Autobiography

I am often asked if the figures are accurate as
they are written with great authority, but they
do make judgements based on accumulatives.
If you are a company on the stock market,
worth is easy to calculate according to share
values and how many you own. But the list is a
barometer; it was never meant to be a totally
accurate assessment. They may look at your
business and discover your turnover is £100
million, and those kinds of businesses are
selling for one year’s turnover, but is it in
decline or growth? The calculations can be out
either way. With a company like Ann
Summers, because it is a growth business, by
the time the figures are published the turnover
has gone up, along with profitability. In some
companies there are huge changes over the
years, with hundreds of millions of pounds’
difference, but if you look at ours it is built
carefully and studiously with no violent ups and
downs in our growth pattern.
Sometimes controlling this growth is the
hardest thing to do. There is nothing in this
world that pumps the adrenalin more than
when a business is growing at an electrifying
pace. You are naturally reluctant to slow it
down, but we realised the dangers, and our
business prudence overcame the adrenalin
surge. Our suppliers couldn’t keep up with the
demand, so if we hadn’t slowed down we could
not have maintained supplies to our
customers. You have to supply your customer,
or you fail.
But what the list shows me more than anything
is how far I have come and how times have
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