BQ Scotland winter 2017

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Scotland: Winter 2017

RAREBIRD TAKES FLIGHT Paulette Brough’s Harris tweed business in the Western Isles is expanding

READY FOR TAKE-OFF No longer a franchise for Flybe, Loganair is flying solo once again

GOING FOR GOLD

Orkney inspires Sheila Fleet to create spectacular jewellery

Scotland: Winter 2017

Treasure island Jess Hartwell is carrying on a family tradition, making beautiful rugs on a beautiful island

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INSIDE

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SCOTLANDS DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Business Quarter Magazine

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Celebrating and inspiring entrepreneurship

BUSINESS QUARTER

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WELCOME

“The businesses that spring up on our islands can be awe-inspiring.

In the winter issue of BQ Scotland, we salute the inspirational achievements of entrepreneurs who call the islands home.”

BQ is part of BE Group, the UK’s market leading business improvement specialists. www.be-group.co.uk

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As a dedicated supporter of entrepreneurship, BQ is making a real and tangible contribution to local, regional and national economic growth across the UK. We are unique in what we aim to achieve as a media brand, a brand that has established a loyal audience of high growth SMEs as well as leading business influencers. They wholeheartedly believe in BQ’s focus on people – those individuals that are challenging the traditional ways of doing things. They are our entrepreneurs. BQ reaches entrepreneurs and senior business executives across Scotland, the North East and Cumbria, the North West, Yorkshire, the Midlands, Wales, London and the South, in-print, online and through branded events.

All contents copyright © 2017 BQ. All rights reserved. While every effort is made to ensure accuracy, no responsibility can be accepted for inaccuracies, howsoever caused. No liability can be accepted for illustrations, photographs, artwork or advertising materials while in transmission or with the publisher or their agents.

All content marked ‘Profile’, ‘Partner’ and ‘Special Report’ is paid for advertising.

All information is correct at time of going to print, December 2017.

WINTER 2017

Scotland’s islands are truly magical places. Whether it’s the steep cliffs of Shetland or the rolling hills of Orkney, the majestic peaks of Skye or the wooded slopes of Mull, the winding coast of Islay or “Scotland in miniature” on Arran, our nation has some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet.

The businesses that spring up on our islands can be equally awe-inspiring. In the winter issue of BQ Scotland, we salute the inspirational achievements of entrepreneurs who call the islands home.

It takes a special kind of innovator to run a successful business on an island.

You need even deeper reserves of grit and determination if your market is far away – plus you need to tackle the challenges of remoteness if the weather has grounded flights and kept the ferry in port.

It’s fascinating to explore why entrepreneurs have chosen to base themselves on islands. For many, it’s about inspiration – like Sheila Fleet, who draws on the stimulation provided by the landscape on her native Orkney to create her jewellery, or Paulette Brough, who fell in love with the colours of Lewis and Harris and its tweed while visiting and decided to stay and launch Rarebird Designs.

Other entrepreneurs share a similar sense of place when it comes to their products. That provenance is a key factor in the success of Jessica Hartwell and her team at Skyeskyns, a sheepskin tannery and five-star visitor centre on Skye, which exports its products around the world.

Provenance is also crucial in the tales of two bakeries – one on Mull and the other on Anglesey, off the north-west coast of Wales. On Mull, Joe and Dawn Reade have taken the Island Bakery from its humble beginnings in a garage attached to a cottage – the very epitome of a “cottage industry” – to a business that supplies Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, while James Shepherd drew on an ancient recipe to create the Aberffraw Biscuit Company.

It’s important to remember the businesses that serve our islands too, including Loganair, which provides lifeline flights to many remote communities. The company is flying solo again after its franchise agreement with Flybe ended and chief executive Jonathan Hinkles is the one in the pilot’s seat who must make the new setup soar.

We look at the lessons that have been brought back from other islands too.

Tim Viney honed his skills working on St Lucia and Bermuda before returning to Cumbria, where he runs Atlantic Geomatics, which is mapping every single graveyard plot in England.

And, in a change of pace, we also look at an island on a slightly different scale.

Edinburgh-based master of wine Giles Cooke, one of the directors of importer and wholesaler Alliance Wine, makes wine during spells in Australia, both for his own Thistledown Wine Company and for his side project, Our Fathers, which donates money to charities that are very close to his heart – as well as creating stonking shiraz.

