Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  Opinion-formers began to warm to us. (One journalist told me later than the media treated us kindly because they considered us a good source of upbeat stories.) The fashionable broadcaster Anona Winn, who since 1965 had chaired an all-female radio chat-show called Petticoat Line, gave some of us lessons in telephone diction. The Times took to referring to us as by what it obviously thought was the rather witty nickname “computerbirds”. Academics began to write about us too. I remember seeing myself described as an entrepreneur - and thinking, once I had looked the word up, “They’re right. That is what I am.”

  The learned article that sticks in my mind today was by someone from the London Business School, who managed to include in his essay the outrageously shallow and sexist jibe: “Like many women of her ilk, she is indifferent to the appearance of her home.” But most of the coverage was flattering, and, predictably, I found myself starting to believe in it. Perhaps I really was a business genius. Perhaps I really had caught the spirit of the age. Perhaps I really was set irreversibly on the path to riches.

  On Christmas Day in 1970 - which we celebrated in our usual way with our old friends Frank and Doris Hewlett - I gave an enthusiastic toast to the success of Freelance Programmers. “We’re flying now,” I said. “Nothing can stop us now.”

  A few weeks later, things began to fall apart.

  The first crisis was one that it had never even occurred to me look out for: a recession. The economic downturn of the early 1970s struck early for the computer industry: two or three years before the 1973 oil shock with which it is generally associated. The computerisation of British business had got ahead of itself, and firms that had been investing heavily in IT realised - more or less simultaneously - that they needed to wait for some return on this outlay before investing further. It took a while for the orders to dry up completely, but more and more companies started to hold back, and our flow of new work slowed alarmingly. Pamela and I began to worry and resorted to our first ever mass direct mailing to drum up business. It had little effect.

  Things still looked healthy from the outside. We had an impressive range of current and recent clients, including - in addition to those already mentioned - ICI Paints, Penguin Books, Glacier Metal, Watney Mann, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Harwell, the Family Planning Association and the Council of the Stock Exchange (despite the fact that women still weren’t allowed to work on the Exchange itself). Our work ranged from straightforward programming to more complex consultancy projects such as feasibility studies, benchmark tests, equipment selection and systems analysis. We had also been working on a big cost-sharing contract from the Ministry of Technology, creating package programmes based on British Standards for fluid-flow and design.

  As the year unfolded, however, and the contracts were completed one by one, it became harder to ignore the frightening truth: new contracts were not appearing to take their place. By the end of the year, the wider economy was showing signs of faltering, and we realised that clients and prospective clients weren’t just cutting back - some were actually going under. In February 1971, I managed to extract a large, late payment from Rolls-Royce two days before it went into receivership.

  The suspicion dawned on me that, in developing Freelance Programmers, I might not have been nearly as clever as I had imagined. Perhaps our success had been attributable to lucky timing and had been driven simply by wider economic growth. Perhaps I should have given more thought to the fact that economic cycles can go down as well as up. Now that our luck had run out, the company’s hard-earned assets were - even with our minimal overheads - haemorrhaging away.

  It is easy to feel helpless in such circumstances, but Pamela and I both realised that our best hope lay in vigorous activity. We threw ourselves into finding new business - or, failing that, at least making new contacts. When work is scarce, you must network or die. I had, as it happened, been elected a Fellow of the British Computer Society and, a bit later, a Vice President (with a mission to get the society chartered status). This might sound like a tiresome distraction. It was actually an invaluable opportunity for keeping in touch with people and new developments in the industry - while my position in the Society added greatly to our credibility within the industry. Many members would at some point or another be awarding contracts of the kind we were looking for; and, when they were doing so, it was a huge advantage if I was aware of it and they, in turn, knew who we were. We wouldn’t necessarily win the contract, but at least we would be in with a chance.

  In a similar spirit, we formed a loose consortium, in early 1971, with three other software companies: Business Software, Applied Computer Sciences, and Programming Sciences International. We called ourselves Allied Software Houses. The idea was that, while continuing to pursue our individual businesses, we would widen the options available to us with a collaboration that would let us bid for contracts that would otherwise be too big for any of us to handle. It didn’t make much difference: it was 18 months before we won our first contract. But doing almost anything - even just seeking safety in numbers - was better than doing nothing.

  Around the same time - February 1971 - I launched a new company: F2. This was largely a formalisation of the “dual management system” that Pamela and I had already established, and was partly prompted by a sense that Pamela was growing frustrated with her subordinate status. She became managing director of Freelance Programmers, which continued to concentrate on the home-based programming services on which the business had been founded, while I became managing director of F2, which focused on more ambitious services such as systems analysis and consultancy. This kind of work had grown to represent around 40 per cent of Freelance Programmers’ business, and there was a certain logic in dividing the operations: not least because consultancy arguably required a more full-time, less home-based workforce. There was also - again - the attraction of being seen to do something. The last thing we needed was for potential clients to believe that we were struggling. F2 at least got us noticed for a while. We gave the company its own address in Amersham. Ann Leach became group technical director.

