Business is people

“Business is people” is Callum O'Neill’s guiding maxim for a business built around personal contact and practical work. First offered as advice to Dexter Mayhew, it later becomes the rationale for Natural Stuff’s hands-on management culture; Dexter’s move from television to serving customers gives the phrase a concrete, and not entirely comfortable, test.

Career Advice and Principle

Callum uses the maxim while suggesting that Dexter consider a change of career. Dexter presents footage for a programme whose studio is in Morden, so his professed travel amounts to trips there. Callum argues that Dexter knows something about food and drink and can get on with people if he applies himself; he sees those qualities as grounds for a possible future in business. The maxim makes that recommendation personal: success, in Callum’s account, depends not only on a product or a job title but on dealing well with people.

Dexter’s response is a joke at Callum’s expense: he recalls that his old friend wore the same trousers every day for three years. Callum answers that this was a long time ago. The exchange gives the advice the texture of an old friendship rather than a formal pitch. Dexter tries to dislike Callum, but the practical offer remains on the table.

A Principle Put to Work

At Natural Stuff’s Clerkenwell headquarters, the maxim belongs to a workplace that is deliberately unlike a conventional office. The warehouse is fresh and modern, with juicers, bean-bags, unisex toilets, high-speed internet and pinball machines; its immense canvases of cows, chickens and crayfish contribute to the informal atmosphere. The architects call the space a “dreamspace,” but Callum insists that his executives first learn the business from the ground up.

Dexter is assigned a month-long trainee placement as shadow manager of the latest Natural Stuff outpost. Over the first three weeks, he cleans juicers, wears a hairnet to make sandwiches, grinds coffee and serves customers. He finds, to his surprise, that the work is okay. The maxim is therefore not just a slogan about sociability: it describes a management practice in which executives are expected to understand the business through direct contact with its everyday work and customers.

Recognition and the Cost of Starting Again

For Dexter, that customer contact also carries an unwelcome reminder of his former status. Customers sometimes recognize him as an ex-television presenter, and those around his own age seem especially likely to look at him with pity. Their remark that he seems smaller in real life captures the gap between television visibility and his new position behind a cash register.

Dexter imagines reassuring them that he is at peace, likes the work, is learning a new business and is providing for his family. He offers bread with the soup, turning the abstract maxim into the immediate exchange of service. That exchange does not erase his embarrassment at being recognized or the sense that his former fame has diminished; it does, however, give the work a practical purpose beyond his lost television career. In Dexter’s experience, Callum’s principle is both a business ethic and a way to make a less prestigious new beginning feel worthwhile.