I was idly listening to the radio this morning, on my way to the post office, when the presenter (who sounded like a Simon so let’s just call him that) said “I want to know which Coldplay song you would like me to play next, so just text me now on 19xxx. “

It sounded so much like he was talking to me that I almost ignored the fact the number he read out clearly wasn’t a private mobile. I nearly did something that I never do; I all but texted “Violet Hill” to a radio station.

I didn’t actually do it; a moment of sanity reminded me that far from texting a friend I would have been sending a message to the computer and back office of Today FM. Still, it made an impression.

And it got me thinking about what an upside down world we live in. Big organizations do everything they can to make us feel like we are connecting with an individual (Simon) rather than a machine (Today FM), while, ironically, us Kitchen Table Tycoons pretend to our customers that we have a machine (“one of our team will call you back”) when really we are just the genuine individual article.

Here’s the juice: would we get more business if we dumped the pretence of being big and were overt with the fact that our customers get to talk to us, the boss, directly?