Financial downturn story #1: Lehmann Brothers and me

Pictured above: Google Nano’s recreation of me realising I’ve lost a coffee contract in 2008

Nobody thinks of coffee suppliers during global downturns.

I have kept a diary since I was 12 years old. My entry on 15th September 2008 starts with the same swear word written in ALL CAPS repeated for several lines. That’s because the coffee business I was sales manager of had 30% of our business in the Square Mile of London. And one of our biggest clients: Lehmann Brothers.

It felt apocalyptic. Darlington’s Coffee, where I worked, did the numbers and realised one thing: we were already lean. Cutting costs wasn’t going to make much of a difference. We had to sell our way out of a recession.

I was relieved of all of my reports. My brief was simple: get on the road and the phone. Over the next six months, I went through a range of emotions, but I was never bored. I disappeared into a spreadsheet that acted as our CRM.

You don’t need to be good. You need to be good AND lucky.

And then, luck broke my way. The UK Government started printing money, and the Pound fell through the floor against the Euro. Who was exposed? Coffee chains that buy from Italian coffee suppliers. In that time, we secured four chains. I can’t remember the numbers, but we went from a third down to about parity with the previous financial year.

Financial downturn story #2: Walt Disney and me

I drew a crowd.

I learnt a shocking truth when I left art school: painting is not lucrative for most people. Who knew?  I had a studio in a run-down building opposite a strip club in Auckland’s Customs Street. But that was all I had in common with the trope of the eventually successful artist living in a garret. I was getting scary broke. A series of events transpired, and I found myself hired by the Mouse House: Walt Disney. 

My brief: build and paint a few hundred “flat people” to beef up the crowd scenes at Ellerslie Race Course when the camera swept past the spectator stands on a TV show called “Ready To Ride”. 

They had to be heavy, because they had to stand up in the wind… and we had to have them up at the start and end of every shooting day. I’ve never been as fit as I was then. My friend and I had to run up the spectator steps and assemble all these flat people. And we had to move them all if the director decided to come from another direction. 

It turns out my work wasn’t going to be seen much in galleries. However, there is one thing that the Mona Lisa and I have in common: we both know how to draw a crowd. 

* with thanks to Julie Corbett for the excellent pun. 

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