In a recent speech given to the Professional Contractors Group (PCG), legendary tyre retail mogul Sir Tom Farmer warned would-be entrepreneurs against having simplistic, size orientated goals for their businesses. The Kwik-Fit Founder may have sold a 700-branch strong tyre retail chain to Ford for £1 billion in 2001, but for him size isn’t everything. He might not be Warren Buffet yet, but Scotland’s own oracle of Edinburgh had this sage advice: “bigger is dumber.”

PCG is apparently the biggest organisation representing freelancers in Europe, so it sounds like Sir Tom was preaching to the choir with his message of the importance of building businesses on a core group of key employees, and then outsourcing the rest. However, as virtually all the global tyre manufacturers are now demonstrating in their collective quest to make an increasing amount of high-performance tyres in low-cost countries with less human intervention, full-time employees are expensive and an inevitably long-term investment. And, as most national tyre retail chains will concede, running large networks such as theirs is a similarly complicated business.