Let’s hear it
for the kids
with cojones
Josh Littlejohn would have been a little kid when I started working for his dad. I was a pony-tailed student funding my prodigious vinyl habit as a part-time waiter in Littlejohn’s restaurant in Stirling, the first of what went on to become a reasonably prominent chain. The schtick, commonplace now but quite original then, was burgers and pizzas and retro Americana scattered around and 40s big-band swing on a loop. I don’t think I’ve managed to get Chattanooga Choo Choo out of my head since.
I learned a lot from that job: how to paint on a smile for one’s public, how to handle tricky customers, how to slickly charm a decent tip from a late-night table of drunken middle-aged women, the high importance of comfortable shoes, and, most usefully, how to balance three large plates on one hand. I’ve had a lot of different jobs since, but they’ve all fitted a similar mould: I am one of life’s cogs in the wheel, the kind of guy who works for other people, providing a service of some sort at one end while taking orders from the boss at the other. And I have no problem with that — after all, that’s most of us, most of the time.
But some people are put together differently. Josh Littlejohn, for example. Now 28, the apple has not fallen far from the tree: he, like his restaurateur father Simon, is an entrepreneur. Unlike his father, he is a very 21st century type of entrepreneur. In 2012, Josh set up Social Bite, a Pret a Manger-style café that gives 100 per cent of its profits to charity, and where one in four of the staff is from a homeless background. Josh caps his own salary at seven times the wage of the lowest-paid employee. There are now two outlets in Edinburgh and two in Glasgow, with plans to expand into Aberdeen and Dundee. Their lunchtime pot of chicken noodles with a chilli kick is one of life’s great pleasures.
George W Bush is reputed once to have said that ‘the problem with the French is they don’t have a word for “entrepreneur”.’ It seems to me that the problem with the Scots is they don’t have esteem for entrepreneurs, even though these people are exponentially more important to our nation than any number of bovine MSPs who think a profit is some kind of religious guru.
They’re born, not made, entrepreneurs. They’re not often regular, run-of-the-mill types: they are riverboat gamblers, frontier speculators, swashbucklers; they have cojones. When I met Josh at a dinner he was so young-looking, scruffy and unassuming that I initially thought he was a work-experience kid. At a conference recently I came across Gregor Lawson, who eloquently addressed the audience while dressed from head to toe as an orc. This was arresting enough, but when he removed the hood of his costume to reveal he looked like a younger Ewan McGregor the women in the audience really started paying attention. Lawson quit a good job with Procter and Gamble to start Morphsuits with two pals in 2009. It is now the world’s largest fancy dress company, in part because these three young guys understood how to use booming social media and youth culture to heighten their company’s profile. Listening to him explain the advances and setbacks of taking a start-up from nothing to a global concern was awe-inspiring.
Then there’s Jamie Coleman, who, despite an unnerving resemblance to Lex Luthor, is likely to be a superhero in the story of Scotland’s future economic success. In 2014, Coleman set up Codebase, a digital hub based in an ugly building beside Edinburgh Castle, with an intention to “build, nurture and grow the next generation of tech superstars.” After less than a year it already accommodates 50 young companies with more than 300 staff, is the largest technology incubator in the UK and one of the fastest-growing in Europe. Scotland has the native genius to become a major centre of digital innovation in the 21st century, with all the accruing benefits in terms of jobs, tax revenues, exports and reputation. And I’d bet Coleman will be at the heart of it.
I’ve picked out three individuals, but there are countless young men and women across Scotland who are made this way: who have no interest in being a cog in the wheel of a faceless corporation, but are instead humming with ideas and the energy to strike out on their own. These guys are nothing like the bozos who humiliate themselves weekly on The Apprentice. They are serious people who challenge the existing way of doing things, who bring about the creative destruction that drives progress, who in pursuing their vision can change the world a bit.
In Scotland, we are obsessed with the supposed nobility of the public sector. While it is true there are many good, principled people working for the state, the idea that they have any innate moral superiority by dint of career choice is bunk. It’s not taking the tough path to confiscate as much of the taxpayer’s hard-earned salary as you can get away with and then gaily hose it around. It’s much more difficult to scrap your way to success, overcoming disaster after calamity while creating wealth and jobs that didn’t previously exist. Our grimly leftist political culture still struggles with this basic concept — many of those MSPs who sit daily in judgement at Holyrood wouldn’t be asked back for a second interview in the private sector. Indeed, one of the most frightening things about last year’s Yes campaign was its delusion that an independent Scotland would be some sort of weirdo statist Shangri-la. The reality is the opposite: we will only be a grown-up nation when we learn to celebrate our entrepreneurs, and when Holyrood is populated by those with a more natural affinity for business.
As so often, Teddy Roosevelt said it best: ‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.’
The darkest
of prejudices
Unthinkably, anti-semitism is once again on the rise across Europe. Benjamin Netanyahu’s suggestion that the continent’s Jews should move to Israel, following the attacks in Paris, Belgium and Copenhagen, has angered many of his co-religionists, but the fact he felt able to say it should give the rest of us pause.
A timely article published yesterday in Scotland on Sunday by the journalist Dani Garavelli showed concern about their safety is growing among Scotland’s Jews. Giffnock’s long-established community has seen security stepped up outside Jewish buildings, including police patrols at the synagogue and at Scotland’s only Jewish primary school. The children are no longer allowed to line up in the playground in the morning.
The number of anti-semitic attacks in Glasgow rose ten-fold last year, according to Garavelli. A woman selling Israeli cosmetics from a stall is said to have had a ‘burning’ substance thrown in her face, while a rabbi was taunted with shouts of ‘Sieg Heil’. A sheltered housing complex in East Renfrewshire was daubed with a swastika and the words ‘Jewish Cunts. Jews Out’.
It seems to be politically hip to adopt an anti-Israel stance. What used to be the preserve of the far-Right now sits more easily with the far-Left, which is currently undergoing a modish revival in Scotland. Criticism of Israel’s government, a perfectly reasonable thing to do, all too regularly shades into the dark prejudice of anti-semitism. There’s nothing cool or modern about this. Anti-semitism is the most ancient of hatreds, and it was only 70 years ago that Europe’s Jews were nearly destroyed in a mass extermination programme. Anti-semites: think of the company you’re keeping.
When you’re in the brown stuff
The greatest pitfall of the digital age must be the ability to send an email to precisely the wrong person by accident. It’s almost a good enough reason to return to quill and parchment. Anyway, horribly, I did it (again) last week. On the upside, it has given me cause to recount the following tale. An office I once worked in had an internal messaging system that, predictably, was dominated by staff firing abuse at each other. However one woman who was romancing a male colleague found a more intimate use, sending the note: ‘I want to cover you in chocolate and lick it all off.’ Fair enough, except she mistakenly posted it to her boss. His reply? One masterful word: ‘Why?’
These articles appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on February 23, 2015
