Thank God nobody stopped him.

UNCOMMON THOUGHT #002

Last month marked 19 years since Tony Wilson died.

Nineteen years.

That’s one of those numbers that doesn’t seem right.

I grew up watching Tony Wilson on Granada television. Long before I understood Factory Records, FAC numbers, Peter Saville or any of the mythology that eventually grew around him, he was simply that clever, slightly smug bloke off the telly.

And I mean slightly smug in the nicest possible way.

Actually, no.

He was very smug.

Tony Wilson could probably have told you your house was on fire and somehow made you feel intellectually inferior for not having noticed the smoke.

But I liked him.

Manchester liked him.

Well, some of Manchester liked him.

Others thought he was a complete dickhead.

I’m fairly certain Tony would have regarded that as a compliment.

By 1987 I was going to the Haçienda.

I was 17.

And if you weren’t around Manchester and the North West at that time, it’s difficult to explain what was beginning to happen.

You could feel it.

The music was changing.

The clothes were changing.

The clubs were changing.

Manchester itself seemed to be changing.

New Order.

The Happy Mondays.

Factory Records.

The Haçienda.

Then came the Stone Roses and everything that followed.

Manchester stopped feeling like somewhere things used to happen and started feeling like the place where everything was happening.

And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos was Anthony H. Wilson.

Television presenter.

Record label boss.

Nightclub owner.

Cultural agitator.

Professional gobshite.

And, by most conventional measures, a pretty shit businessman.

Which is precisely why I want to write about him.

We made history, not money

Wilson once summed up Factory Records beautifully:

“We made history, not money.”

And Christ, did they.

Factory was responsible for Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays and some of the most recognisable music, artwork and cultural imagery ever to come out of Britain.

They created Factory Records.

They created the Haçienda.

They worked with Peter Saville and treated record sleeves as pieces of art.

They numbered practically everything.

Records got Factory numbers.

Posters got Factory numbers.

The Haçienda itself was FAC 51.

Even the bloody cat apparently got one.

This was not normal corporate behaviour.

Imagine trying to explain Factory Records to a bank manager.

“So, Mr Wilson, what’s your business model?”

“Well, we’re going to find brilliant bands.”

Excellent.

“And presumably tie them into watertight contracts?”

“No.”

Right.

“And maximise the profit from successful releases?”

“Not particularly.”

Hmm.

“What about packaging costs?”

“We’re going to make it look fucking incredible.”

“And the margins?”

“Don’t worry about those.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Yes. We’re going to take loads of the money and put it into a nightclub.”

“Profitable nightclub?”

“No. It’s going to lose a fortune.”

You’d have been escorted from the building.

And yet here we are, decades later, still talking about Factory Records.

The Haçienda shouldn’t have worked

The Haçienda is probably the perfect example.

It became one of the most famous nightclubs in the world.

Culturally, enormous.

Financially?

A fucking disaster.

There were periods when New Order were effectively making money from selling records so the Haçienda could lose it.

That’s not a business model I’d recommend in a StrongOrigin strategy meeting.

But here’s the uncomfortable bit.

If Tony Wilson had been a better businessman, would the Haçienda have existed at all?

Would a sensible accountant have approved it?

Would a committee have signed off Peter Saville’s ideas?

Would Factory have given its artists that much freedom?

Would somebody eventually have said:

“Tony, this is all very cool, but we need to concentrate on EBITDA.”

Probably.

And perhaps they’d have made considerably more money.

But would we still be talking about them?

That’s the bit I find interesting.

Being sensible is massively overrated

We’re obsessed with sensible.

Especially as we get older.

Get a sensible job.

Buy a sensible house.

Make sensible investments.

Don’t take unnecessary risks.

Don’t embarrass yourself.

Don’t start something unless you know it’ll work.

And definitely don’t do anything if somebody with a spreadsheet thinks it’s a bad idea.

Now, before anybody remortgages their house tomorrow and invests everything in an artisan kazoo business because Mick Armstrong told them to follow their dreams, that’s not what I’m saying.

Money matters.

Cash flow matters.

Profit matters.

Paying your mortgage matters.

Paying your staff matters.

Tony Wilson himself discovered the brutal reality of not having enough money towards the end of his life.

So I’m not romanticising financial failure.

Being skint isn’t artistic.

It’s fucking stressful.

My point is different.

Don’t confuse an idea not making money yet with it being a bad idea.

And don’t confuse somebody telling you something won’t work with them actually knowing it won’t work.

They don’t.

Neither do you.

That’s the whole bloody point.

Everybody becomes an expert when it’s your idea

Tell people you’ve got an idea and watch what happens.

You should try this sometime.

Actually, you probably already have.

“I’ve been thinking about starting a business.”

Too risky.

“I’m thinking of writing a book.”

Do you know how difficult it is to get published?

“I’d love to open a coffee shop.”

Hospitality is terrible at the moment.

“I’m thinking of changing careers.”

At your age?

“I’d like to move abroad.”

What about your pension?

“I’m going to start making videos.”

What if nobody watches them?

“I’m building a website.”

There are millions of websites.

“I’m thinking about…”

DON’T.

It’s remarkable.

People who’ve never done the thing you’re talking about suddenly become world authorities on why you can’t do it.

And usually they aren’t trying to be horrible.

They think they’re protecting you.

They’re giving you sensible advice.

There’s that bloody word again.

Sensible.

Sometimes you’ve got to be the idiot in the room

Imagine Tony Wilson asking permission.

There’d probably be no Factory Records.

No Haçienda.

