【剑桥商务英语高级真题集】Manshee公司的发展(1/2)

英语自学网

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BEC HIGHER 听力训练，希望对备考的同学们有所帮助。
全文听写，英式拼法
HINTS
Manshee
6 million poundsGood morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm honoured to have this opportunity to talk to you. Eight years ago, I bought my first computer, but I soon discovered that where I lived, it was difficult to find accessories for that particular make. That made me realise that other people must have the same problem.
Then I found that foreign magazines contained plenty of advertisements of mail order companies, so I started buying spare parts and things that way and selling them on to my friends at a small profit. That was how my company, Manshee, was born.
Four years later, Manshee was making a profit and had reached a turnover of 6 million pounds. We had four directors, myself and three of my friends, plus a staff of 17. The culture was young and the working environment didn't have any structure. The company just grew and grew with its own momentum, and everything we did seemed to strike lucky. If we needed to buy some equipment or redecorate the sales office, we decided yes or no in isolation, only taking the short term, usually the cash flow for that month, into account.
However, the market became increasingly cut throat, and that led to falling margins. We realised, rather unwillingly, that the time had come to structure our future, but we didn't really have much idea how to set about it. So we went to a firm of consultants who specialise in helping small businesses, and it proved a turning point. They insisted that we four directors sit down and rank our investments in order of importance for the coming years. It seems obvious now, but we'd never realised the value of doing it before.