Gerry’s big decision came around again last night on Channel 4.

As we posted last week, Sir Gerry Robinson (ex Head of Coca Cola Europe and Granada TV) seems to be spending his retirement helping small family run businesses in financial difficulties.

And there is the first annoyance.

Most “Reality TV” these days seems to spend most of the time telling you what is coming next (“After the break..”) and what’s already happened.

Anyway, leaving that aside, what happened on last nights big decision?

Sir Gerry visited two businesses as follows

A family owned chair manufacturer in the North West and a pie and pasty manufacturer in Devon.

Both had sales problems but for different reasons.

The chair manufacturer had been in the family for a number of generations and the current owner was obviously feeling the pressure as his young school age son was the next obvious owner. He had employed a management consultant as Managing Director and to say the two didn’t get on was an understatement… They seemed to be at open warfare. But more seriously, they had done NO promotions or salesman bonus’s to stimulate activity.

The pie and pasty company had an owner/manager who seemed to be the ultimate “micro manager”

Both the production manager and office manager told of the same thing. Hearing half a phone conversation and then snatching the phone to finish it, “dropping by” a standard production run “just to check things”.
In short “general meddling” as Sir Gerry put it. All classical micro management symptoms (and watch out for a micro manager blog post shortly).

The last third of the program is where it started to lose a little bit of credibility.

As Sir Gerry observed, the pie and pasty company had never made a profit and the chair company would need AT LEAST £1.5 million just to stay afloat.

So what sort of businessman would invest?

In the case of the pies, the owner stood to lose his house and the chairs, around 80 people in one small village would be out of work crippling the local economy.

So maybe it is the “sob” factor that turns hard headed Sir Gerry into a cash cow for failing businesses.

Next week, (the last one I think) and Sir Gerry currently has seen 4 invested in 4. It would be interesting to see what type of business he wouldn’t invest in.

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Blog post originally from Sharp End Training

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