Dark Angels - Established: Lessons from the World’s Oldest Companies

A LSO BY THE D ARK A NGELS COLLECTIVE

Keeping Mum

In memory of Neil Duffy, 19692017

Dark Angel, writer, friend

Dear Reader,

The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). Were just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, youll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

If youre not yet a subscriber, we hope that youll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a 5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type established5 in the promo code box when you check out.

Thank you for your support,

Dan, Justin and John

Founders, Unbound

Gillian Colhoun

Stuart Delves

Elen Lewis

Martin Lee

Claire Bodanis

John Simmons

Neil Baker

Richard Pelletier

Jamie Jauncey

Mike Gogan

Mark Watkins

Andy Milligan

Peter Day

Only in fairy stories do people live happily ever after. The rest of us like the best novels have a beginning, a middle and an end. And though they try to behave as though it isnt so, the same things happen to companies and organisations.

Success is no guarantee of long-term survival. Indeed, you might say that success sows the seeds of its own destruction. It tends to create a carapace of self-regard that begins to insulate a successful organisation from the world in which it is trying to make its living. Eventually fatally so.

But just a few organisations defy the odds. Of the hundreds of companies Ive encountered in decades of reporting, I remember in particular the traditional Japanese inn whose family had been running the place for forty-six generations, some 1,300 years. No surprise that it was in Japan, where they revere crafts, skills and tradition, and often spurn organisational growth and financial engineering.

On a different scale of longevity, one of the most impressive retailers Ive encountered in Britain is Booths. Its a small, family-owned grocery chain based in northwestern England, still very proud of its origins as a tea shop in Blackpool in 1847.

In a world of supermarket giants, Booths has stayed true to its roots, and close to its customers. Airy, stylish stores, strong links to local suppliers, and run by Edwin Booth, the great-great-grandson of the founder. With a confident side-swipe at a prominent competitor, Booths cloth carrier bags declare in bold type: Preston not Heston, or Cumbria not Umbria.

But it is more than just slogans. The businesses in this book have memorable stories to tell, and this enthusiasm for corporate story-telling is why I pricked up my ears when I first heard about Dark Angels more than six years ago, and made an In Business programme about them on BBC Radio 4.

Great big corporations have a lot to learn from the compelling narratives in Established, most of which are about smaller companies. For these potent stories, the big boys can only substitute expensively devised and promoted brands. The tales told in this book are not fairy stories, but they are equally compelling.

Peter Day worked for BBC Radio for more than forty years. He reported on companies large and small for the Financial World Tonight , Today , In Business and Global Business on the BBC World Service.

Stuart Delves

8/9 November 2016. The first snowfall here in Scotland. An either/or event. It can seem wondrous. It can seem bleak. We heard this day that Established had reached its crowd-funding target.

We heard this day also that Donald Trump had been elected the forty-fifth President of the United States of America. The election campaign was long, hard, ugly and vituperative. The result, for many of us, is bleak. A dark winter.

But you might be reading this in a different season. Who knows, there might even be the whiff of optimism in the air. Perhaps that, above all, is the quality you need to survive a long time in business.

Among these momentous tidings, something small but maybe not insignificant. Putting on my shoes to go out and face the uncertain world , I found a Buddhist lapel pin stuck to my rubber sole. On what random centimetre of pavement or worn carpet it lay lost I have no idea. But somewhere in my perambulations it stuck to me a tiny reminder of something bigger, deeper, more enduring than the swings from left to right, or as Brecht said in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui , the bitch being on heat again.

Established is a book about some of the worlds oldest surviving businesses. Businesses that have withstood war, plague, rebellion, boom, bust, depression. The idea for it came to me several years ago while looking at a list of the worlds oldest businesses with some, in Japan, going back to the year 578 (a construction company and a hostelry). I thought that was remarkable and almost like something out of the world of fantasy fiction, like Gringotts in Harry Potter. Religions, universities yes. But businesses? Especially when today our experience is that businesses reaching the age of twenty-five are doing damned well. Dark Angels is more than halfway to that target already.

The question How on earth have you managed it? was the one that John Simmons and I thought could guide such a book and when he, Jamie Jauncey and I welcomed nine new associate partners to a gathering at Moniack Mhor in the Scottish Highlands over the summer solstice in 2015, we thought that co-writing such a business book could be one of several markers of the new phase of Dark Angels. And we opted for English-speaking countries, so, sadly, the salt mines of Poland, the breweries of Belgium and the ceremonial papermakers of Japan fell out of the equation.

Stories, as Dark Angels has banged on about for more than a dozen years now, are the best vehicles for vital information, insights, life lessons. We still learn about what it is to be human from the Greek myths or Shakespeares plays. We can certainly learn a thing or two about business survival from those that have lasted a couple of hundred years or more. And just as with which myth speaks to you the most, the question for each reader of Established is, which story resonates most with yours and what endorsement or caution can you take from it?

So, here it is. Established . Twelve great stories. Each of us asking that question of one of twelve disparate companies, from the tiny to the global, all of which have survived for at least a hundred years or more. My village pub was established in 1792 and frankly I dont know how it keeps going! Even in our time here eighteen years its had a run of rum managers including chair-leg-wielding brawlers, absentees, coke dealers and arsonists. Recently its fortunes have changed in the surer hands of Rosie and Kenny, whove embraced the pubs literary associations (in preference to its witchcraft ones), spruced it up and won the first Pub Hub award in Scotland. What would their answer be? Sheer luck probably. And a good roadside location. I hope you enjoy these twelve stories, where longevity comes in many different guises.