  To the casual observer, we appeared to be expanding. But the bottom line was that both parts of the business were struggling. The work was running out, and our hard-earned wealth was evaporating. In the 1971-72 tax year we posted a £3,815 loss. As I agonised over how much money we could afford to spend on a morale-boosting celebration of Freelance Programmers’ impending 10th anniversary, it occurred to me that this could be the last anniversary we would celebrate. If things didn’t start getting better very soon, we were done for.

  Instead, they got worse. I arrived in the office in Chesham one summer morning to find a letter from Pamela. She was handing in her notice. A series of fraught conversations, with her and with others, revealed that that was not all. She was setting up a rival company, Pamela Woodman Associates, to carry out exactly the same kind of business as Freelance Programmers, in exactly the same market. She was also approaching most of our best programmers to invite them to work for her and (it emerged later) offering their services to the same prospective clients that I was targeting.

  People with long experience of the tooth-and-claw struggles of the business jungle tell me that such breakaways are simply a painful fact of life; some experts say that it is surprising that they do not happen more often. Young companies in hi-tech sectors are particularly vulnerable to them, because the talent they employ forms such a large part of their assets. I am sure that this is true. But for me Pamela’s breakaway wasn’t just a set-back: it was a brutal, horrifying shock, like a kick in the stomach. I felt - perhaps unfairly - that it was a monstrous betrayal.

  Part of the joy of the first decade of Freelance Programmers had been its loose, informal structure. We were all highly skilled, in a sphere that required the most precise, disciplined and logical thinking. Yet our way of organising ourselves had been largely improvised and intuitive - one might almost sa
y “feminine”, in contrast to the rigid structures and conventions of the traditional masculine business model. Paradoxically, this looseness had also made the company quite centralised, because the invisible ties that held it together came mostly from me and my personality. Perhaps it was this that Pamela and her fellow-defectors wanted to escape. The fact that they did so made me feel that I was under personal attack, and that my world was collapsing around me.

  I can see, nearly 40 years on, that Pamela was perfectly entitled to have her own ambitions and to do anything legal to further them. But I have never recovered from the disillusionment - and especially not from the realisation that, even as we had been sharing our dreams for the company’s future, she had been plotting a move that she knew might destroy it. This did something to me as a person. I still find it hard to take friendship at face value, and I have allowed very few other work relationships, no matter how satisfactory, to become proper friendships.

  In the short term, however, it was not just an emotional blow. It was a catastrophe for the business. Overnight, we had lost many of our most skilled and experienced programmers and a large slice of our future business, at a time when we could least afford to do so. I had also lost some of our best project managers - including the highly valued Suzette Harold (mentioned before as the early programmer suspected by the Inland Revenue of running a house of ill-repute). And of course Pamela had almost as good an idea as I did about which parts of our business were most profitable, which clients we were planning to approach, what sort of ideas we were intending to discuss with them, and what kind of prices we were likely to quote. From her point of view, we were sitting ducks.

  I say “we”. To all intents and purposes, the burden of this crisis fell on me. Most of our programmers kept themselves aloof from the schism, making themselves available to whoever booked their services first. Some made a point of rejecting Pamela’s advances, out of loyalty, and several offered emotional support and encouragement. But as far as I was concerned there was no one else who was “under attack” and no one else who was actively involved in the question of the business’s survival. All sorts of people offered helpful advice, but I don’t think I really listened to any of it. I was the one who decided what costs could be cut, I was the one who had to cut them and deal with the consequences of doing so, I was the one who had to ensure that the positive morale that had helped drive our expansion did not now turn into a hopeless fatalism - and I was the one who somehow had to find the time and strength, amidst all this, to carry on going out in search of new business.

  Every day, throughout every waking hour, I was working at frenetic, breathless speed. I felt constantly as if my heart was in my mouth, as if my very life depended on my making the best possible use of every minute. And in a strange kind of way, I relished it - as if the adrenalin were addictive. This, I said to myself, was my big moment, my Battle of Britain. Anyone who thought I would give up without a fight was very much mistaken.

  In the outside world, conditions worsened - and carried on worsening. January 1973 saw a huge stock market crash. In October 1973, the OPEC nations’ anger at US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war led to a devastating rise in oil prices. In 1974, a crash in UK commercial property prices provoked a medium-sized banking crisis. By 1975, UK inflation was touching 25 per cent. If we had relied on economic recovery to save us, we would have gone out of business.

  Instead, we fought. I drastically reduced our staff of full-time managers. I quietly reabsorbed F2 (after a decent interval) into the main company. I resumed the overall managing directorship, while Frank Knight - whom Pamela had brought on to the board from Commercial Union in 1971 - remained chairman. I also did most of the clerical and administrative work, and all the sales, and, it seemed, more or less everything else. Treating every day as a battle for survival, I explained to each remaining member of our panel that work was in short supply and that they were likely to earn little or nothing from Freelance Programmers for the foreseeable future - but that I still earnestly hoped that our long-term relationship with them would continue. I started looking for ways to replace our disparate bases (at my home in Amersham and on both sides of the high street in Chesham) with a single, cheaper premises in Chesham. In short, I developed a liquidator’s mentality, getting rid of almost anything that could be got rid of, until there was scarcely anything left of the company but its name and its core ideas.

