The bark that became sound – Paperback

The orders thin out. A fax arrives, then another. The biggest customers go to tender, and the price they want is half of what a decent stopper costs to make. The warehouse fills with stock nobody has ordered, until you have to walk sideways between the sacks to reach the office. By autumn there is enough money left for four months of wages.

One night Toms sits down at the computer and starts typing the list of people he will have to let go. He gets to the fifth name and stops.

He never sends it. Instead he clears out the old compressor room, puts two workbenches and a whiteboard in it, and asks his eleven employees to spend Friday afternoons finding a use for the seventy per cent of every cork tree that the factory has been throwing into a skip for forty years. For two months, everything they try fails.

Then, on a Friday in January, the answer arrives in a shopping bag, carried in by a woman who has spent eighteen years grading stoppers one at a time and has never once been asked what she thinks.

A short story of about eight thousand words, the second in the Entrepreneurial Stories series.