Trader? Accumulator? Mechanic? Lord? In the warm, late spring of 2019, I found myself surveying these options as part of something called the Entrepreneur Personality Profile, an online quiz that was a central feature of the job application I was completing. Very little about my life at that point suggested that I had any entrepreneurial personality to be profiled: mid-twenties, freelance writer, living in rent and debt.
I was applying for a job as an in-house copy writer for a Manchester-based firm, a company established in the late 2010s to “demystify property”, aiming to act as a full-throated advocate for landlords and putting them in contact with larger developers. Investment meet-ups, podcasts, webinars. Perhaps sensing the way that winds were blowing, they had set up base in city-centre Manchester, and having initially forgotten about the application I soon found myself attending their office for an interview. I had, it seemed, passed the Entrepreneur Personality Profile with true blue colours.
The interview took place in their office, an exposed brick, 2010s fantasy of millennial, minimal cool. Open plan, hot desks, coffee machines. Neither of my interviewees – an unusually solemn HR person and the company boss, a sunny, self-satisfied, and smart casual dressed man in his mid-40s who carried a vaguely David Cameron air – particularly clocked that my writing history was mainly leftish or alternative music publications, perhaps at odds with the firm’s stated aims. But I got the job.
The first thing that I remember happening was a thick, heavy parcel of books arriving at my Old Trafford houseshare. The company “culture”, I was told, had a huge focus on “reading”. These were not, I quickly realised, Booker Prize nominees or Fitzcaraldo Editions, but self-help books of a business, Silicon Valley flavour: CEO-style routines and “smart” productivity hacks.
Mercifully, this being the first in-house copy writer position that they had hired turned out to be the ultimate productivity hack. There was very little work to do and my assurances about writing were taken at face value. I could effectively set my own workload. These two sides of A4 copywriting project? Yes, this will take a week at least!
Certainly, once a week I had to type up the text to their podcast, as chummy and banal as corporate audio content tends to be. The most obviously shameful work, the stuff I still look back on with a shudder, was copywriting about “the ripple effect”. This was the phrase that the firm used for the idea that landlords should buy in poorer parts of the city, gambling on being able to raise rent prices there down the line as renters are pushed out of central, high-demand parts of town. I would follow my finger along the yellow MetroLink tram line and pick somewhere, writing a short guide to the area for potential investors.
Yes, in almost all ways, me taking the position was a venal thing to do. I was amazed that I was in a position to take money from people whose values I despised to provide me an income, and it was funny to talk about down the pub, a place I was beginning to attend more frequently as a result of working in town. In the late 2010s, there was popular leftist discourse about rinsing our corporate overlords for whatever you could get, and using the benefits to subsidise your own interesting projects. But writing packs with titles like “The 18 year property cycle explained”, “White goods for your rental: where to start” and “How to win from plan property” teaches you the self-defeating, hypocrite-making worthlessness of those ideas pretty quickly.
I’d love to say that I socialised with my colleagues, going deep undercover in a tight white shirt and blue suit to hear the after-hours, gakky boasts of would-be property moguls. But I sat in a quiet corner of the office, mostly avoiding my colleagues in perhaps an early warning sign to them that the Entrepreneur Personality Profile might have malfunctioned.
Once, we went on a field trip to the prototype version of a Deansgate tower and stood in a show home drinking champagne. Out of the glass window, I remember seeing a friend of mine walking on the street in the distance, and felt ashamed. Shame was not an obvious emotion at the office, though to counter the cognitive dissonance of pushing landlordism in a city with increasing visible homelessness, the firm did allow some minor Corporate Social Responsibility, allowing one office worker a few hours a month to do spreadsheets for a North Manchester housing charity.
It’s easy to forget now how 2019 was such a time of political upheaval. I remember my 26th birthday, with my property colleagues watching Boris Johnson on the office TV give his first speech as Prime Minister in the House of Commons. My line manager, the only outwardly venal person I encountered there (and, weirdly, one of the only Manchester born and bred people in the firm) told me that it was “our job” to make Johnson “look normal” and Jeremy Corbyn, then still Labour leader and someone they all universally hated, look “not normal”. In what turned out to be my final week, an Extinction Rebellion demo passed the office window. Everyone stood up to jeer and shake their heads. I made a (probably pretty limp) defence of them, and something seemed to turn.
In retrospect, that period was quite a big time in my life, and friends were impressed and concerned that after big midweek summer nights I was able to turn up to the property office for 9AM, spending the mornings hungover and getting wired up on free coffee, and long afternoons coming down.
It was just another normal day when I got sacked. If there was any departmental skulduggery going on then I was entirely oblivious to it. In the morning, I was suddenly asked to go into a meeting in an exposed Perspex room. The solemn HR staffer and my Manc line manager told me that I was not a good cultural fit. I felt, perhaps rightly, blamed as some kind of imposter. I had lasted two months.
Exiting the Perspex room and, by now, slightly dazed, I had to hand over my laptop and empty out my locker in full view of the office staff, which felt theatrical and faintly cruel, like something latent in the otherwise cheery property world had suddenly been made flesh. I was escorted out of the premises, by a security guard who seemed to have only been hired for that day, and immediately saw my best friend Emma. I don’t remember it exactly like this but to this day she swears I shouted “I’ve just been sacked!” at her in the exact same cadence of Ian Beale saying “I’ve got nothing left” on EastEnders.
Every now and again – past the halfway mark of another decade – I check in with my old employer online. Their ripple effect came to pass, and AI seems to be doing much of what was once my portfolio. When I moved out of my Old Trafford room later that year, I left the self-help books behind in the houseshare in their thick packet: who knows what kind of entrepreneur has them now, I wonder?
header image: Pete Birkinshaw