Peter Ranscombe, editor

CONTENTS WINTER 2017 08

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JEWEL IN THE CROWN

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OVERCOMING TURBULENCE

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DO AS WE DO

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Sheila Fleet’s jewellery business on Orkney has fans around the world

Loganair managing director Jonathan Hinkles is the man in the pilot’s seat

Strathclyde Business School’s Professor Eleanor Shaw explains why entrepreneurs will always be the beating heart of the campus

FEATHER IN HER CAP Paulette Brough’s Rarebird Designs has grown from a lifestyle business into a global exporter

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PLANNING TO SUCCEED

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SKYE’S NO LIMIT

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CHEESE AND BISCUITS

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INVESTING TOGETHER

UBS helps people negotiate the difficulties of handing on wealth to future generations

Visitors are flocking to Jess Hartwell’s tannery and sheep skin shop on Skye

Joe and Dawn Reade use renewable energy to power the Island Bakery on Mull

Growth Capital Ventures is bringing new and exciting investment opportunities to a wider range of investors

Celebrating and inspiring entrepreneurship 30 14

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CRUNCH POINT An ancient island tradition has turned into a recipe for success for James Shepherd

DRIVING THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL TRADE

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NUCLEAR FAMILY

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MASTER OF WINE

Scottish Enterprise helps businesses negotiate the fast changing waters of global trade

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MAN ON THE MOVE

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HE KNOWS WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED

Steve Mathers travels the globe for a worldbeating manufacturer

Using lessons learned on islands, Tim Viney’s business is mapping every graveyard in England

Atom bank attracts exceptional people to it’s exceptional business

Giles Cooke has helped turn Alliance Wine into a major importer and distributor

HIGH LIFE 41

The best in motoring, food and drink

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Jewel f the isles From her base on Orkney, Sheila Fleet and her team produce individually-designed and hand-finished pieces of jewellery that have captured the hearts of customers around the globe, as Peter Ranscombe discovers.

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hristmas always comes early for Sheila Fleet. Like so many entrepreneurs working in the manufacturing and retail sectors, Fleet and her team must start thinking about the festive period way back in the late summer and early autumn, even when the warm sun is still beating down on her workshop at Tankerness on Orkney.

Yet “workshop” doesn’t really do justice to the craftsmanship that goes on in Fleet’s headquarters.

Each of her designs originates and gets made on the premises and is hand-finished there, combining silver and enamel coloured with glass to create everything from brooches, earrings and necklaces through to rings, cufflinks and kilt pins.

It’s a treat to see Fleet in action as she leads the

way through the workshop, passing on her design for a piece of jewellery for a German customer to a member of her team. Around her, craftsmen and women are busy beavering away at their wooden benches, their hand tools neatly lined up in rows, working hard to meet the Christmas orders.

This is no soulless factory either. Even though it’s just a short drive from Kirkwall, Orkney’s main town, Tankerness is a rural community, with the workshop surrounded by fields and only a short walk away from the shoreline.

What’s perhaps most striking about Fleet’s jewellery is the way in which it captures the essence of the landscape of Orkney, an archipelago of around 70 islands lying 10 miles off the north coast

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of Scotland. Her designs incorporate the patterns created by waves on the sea, sand on the beach, colours in the rock; capturing each ripple, each curve, each colour.

Her home is strewn with pieces of rock, perched on tables and surfaces around the house. Like a magpie, she collects stones with colours or patterns that will inspire her designs, while friends and family also contribute to the collection.

She holds up an example from Yesnaby, a set of sea cliffs on the west coast of the Mainland and her favourite place on Orkney to go collecting rocks. Fleet clearly feels a very strong connection to the land of her birth and it’s intriguing to see how the landscape has inspired her work.

Later, sitting at her dining table, she spreads a series of old photographs across the surface,

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some showing family portraits, other showing scenes from the family croft in the 1950s, including the “stooks”, sheaves of grain standing upright in fields, in the days before combine harvesters and baling machines could create the now-familiar cylindrical or rectangular hay stacks. Some of the photos are in frames and ready to be passed on to relatives or friends.

“You had to cut the stooks at just the right angle, so they would stand up properly,” Fleet remembers. Precision and an eye for detail emerged at an early age.

