PROFIT JUNKIES

We need to start a campaign to change the perception of "successful" people.

Andy Boddington wrote a blistering comment on a previous post of mine:

We need to start a campaign to change the perception of "successful" people. They are actually junkies and they are addicted to profit and will do anything they can to obtain it. Profit Junkies. We need to show people that the kind of thinking of these junkies is what results in : poor architecture, built in obsolescence, poor enforcement of regulations, enforced compliance, falsified science, lack of foresight, blinkered thinking and war.. People need to stop calling them elites and start calling them parasites. I believe a cartoon by Bob Moran could show this. I think someone should make a video where a family find a box in a loft which is an original The Landlord's Game - the forefather of Monopoly. - Originally The Landlord's Game had two sets of rules - one was called Prosperity and the other Monopoly. We need to educate people about the ugly side of "success" and the extreme power of a single voice media.

I totally adored my father, but I hardly ever saw him because he was a Profit Junkie.

My earliest memories of him are vague impressions of a dark haired, good looking young man riding London’s streets on a big black Norton motorbike. He knew London very well by the time I was born in 1952. He grew up in a three storey house with his three siblings. They lived in Balls Pond Place, Dalston.

He had been conscripted into the Army at eighteen and became a Morse Coder in Egypt. When he returned home, he was twenty-one, his hair was streak-bleached by the hot sun and his skin was mahogany. My mum said she thought he looked a lot like Frank Sinatra. She adored him on sight.

I was born only a year after their wedding day and a brother followed me only eighteen months later. We lived in a pokey three-roomed flat which was on the 2nd floor of a severely bomb damaged house in Islington. I remember my mum falling through the stairs when they finally came away from the crumbling walls. I found her lying in the coal hole, a bit scratched up and black from coal dust but otherwise grinning and giggling. Another day I was in my high chair waiting for my dinner when the steamed ceiling above the cooker suddenly fell on her head and into our food. I played in bomb craters and in streets that had no houses because they had been demolished due to extreme bombing. I thought that was fantastic. I seriously believed that the whole world looked like that because my mum had told me that there had been a ‘World War’.

Every day I would be delivered to my grandmother’s house, scrubbed and tidy. My parents both worked in the City. My dad was a printer and my mum was a book-keeper. They worked long hours and all their conversations were about saving for a house and getting out of the slums. They occasionally would go out dancing and so they used to push all the furniture into the bay window to practice the jitterbug or the jive to music from their 78 rpm records on a precious record player. My brother Roy and I would be watching from under the table. We loved it and would always dance with them to our favourite song which was Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley.

Dad won a colour matching competition. He bought his own machines and began to work for himself in a tiny workshop in Marylebone. His little business was doing very well we heard him saying to our grandparents at Sunday lunch.

Without telling us a word about it, my parents finally got a mortgage on a 1930s semi detached house in Romford. When we moved in, Roy and I were so excited we ran in the front door, out the back door, round the side and in the front again over and over - squealing all the way! We had our own garden with a big oak tree at the bottom. We were overjoyed when we saw the bathroom. An enamelled bath, fixed to the floor and not a tin one on a peg up high on the wall. We had our own toilet! We felt so rich!

My grandfather had wallpapered my bedroom with pink quilted effect flowery paper.
I hated it. It was too girlie, too pale, too flowery for me, the street fighting urchin kid from the rough end of Islington, but I thanked him, because that was what children did in those days. We were “seen and not heard” by order or else!

Roy and I settled in but didn’t think much of sleeping in separate rooms. He usually would wait until Mum went downstairs and then he would crawl into my bed for a cuddle. Eventually he stopped doing that. He was only five then and I was nearly seven.

When I was eight I joined the Brownies and learned how to polish shoes. This gave me my first business idea. I put shoe polishes, brushes and rags into an old wicker basket and I called at all the houses in our street one Saturday morning.

I knocked politely at the doors and announced my new Shoe Cleaning Service. People were so amused that they gave me pairs of shoes to clean and paid me a shilling a pair. When I finished I told them that if they left shoes in their porchways I would come and clean them every Saturday.

When I excitedly showed my dad my earnings he was very impressed.
He said seriously, “You need to keep a book about your business, Frances!” and he showed me how to make a bought and sales ledger in a simple school exercise book. At the end of each Saturday he would supervise me totalling up my takings and entering into the book all my receipts and expenses. Then he would deduct 10% which he called ‘profit’ and give the rest to me as wages. I would then take Roy to the sweet shop and buy us two ounces of sherbet lemons or candy twists. I would pay the 10% profit into my post office savings book. Dad said that the profit was very important because I could save up for expensive things that I really wanted.

In this way I was to become a Profit Junkie, just like my parents and their parents before them. My post office savings book would receive extra cash from time to time because my grandparents liked to give Roy and I a few coins as pocket money. My savings book became quite full of neat entries and the total grew under my sticky childish fingerprints.

At thirteen I applied to work on Saturdays at Woolworths and was paid a whole pound for the day. This seemed like a tremendous amount of money at the time and it really was. I could buy a pretty top for ten shillings in those days. As was now my habit, 10% went into my savings account.

