In message , at 11:50:26 on
Sun, 5 Apr 2015, Recliner remarked:

The boss came round to have a look, and decided to buy the whole block
outright (having already ascertained that most of the staff already
lived in Essex and he was looking to replace the Tottenham facility with
one nearer the Shoeburyness factory).

We moved into our 5th floor a couple of day later - the deal being
"deliver the keys tomorrow or it's off". And then we AMSOFT staff
moonlighted as building managers organising the refurbishment of floors
6-9, ahead of the arrival of the Tottenham crew.

Sounds like quite an educational experience! I guess you got to learn
all sorts of unlikely skills working for a 'pioneering' (cowboy?)
outfit like that.

I resent the conflation of pioneering, with cowboy with what our day job
was which was bleeding-edge personal computing. That completely
re-purposed the company from audio to PCs, and incidentally made it
vastly more profitable as well as providing the tools for numerous
customers to kick-start their own careers as programmers or
self-publishers.

Ironically, Amstrad in its entrepreneurial heyday, sounds like a very
different company to the ones that the modern day
sharp-suited/high-heeled Apprentices dream of creating.

We in AMSOFT like to think of ourselves as the original Apprentices
(back in 1984) and learnt an incalculable amount by being parachuted
into the day-to-day sales/marketing business of such a high profile
organisation where the boss had something I've never met before or since
- the ability to make a decision on the spot and stick to it.

It was often very challenging to justify what needed doing (he has the
knack of asking the one question you don't have an answer for), but
having committed to it, the funds were always available - even
six-figure cheques issued minutes later.

Rather mundane, perhaps, but when I joined the company he sent me off to
Vauxhall dealership somewhere in the Tottenham area with instructions to
pick whichever car (within budget) I wanted and drive it back. No
paperwork at all, just his word having phoned ahead that the garage
would get paid.

It worked the other way round too - if, as happened a few times, a
journalist rang saying "please give me the details of your new computer,
I've just been talking to AMS and he said it would be OK", I knew that
the first call after putting the phone down to the journalist would have
been to me, and not having received such a call, it was a scam.
--
Roland Perry