No FAC 51.

Maybe no Factory version of Manchester as we came to know it.

Some ideas only exist because somebody is unreasonable enough to ignore the reasons they shouldn’t.

That’s true in business.

It’s true in art.

It’s true in music.

It’s true in life.

The world is full of things that look obvious after somebody else has done them.

Before that, they often look ridiculous.

That’s one of the great tricks hindsight plays on us.

We look back at successful people and assume there was some clear path.

There usually wasn’t.

There were wrong turns.

Bad decisions.

Money wasted.

People laughing.

People saying no.

Moments when the person doing it probably thought:

What the fuck am I doing?

We just edit those bits out afterwards.

And then there’s age

This one particularly pisses me off.

There’s a strange idea that ambition has an expiry date.

You can reinvent yourself at 25.

At 35, it’s brave.

At 45, people start asking whether you’re having a midlife crisis.

By your fifties, apparently you’re supposed to know your place, protect your pension and develop a keen interest in garden furniture.

I’m 56.

I’ve got more ideas now than I had at 26.

The difference is I’ve also got 30-odd years of getting things wrong behind me.

That’s useful.

I’ve started businesses.

I’ve watched ideas fail.

I’ve changed direction.

I’ve made money.

I’ve lost money.

I’ve built things that worked.

I’ve built things that absolutely didn’t.

And I’ve learned something important.

Failure rarely kills you.

Regret hangs around considerably longer.

What is the thing you keep talking yourself out of?

You know the one.

You’ve probably had it for years.

Maybe it’s a business.

Maybe it’s a book.

Maybe it’s a qualification.

Maybe it’s travelling somewhere.

Maybe it’s leaving a job you fucking hate.

Maybe it’s starting again.

Maybe it’s something you’ve never told anybody because saying it out loud would make it real.

And there’s always a reason not to do it.

Wrong time.

Not enough money.

Too old.

Too young.

Too busy.

Too risky.

Someone else already does it.

Nobody will be interested.

What will people think?

Here’s the annoying truth.

They might be right.

Your idea might fail.

There you go.

There’s your motivational speech.

You might lose money.

You might make a complete tit of yourself.

You might discover you aren’t as good at it as you thought.

Nobody might buy it.

Nobody might read it.

Nobody might turn up.

It could be a complete disaster.

Do it anyway.

Because there’s another possibility.

And for some reason we don’t talk about this one nearly enough.

You might be right.

The idea everybody thinks is stupid might be brilliant.

The business might work.

The book might get written.

The record might get made.

The plane ticket might get bought.

You might discover you’re actually bloody good at the thing you’ve spent years telling yourself you couldn’t do.

Your second act might turn out to be considerably more interesting than your first.

And if it doesn’t work?

At least you’ll know.

Which beats sitting there in 20 years thinking:

I wonder what would have happened if I’d actually done it?

Manchester does things differently

There’s a line everybody associates with Tony Wilson:

“This is Manchester. We do things differently here.”

Except, wonderfully, there’s a problem.

Tony apparently never bloody said it.

The line came from 24 Hour Party People, with Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson.

A fictional Tony Wilson quote became one of the most famous Tony Wilson quotes.

Which somehow feels entirely appropriate.

Fact, fiction, mythology.

Very Factory.

But whether Wilson actually said it isn’t really the point.

He lived it.

He backed things.

He championed people.

He believed Manchester didn’t need to ask London for permission.

He helped create an environment where people from around here could believe that something important could happen here.

Not somewhere else.

Here.

That’s powerful.

Cool doesn’t pay the gas bill

And here’s where I disagree slightly with the mythology.

It’s easy to look back at Factory and romanticise the chaos.

Don’t.

Cool doesn’t pay the gas bill.

Cultural importance doesn’t automatically pay wages.

Being visionary doesn’t excuse being financially incompetent.

The lesson from Tony Wilson isn’t:

Be shit at business.

It’s:

Don’t become so obsessed with being good at business that you stop doing anything worth doing.

That’s different.

Learn the numbers.

Understand cash flow.

Make a profit.

Build something sustainable.

But leave enough madness in there to do something nobody sensible would have approved.

Because the spreadsheet can tell you whether something makes financial sense.

It can’t always tell you whether something matters.

Thank God nobody stopped him

Tony Wilson got plenty wrong.

He lost money.

Factory collapsed.

The Haçienda eventually closed.

There are probably a hundred business lessons you could teach using Factory Records as an example of what not to do.

But here’s the problem.

He fucking did it.

He didn’t sit around talking about starting a record label.

He started one.

He didn’t spend five years researching whether Manchester needed a nightclub.

He opened one.

He didn’t wait for London to tell him Manchester was culturally important.

He acted like it already was.

And eventually everybody else caught up.

That’s what I take from Tony Wilson.

Not that money doesn’t matter.

It does.

Not that every crazy idea is secretly brilliant.

It isn’t.

Not that believing in something guarantees success.

It absolutely doesn’t.

It’s simpler than that.

Stop waiting for permission.

Do the thing.

Start badly.

Learn.

Change it.

Make mistakes.

Get better.

Make some money if you can.

Make history if you’re very lucky.

Ideally do both.

But don’t spend your entire life standing at the side telling everybody about the thing you’re definitely going to do one day.

One day has a nasty habit of becoming never.

Tony Wilson was a shit businessman.

He was also exceptionally good at making things happen.

There’s a difference.

And nearly two decades after he died, we’re still talking about the things he made happen.

That’s not a bad legacy for a smug bloke off Granada.

So, what are you still waiting to start?