Hishem Azzouz describes how he led his company through financial hardship by avoiding mass layoffs, making targeted redundancies, and having leaders take pay cuts so employees could still receive salaries and commissions.
Chapters
We didn't owe anybody any money, but it was becoming more difficult. I could have decided a year ago that we're done. We still got half a million quid in the bank, get rid of everybody. But I couldn't then walk through the Northern Quarter and walk past a guy who I sacked just to save my own skin. We made 5 or 6 people redundant. We fired or sacked 1 person and everybody else managed to get off the boat safely. And every single one of them is in work right now. We can hold our head high when we walk past people in the street as to kind of how we behaved and how we reacted and how leaders ate last. We were paying ourselves a pittance so that we could pay people their salaries, their commissions, their redundancies, etc., etc.