesses like that talk in large sums of money. Livingston made a good profit as well as providing a very good service.