Creativity also clearly runs in the family. A large painting that hangs in her house is one of 500 watercolours created by her mother – who only took up the hobby when she was in her 80s.

Born in 1945 on South Ronaldsay, one of the islands connected to Orkney’s Mainland by the

Churchill barriers at the eastern end of Scapa Flow, Fleet left school at the age of 15 without any qualifications. Yet her talent for art and design was already evident.

Fleet joined Edinburgh College of Art in 1963 and spent two years on its general course, studying drawing, painting and sculpture. After joining a “lapidary” club – the cutting, polishing and engraving of gemstones – and creating her first piece of jewellery, she began specialising in jewellery and fashion design, gaining her diploma from the college in 1967.

She was then awarded a further year’s post-diploma professional training in jewellery, which came with industrial endorsement. A small bursary allowed her to study in London under Andrew Grima, one of the most famous jewellers of his day, who designed pieces for the Queen.

“After 21 years in industry working for other people, the time seemed right to work for myself.”

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Gaining top marks in her post-diploma studies and a series of awards allowed Fleet to spread her wings even further, travelling extensively through Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. She joined Corocraft, the world’s largest costume jewellery company, in 1969 and won a series of prizes in British and European competitions, meeting and marrying her husband, photographer and blacksmith Rick Fleet, along the way.

Fleet and her husband moved back to Orkney in 1977 and she began working with local jewellery company Ortak as its first professional designer and modelmaker. In 1993, she took the bold move of setting up her own business, building her first workshop in a converted chicken shed in her garden.

“We still use the shed,” Fleet laughs. “The members of staff who work in there have the best views from their windows because they can see down to the shore – they may have the oldest shed, but they have the best view.

“After 21 years in industry working for other people, the time seemed right to work for

myself. My son was in his teens, so it felt like he was old enough for me to start my own business.

“My husband had been ill at the time, so it was a way of us working together. We were looking for a quality of life where we could work together as a family.

“It had been great to be in London and the south of England during the swinging years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But the time was right to come home – Tankerness is beautiful because I love being by the sea and my husband loved aeroplanes and we’re only five minutes from the airport.”

Construction work began on the current workshop, showroom and offices in 1995, with the premises extended several times over the years to accommodate the growing business, Sheila Fleet Jewellery. Now, an even more exciting expansion project is underway.

Next year, Fleet will open an exhibition space and café in an old church that sits next to her workshop. The sanctuary of the church has been sympathetically restored, with a

mezzanine level creating extra space inside.

It’s been a long time in development; the company bought the building in 2007 and work was already underway back in 2014. But Fleet has been keen to renovate the church to the highest standard and the result will be well worth the wait.

The new visitors’ centre is expected to create around 12 jobs, swelling the headcount of the company from its current complement of around 80 staff, some 50 of whom are based on Orkney, with the others spread throughout the businesses’ shops in Kirkwall and Stockbridge in Edinburgh, and its concessions at Jenners department store in Edinburgh, House of Fraser in Glasgow and Loch Lomond Shores.

The concession at Jenners opened in 1995 and expanded in 2000. Over the summer, Fleet’s company took the window displays in the store, advertising her jewellery to the thousands of visitors who flocked to the city for the 70th Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival.

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“Now we have to prove to our customers that we can work with Scottish gold as well, so we’re at a very exciting stage.”

Another development about which the designer is particularly excited is the chance to use Scottish gold for the first time. Permission was granted to extract gold from the Cononish mine near Tyndrum in 1996, with Chris Sangster founding Scotgold Resources to carry out the work in 2007.

Sangster was interviewed by Gillian Law in issue nine of BQ Scotland magazine back in the autumn of 2012 and last year the first Scottish gold was sold at auction in the form of 12 rounds or coins, with Fleet paying £2,517 for her share of the precious metal – round number six. Back in June, a second announcement from Scotgold revealed that a deal had been struck to sell more gold to two Scottish jewellers, one

of which was Fleet’s company.

“Scottish gold is a rare commodity,” explains Fleet. “We’ve just created our first few pieces – it’s quite nerve-racking because we know we can produce items in other metals, but now we have to prove to our customers that we can work with Scottish gold as well, so we’re at a very exciting stage. We have now made our first ten items in Scottish gold.”

