Defining Moments

I know some people have a clear vision to set up their own business from when they’re in school. I wasn’t one of them. I left school fairly early and went into horticulture. From there I realised that I wanted to get some education and I came to… read more

Secret

The key thing is to go into a market which is really going to attract people, and has wealth. Either that, or create one of your own with a new product or idea that you know will catch on. It can be difficult, but the key thing is to be persistent, and… read more

Secret

Part of the secret is to get different types of people in your organisation, and if you can get them to work together then you can create something wonderful. You don’t want clones, you want people with different characteristics.… read more

How I... Guide

After four years we had a turnover of eight million. At that stage, about 92% of that turnover was in submarine telecom, to do with the installation of cables on the sea bed. We were now one of two world leaders, the other being our old company. Over a… read more

How I... Guide

Consistently our orders have been greater than the overall turnover of the business. It does carry risk as we can’t afford a major contract to go wrong. We’ve always been told that you’re only as good as your last contract. Everyone who looks at the… read more

How I... Guide

I’m a great believer in the fact that the team matters more than the individual. You’ve got to spread the message of your company to everyone in the business. It gets more difficult as you get bigger and communications get harder. We’ve got up to 150… read more

How I... Guide

We had to make sure that we had the right people around us when we were making the decision about who to sell to, and we had great financial, tax and legal advisors to turn to. Choosing between potential buyers is always a difficult process. In the end,… read more

Pearl Of Wisdom

What I really like is change and challenge. If we go on a long car journey I like to have my i-pod on shuffle. There’s that little tingle of anticipation every time you get to the end of one song and you don’t know what’s coming next. A lot of people… read more

Challenge

The Engineering Business had a very unlikely start, and if you did any analysis you’d say, “Don’t do it, it looks ridiculous.” We were trying to compete with a very wealthy and well established global leader, and we had nothing. Four of us started the… read more

Challenge

We’ve had to make sure we grew organically. In the offshore oil and gas industry, traditionally you have to put up a bond when you take an order. If you take an order for 30 million, your customer probably wants a bond for three million. We’d run out… read more

Success

We sold The Engineering Business very recently. It was a 100%, clean sale which I think was the best thing for all the people involved. Early on, we made the decision that we would want everyone in the company to participate in any success we had. So… read more

Aspiration

We have very great aspirations for the future and hope to achieve a hundred million turnover in the next three or four years. We’re forever looking out for new opportunities in the market and making sure we can benefit from them.… read more

Support Story

I was keen to bring in a non executive director, a mate of mine from Aberdeen who was well experienced in running businesses. Later we got another lady from the City of London finance industry, who was a really good person to have as she provided… read more