Each small business I started blossomed in the same way as the shoe cleaning round. I made clothes for friends when I was fifteen and I used the income to buy fabric to make special items for myself or as gifts. I always had a business, it was part of me. I didn’t notice that no other children were doing this. Not even my brother Roy. I had ceremoniously passed him my basket of shoe polishes when he was eleven years old, but he never took over my round. He said it was embarrassing. Roy was quite a sulky child who could not be persuaded to do anything at weekends except play football.

After I got married at nineteen, my husband became my ‘business’. He was a roofer and so I created his bought and sales ledger and designed his headed notepaper. We named the business Apex Roofing and my brother Roy was our first employee. Still I was adding the obligatory 10% of profit to my post office account.

Within a year my savings were large enough to put a deposit on a house.

I continued to look after Apex Roofing but I also had a dressmaking business in which I made some gorgeous things. I made a lot of lovely wedding dresses which was my favourite thing to do. I would sit and draw out my client’s ideas until they were happy with the design and then I would help them to buy the fabric and haberdashery they needed to create their dream dress. Sewing tiny beads or pearls onto miles of fabric was hard work but so rewarding when the brides would come for their final fitting and look absolutely stunning in my wall of mirrors. I once went to a Bridal shop with a client so that she could show me the kind of dress she wanted. I looked at the way they were made and the price tags. I was horrified. They were shoddily put together, barely finished inside and they were incredibly expensive.

I charged at a fair hourly rate for my work and I kept a record of precisely how much time each dress had taken - all logged down on an invoice form. The fairness of my prices kept new brides calling my number. I never needed to advertise. My reputation was all word of mouth in the 1970s.

In 1979 we moved to Aberdeen because, by then, my husband was working for BP on the North Sea oil rigs. They made us a very attractive offer to relocate to Scotland and we jumped at the chance. Of course, this meant that we would be leaving Apex Roofing behind, so we thought it was a splendid idea to pass the business to my brother Roy for his 25th birthday present. By then Apex Roofing had a strong record and reputation. We had re-roofed the town halls of Norwich, Colchester and Clacton on Sea. Prestige jobs which brought us more work than we could handle at times.

Something odd happened. Roy did not seem to want to know us after that. At first we thought he was just run off his feet with the work but after a while we realised that something was very wrong. Roy bought a good sized property in Colchester and changed the name of the business to Apex Roofing Services. He began to employ a lot of our friends and soon the rumour mill would bring us gossip over the phone. Roy was cutting the pay rates or Roy did not engage with the men like we had. There were no meetings to discuss tenders. Roy ran the office but the guys did not know whether there would be work the following week. Roy would sack people over trivial things. We were up in Aberdeen, both working hard. Tony was on the rig and I was starting a small interior design business in partnership with two recently qualified architects. I had a niche market and no competitors at that time. It was a veritable goldmine of a business and I could not drop everything and high tail it down to Essex to see what was going on in Apex Roofing. Besides, I wasn’t the boss any more. Still the complaining phone calls came in. Roy wouldn’t take on any more employees. Suddenly everyone was on a sub-contract basis.

I was concerned because I was hearing from my family that they were not seeing Roy either. Suddenly we heard about a collection of Jaguar cars that Roy was gathering in his garages. He told my mother than just one of these cars was worth more than her house. She said he was arrogant about it and that had shocked her. Then we heard he owned shares in Colchester Football Club and that is when I knew that he was mixing with freemasons. He probably was one.

Roy became a millionaire and a Profit Junky, estranging everyone with his strange newly acquired superiority.

It was lies that stopped him communicating with us!

He never wanted his new position in society to be attributed to his sister’s foundational work establishing that successful business without pay. He even wrote Tony and I out of the business history when he created a website! As far as his new associates were concerned, Apex Roofing Services began in 1979 rather than 1971 as Tony’s fledgling company.

I was insulted. Roy was always arrogant and superior even from when we were kids, but this was too deceitful we thought. Our gift to him had resulted in him becoming a monster who estranged the whole family eventually. We have no idea where he is now. We think he retired to his holiday home somewhere in France.

His estrangement broke my father's heart. None of us had ever done him any wrong. He just wanted to be thought of as a one-man band, a rags to riches entrepreneur by his golf club cronies. He was becoming elite in Colchester and he did not want anyone to know the truth about how Apex Roofing really began.

That is what big money is capable of doing to some people. I have gone on to create more businesses ever since, but I have always been careful never to imagine that I was special or superior to the teams I created. I have never sold a business. I have always gifted them to members of my teams or I have found someone who was keen to take over where I left off. The Francheska de Avalon Academia in Spain still functions in a small room over the village Police Station there. It is my gift to that lovely community who welcomed me and helped me to get by as a foreigner in their country.

It seems that Profit Junkies are not team players. They don’t share.

They are usually competitive, selfish and mean spirited.

So heeding Andy’s inspiration comment, which triggered me to write this post, it would be wonderful if we could stop calling Profit Junkies “elite” because they really are not. “They are actually junkies and they are addicted to profit and will do anything they can to obtain it.” They will even cut ties with their own families rather than risk losing status in the eyes of other Profit Junkies.

We do need a change in how we measure or perceive success.

ONWARDS!
xx