Fleet is not only a keen supporter of Scottish gold, but also of the wider “Made in Scotland” movement. “We need to do more to promote the provenance of our products,” she says.

Having run her own business for 25 years, Fleet still relishes the challenge of designing

new pieces. “When I create a range, I’ll continue to develop themes from previous years,” she explains.

“But I’ll also take a chance and throw something new into the mix – and it’s often that new design that sells the best. You can’t put all your eggs in one basket, so it’s good to push the boundaries.”

One of the highlights of running her own business is the connection with the customers.

“We are there with them at some of the most important moments in their lives,” she explains.

“We have men getting in touch asking us to design engagement rings for their girlfriends.

It’s really special because we have to help keep it a secret for them.” n

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After 25 years operating as a franchisee for first British Airways and then Flybe, Loganair is once again taking off as a standalone airline. Managing director Jonathan Hinkles tells Peter Ranscombe about the carrier’s lifeline services to the islands and its expansion into other markets.

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t’s the calm before the storm at Loganair.

The remnants of Hurricane Ophelia, the first major storm of the winter, are battering the Republic of Ireland and are due to start hitting Scotland later in the day.

Sitting in his office just yards from Glasgow airport, managing director Jonathan Hinkles looks like calmness personified. Sipping from a bottle of Diet Coke and appearing relaxed in his open-necked shirt, it’s hard to believe that a storm with the potential to ground aircraft is only hours away.

“We’re as ready as we can be,” Hinkles nods.

“All the hard work was done on Saturday and we have plans in place. All we can do now is wait.”

Further down the corridor, the airline’s customer contact centre has been busy fielding calls from passengers and has been taking proactive steps to deal with questions on social media. Under the dim lights in the airline’s operations room, members of staff are

tracking the movements not only of their own aeroplanes but also of the approaching storm.

Ophelia isn’t the only turbulence that Hinkles has had to face as the boss at Loganair.

He’s currently enjoying his second spell with the airline, having joined in 2008 as commercial director before becoming chief operating officer.

He left in 2012 to join Virgin Atlantic and then returned in June 2016 as chief executive.

Hinkles was in for a bumpy ride though as he slid into the pilot’s seat.

Loganair had come in for criticism over the reliability of the lifeline services it provides to communities in its heartland across the Highlands and islands and over the cost of its short-haul flights. “You know you’ve got a problem when your company is appearing in First Minister’s questions,” Hinkles says.

“Fortunately, Loganair had started to take steps to address those issues even before I was appointed. Maurice Boyle, our operations

director, had already begun to turn things round.

“A large part of my job after I arrived back was to adopt a ‘Reagan-esque’ approach and get people to have confidence in their own abilities again. I also wanted to get people to look forwards instead of backwards – we’d become very good at reporting on yesterday’s problem instead of dealing with today’s situation so it didn’t turn into tomorrow’s problem.”

Hinkles also set about tackling a shortage of engineers in the company. He has reinstated an apprenticeship scheme that was axed three years ago as a cost-cutting measure.

“It’s a three-year scheme,” he explains. “It takes longer to train an engineer than a pilot.

At Kirkwall, we tried recruiting engineers to go and work on Orkney, but we’ve found it better to recruit people from the local community who have experience in related areas, such as cars.”

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“A large part of my job after I arrived back was to adopt a ‘Reaganesque’ approach and get people to have confidence in their own abilities again.”

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“Flybe proposed new terms that would have involved us paying millions of pounds more each year. It just made no economic sense for us.”

Charting a smoother course for Loganair hasn’t been without its challenges though. Less than six months after Hinkles took the top job, Loganair’s spell as a franchisee for Flybe came to an end.

“There were a lot of factors at play,” he explains. “I felt we had solved the issues before we started renegotiating the franchise agreement.

“Flybe proposed new terms that would have involved us paying millions of pounds more each year. It just made no economic sense for us.

“Over a period of six-to-nine months, we reached the decision not to renew the agreement. I think it’s fair to say the board was split on the decision when we began discussing it, but by the end of the negotiations with Flybe it was clear to all of us and we were in agreement.

“I was one of the last people to come around to the point of view that we couldn’t renew. We made the announcement in

November 2016 and we began flying again under our own banner on 1 September.”