  The personal cost was huge, but perhaps there was no other way to survive such a storm than by taking the battle personally. To me, this was no longer just a financial matter. It was about me and my dream. I had come up with a kind of business that no one had imagined before, and had run it in a way that the small-minded traditionalists who blocked women’s career paths in the conventional workplace considered mad. If the company failed, the whole idea would be discredited: the idea that companies could be run on trust, the idea that women had as much to contribute as men - and the idea that I was a proper businesswoman rather than just a dreamer who had got lucky.

  I realised by now that, in a sense, I had got lucky. But I also realised, as never before, just how much I cared about the business. Drawing conscious inspiration from the way Britain had stood alone in the Second World War, I resolved that, no matter how bad things got, I was not going accept defeat.

  One incident that illustrates my embattled mentality at the time had nothing to do with the business. I was driving one morning along a familiar country lane near Amersham and noticed that a huge swastika had been painted on the outside wall of a remote farmyard. (The National Front was enjoying a brief spell of headline-making popularity.) My first reaction was horrified panic, as old wartime fears were re-awakened. My next was to take control of the situation. I found the farmer and told him how offensive the symbol was to me. He shrugged and said that it was nothing to do with him. So I visited the local police station, who, in turn, shrugged and said that it was nothing to do with them either. Finally, having toyed with the alternatives of (a) embarking on a lengthy correspondence with the relevant department in the local council or (b) letting the whole thing lie, I realised that there was only one thing for it. I bought a large tin of paint, got up at 4am the next morning and, shortly before dawn, painted over the offending symbol myself.

  I mention this episode of arguably delinquent behaviour because it shows just how fired up I was. (It also reminds me how much energy I then had.) In my mind, my fight for business survival had become part of a much wider fight to defend everything that I held dear: my business dream, my family, my gender, my values. “Never give in,” Winston Churchill had said, in a much-quoted speech in 1941 - “never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty; never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense...” It had worked for him. It might just work for me.

  It was a crucial advantage, in the struggle to keep Freelance Programmers alive, that we had few fixed costs, and that many of our regular freelancers were used to surviving on an irregular income. Most of them seemed to understand that this was the flipside of flexible employment: there was little or nothing to shield our workforce from the economy’s icier winds. The fact that many of them had not been employed before we came along made it easier for all concerned to accept that the company’s pain had to be shared. This didn’t make it less painful, but it gave us a fighting chance of survival.

  Derek was unfailingly supportive too, as he always has been. But I don’t think he really realised quite how bad things were. That £3,815 loss in 1971-72 sounds petty by modern standards, but in our terms it was huge. The company had next to no assets, and there was nothing with which to cover further losses apart from our personal wealth - which, given that we were already double-mortgaged, was negligible. If we did not get back into profit the following year, that would be the end of our story.

  At one point the F2 side of the business was down to a single contract - with Unilever. Yet still, somehow, we
refused to give up, keeping our spirits up by putting an extravagantly positive spin on things. For example: back in 1969, when business was booming, Derek had persuaded me to mark our tenth wedding anniversary by splashing out on an extravagant fur coat. It was second-hand but gorgeous, in dark leopardskin with a beautiful black mink collar; I had imagined that I would wear it on special occasions but in practice had never had an opportunity. Now, having briefly considered selling it (it might have raised anything up to about £1,000), I took to wearing it every day - so that anyone who saw me would assume that the company was still prospering.

  Morale seemed to me to be a crucial issue. In business, as in life, good things rarely come to those who appear desperate. I was determined to put everything in a positive light - even our 10th anniversary party, which took place just days after the launch of Pamela Woodman Associates. I smiled bravely through the champagne reception, which we held at the Institute of Directors in Pall Mall, and was rewarded with some positive press coverage the following day.

  Everyone - well, all three of us who remained in the office - entered into the spirit of things. My part-time secretary, Muriel Messider, epitomised our collective attitude when one of our few, precious customers rang up with a query about an invoice. “Would you mind telling me the invoice number?” she asked, before making a huge song and dance about tracking it down among an imaginary department full of other invoices.

  Those were difficult days. Yet, as sometimes happens when you have your back to the wall, there was a grim pleasure to be taken from the daily battle. And, the harder the fight, the greater the pleasure to be taken from occasional victories - such as the day in 1973 when a very sheepish Suzette Harold rang up, asking if she could re-join us. Several colleagues were aghast when I said yes. But my view was and is that people should be allowed to make big mistakes - or one big mistake at least. Few of us are infallible, and the brightest people learn their most important lessons from the things they get wrong. I certainly never regretted giving Suzette another chance. By May 1974 we had appointed her to the board.