Precious Ramotswe, creator and owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Botswana’s only detective agency for the problems of ladies, and of others, had never studied business management. She knew that it was common for people who ran their own businesses to take courses on topics such as stocktaking and cash flow, but she did not feel this was necessary in her case. Mind you, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency had never made a profit, although in recent years it had not made a loss either, for Mma Ramotswe had managed to juggle income and expenditure in such a way as to end up breaking even – provided that you practised what a book-keeper friend of hers called, with some admiration, Optimistic Accounting.

It was not that she was averse to taking advice. A few days ago she had come across a business magazine that had been left behind in the garage by one of her husband’s customers, and had read it from cover to cover, over a pot of redbush tea and a large doughnut. This magazine had been full of helpful articles with titles such as: ‘Making the most of your human resources’ and ‘How to maximise growth in difficult economic circumstances’. There was also a column called Dr Profit’s Business Clinic, to which readers could write with their business problems and receive free advice from Dr Profit himself, a man who was pictured wearing a large square pair of glasses and a broad smile – the look of somebody, she thought, who was probably always in healthy profit.

In the issue perused by Mma Ramotswe, one concerned reader raised a problem connected with an awkward employee – ‘Can one fire an employee who smells bad?’ Mma Ramotswe read this question with some interest – although it had no bearing on her own business (Mma Makutsi was always well turned-out and took, she believed, two baths a day) – before turning the page and seeing an article on the maximising of growth. ‘A business that isn’t expanding will actually be contracting,’ wrote the author. ‘That rule has been shown to be true time after time. How many businessmen are there who sit and contemplate the ruins of a once-profitable business simply because they forgot to expand?’