The decision marks the first time in 25 years that Loganair’s passenger services would all run under its own brand instead of other airlines’ livery. Although Loganair traces its roots back to 1962 – when it was founded as an air taxi service run by the Logan Construction Company – the business as it is known today began to take shape in 1967 when it launched an inter-island service around Orkney, adding a similar network around Shetland in 1970.

Services between the Western Isles and the mainland had begun in 1964 and growth accelerated following British Airways’ rationalisation in 1975, with the flag carrier handing marginal routes over to Loganair.

In 1994, Loganair signed a franchise agreement with British Airways, dressing its planes in the larger company’s livery. That agreement was replaced in 2008 with a similar deal with Flybe, although Loganair continued as a “codeshare” partner for British Airways,

allowing customers from around the world to book flights into the Highlands and islands, and allowing Highlanders and islanders to do the same in reverse, gaining access to the flag carrier’s global network.

“I think people forget that our relationship with British Airways began before our dealings with Flybe and that it continues today with our codeshare agreement,” Hinkles points out.

“It’s a really important relationship for our passengers in the Highlands and islands.”

As the franchise agreement with Flybe drew to a close, Hinkles had to put all the pieces in place to allow Loganair to operate as a standalone airline again. Some changes were cosmetic – a red, black and white tartan was created to adorn the tailfins of the planes and the uniforms of their crews, while nine Harris tweed patterns were selected for the headrests on the seats.

Other changes involved operational considerations. Around 20 jobs were created, swelling the workforce to about 650 people.

Ten of those jobs came in the customer contact centre in Glasgow, with a further five roles created in the commercial and marketing departments and four in the finance team, all functions previously carried out by either Flybe or its subcontractors. “The Flybe call centre

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was in Serbia and, while it did a good job, it didn’t feel like the right thing to do if we were creating ‘Scotland’s airline’,” says Hinkles.

“We looked at outsourcing the contact centre – and Scotland is a good place to outsource those types of functions – but we felt that even a few miles away instead of a few feet away was too far. I think we’ve proved that this weekend with the preparations for Ophelia – if customers have phoned us then we’ve had all the details here to hand.”

In total, between £3.5m and £4m has been spent putting Loganair on a standalone footing, with all the investment coming from the business’s existing cash reserves.

While Loganair was preparing to fly solo, Flybe unveiled a contract with Eastern Airways, which has seen the old and new franchise partners going head-to-head on some routes.

Figures released in September by Loganair showed that two-thirds of the customers flying from Sumburgh on Shetland to Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow were using Loganair, with the remainder opting for the rival Eastern Airways-Flybe service.

Hinkles remains tight-lipped on the figures for similar services to Orkney and the Western Isles. Loganair provides groundhandling services for the Eastern Airways-Flybe

partnership in Kirkwall and Stornoway and so he feels it would be “bad form” to discuss such things.

Creating an airline from scratch sounds like a tall order, but Hinkles has previous form in this area. He always had a passion for aviation and joined the industry in 1993 fresh from school; his plan was to work for two years before going to university. “But that never happened and never will,” he laughs.

Instead, he spent eight years at City Flyer, which became part of British Airways, before he and five colleagues set up Astraeus Airlines, which was backed by French venture capitalists, in 2001. The business was sold to Icelandic group Eignarhaldsfelagid Fengur, at which point Hinkles left to join John and Hugh Boyle in setting up the UK operations of Zoom Airlines.

“We had an aborted initial public offering in late 2007,” he remembers. “As we were going around the City doing the roadshow for potential investors, I kept seeing long queues forming outside branches of Northern Rock and wondered what was going on.”

Working with three start-ups clearly gave Hinkles the experience he needed to chart a course towards independence for Loganair. Now several weeks into the airline’s

reincarnation, it looks like he’s steered a smooth course.

“The airline will remain profitable this year, although it won’t reach the levels of profit we hit two or three years ago,” he predicts. “That’s due to the investment that was made to solve the issues we faced, but also the weakness of the pound against the dollar, which pushed our costs up by 10%.

“Turnover last year broke through the £100m barrier and this year it will be closer to £120m.

That’s thanks to a doubling of our work for Royal Mail, running two planes instead of four – we call the service to Orkney the ‘Amazon express’ because of all the online packages it carries – and because we’re running shuttle services for three oil companies from Aberdeen to Shetland.

“We’ve had some teething issues since September – like the long queues at Glasgow airport – but I think we’ve tackled those now,” adds Hinkley. “A lot of our staff live in the communities they serve in the Highlands and islands – so if we do anything wrong then we hear about it very quickly.”

Although Loganair may have branded itself as “Scotland’s airline” for several years, it feels like the newly-independent carrier is now growing into its slogan. n

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Partner

DO AS WE DO Only a handful of universities have been given a gold accreditation for their work with small businesses, as recognised by the businesses themselves. Vice Dean of Strathclyde Business School, Professor Eleanor Shaw, explains why entrepreneurs will always be the beating heart of the campus.

ELEANOR Shaw is a busy, busy person. “My main responsibilities are around our external engagement, and, as head of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, our activities in entrepreneurship and enterprise.” she begins,

“and, for a short period of time, I’m also acting head of the department of strategy and organisation!”

Just one of these roles would be enough to keep the average person busy, but Eleanor

appears to thrive on the challenge.

Her career has taken her from academia to industry and back to academia again, and at Strathclyde University she’s found a home that shares her values about being on the ground, in the business community, with doors – and ears – open.

“As an academic, part of my role is engaging in research and the type of research I do is very much based in what is useful to the business world, research that has significance to business and to society. I’m a people person; I like meeting with and speaking to people. And all of that works really well at Strathclyde – as a university, there is a strong focus on ‘useful learning’ in both teaching and research.

“Strathclyde recognises the importance of research, but what it does – and this is something that not all universities do – is it looks at how it can translate that research into meaningful actions and behaviours for

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individuals, organisations, and wider society’s benefit. And that’s something I really value.”

Eleanor herself has an undergraduate degree in management and economics and social history from Glasgow. “When I graduated, I got a graduate job with one of the Big Five which I did for a couple of years. But I felt, as much as I enjoyed the work and the travelling, I missed learning. I’d really enjoyed that, and developing myself through learning, and I decided after a couple of years to move into a research post.”

She took a position as a research assistant with a previous professor, initially carrying out research for him on projects, but eventually she was asked to cover a couple of classes.

“And I absolutely loved it,” she enthuses.

I can hear the smile in her face as she talks about a career that feels like a vocation to her. “I decided at this point that it seemed like a good area for my career – it allowed me to research, which I enjoyed, and to teach, which I also enjoyed. I love meeting people, and finding out ways I can help them on a learning journey, whether individually or with a company.

“So, at that point, I decided to take it seriously, and my way of taking it seriously was to do a doctorate. I realised that in academia, you do need to have a research qualification of some type, and I thought that would be a good way for me to really delve deeply into the things I was interested in.

“The PhD also allowed me to do a lot of work with small, local Scottish companies and in that way, I became really interested in entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship.”

Her PhD involved engaging with business directly: “I was out and about a lot, working with lots of local companies, and I was interested in what growth strategies they were using. That got me interested in the external engagement aspect. A lot of my research involved spending significant time with small

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businesses out at their places of work and I very much enjoyed that.”

Now, fifteen years in to her second stint working at Strathclyde University, Eleanor is very proud of the way entrepreneurs are embedded into everything the business school does, particularly at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship, endowed by entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Tom Hunter.

“We have an open-door policy, if you like.

We have organisations and individuals coming in and out all the time and we do provide some physical space for organisations within the business school. Across campus we have lots of entrepreneurial organisations with an office or a presence.

“Entrepreneurial Scotland is one of our strategic partners, and we have Scottish Chambers of Commerce in the business school along with Scottish EDGE. The Scale Up Institute, which is London based, works with us whenever they are in Scotland, and we do a lot of work with Founders4Schools.”

Founders4Schools is an online platform that connects entrepreneurs with teachers to help get them in to schools, and Strathclyde University provides them with their Scottish home.

“We also, as a university, have a network called Enterprise Partners who are specifically graduates and friends of the university who are entrepreneurial and running their own businesses.

“We bring them in for guest lectures, they provide internships for our students, they act as live case studies, and we run programmes that involve students being placed in their business for a period.” This idea of embedding students within businesses is central to the ethos of the business school.

“We’re really, really keen that when students graduate from Strathclyde that they understand the place of work; they understand

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“Part of my role is engaging in research and the type of research I do is very much based in what is useful to the business world.”

what work is like and they’ve had experience of working.

“In our third year undergraduate programme we have a core management development programme, which all our students take.

Embedded in that programme is a requirement for them to go and engage with businesses – through the business clinic which allows them to offer solutions to small local firms; and via volunteer work, because we’re keen to encourage the idea of giving something back.”

When the Chartered Association of Business Schools introduced the Small Business Charter, Strathclyde was one of the first business

“Strathclyde recognises the importance of research, but what it does – and this is something that not all universities do – is it looks at how it can translate that research into meaningful actions and behaviours.”

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“We’re really, really keen that when students graduate from Strathclyde that they understand the place of work; they understand what work is like and they’ve had experience of working.”

schools in the UK – the only one in Scotland – to be accredited at a gold standard. “That accreditation is important to us, because the evaluation was undertaken not by academics, but by entrepreneurs.

“Those entrepreneurs that we claim to want to help, that we claim to have an impact on, they’re reviewing what we do, and they’re saying we’re doing it well and at a high level.

“It means that when we’re meeting entrepreneurial clients, we can bring it to their attention – they know we’ve been through a rigorous process and it really helps our credibility when we say we can work with you and help you grow your business.”

Eleanor stresses it’s not academic peers making that judgement – it’s the business’ peers.

Strathclyde is, as might be expected, very forward thinking about learning and development opportunities – not just for the academic staff, but for everyone at the

university. In that vein, the business school has partnered with MCR Pathways and encourages staff to take part in their mentoring programme for young people.

“The uptake has been phenomenal – our staff almost get more out of mentoring the young people than the young people do!

But the outcomes are fantastic for the young people – they stay in school longer, they do better with qualifications, and they create opportunities they probably wouldn’t have otherwise had.”

The business school is keen to develop and build capacity to engage externally at the highest possible levels and in the most professional ways. “We’re ambitious; we want to be compared with the top North American and European business schools,” she says.

And to that end, they’ve embarked on a new programme with an American partner.

“Babson is a Boston-based college specialising in entrepreneurship. They run a

programme called the Global Entrepreneurship Educators Symposium. It’s about training the trainers, if you like, and it’s a three day programme to enhance the capacity of our faculty to deliver really high level executive education.

“What’s unique about the programme,” she continues, “is that of those taking part in those three days, roughly half of them will be faculty members and the other half will be entrepreneurs. We work with them, with a view to deliver more programmes for entrepreneurs and in partnership with them.

“It’s something which hasn’t been done much across the UK. The entrepreneurs who took part have developed our newest engagement network, our Founding Entrepreneurs network. We have twenty or so, ranging from the most well-known entrepreneurs to more social entrepreneurs… a really nice mix operating across all sectors, coming into the room, rolling up their sleeves,

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“If businesses come to us, they’ll meet an enthusiastic, experienced group of entrepreneurship researchers and educators.”

and learning how to deliver this type of education at the highest possible levels.

“We can learn from each other whilst having different strengths.”

They’re also dabbling in LEGO: Serious Play, a smaller capacity building workshop working with Northern European colleagues who are experts in their area using LEGO as a learning tool.

“It’s not just for young people, it’s actually a brilliant teaching tool for people at the top of a company who are making the decisions!”

“Anyone in a university involved in external engagement needs to understand that clients are different; listen to them, understand what they’re looking for and, given the expertise they have, find out what they are looking for.

Doing that allows us to develop meaningful

and valuable relationships with businesses.

Eleanor says working on development programmes and working with entrepreneurs is a learning process: “We don’t deliver off the shelf programmes. We sit down, we listen to what they need, and we iterate to make sure that whatever our recommendations are, they’re fit for purpose for that business. To be able to deliver that engagement means we must listen actively to businesses.

“If businesses come to us, they’ll meet an enthusiastic, experienced group of entrepreneurship researchers and educators, who can provide a toolkit and the knowhow to release or enhance the productivity and creativity of their organisations. We can facilitate introduction, and access, to other entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial

organisations… and best of all, we can introduce them to our students.” n To find out more about how Strathclyde University’s services for business can help you, visit https://www.strath.ac.uk/business/ or email entrepreneur@strath.ac.uk

Contact details www.strath.ac.uk/business 0141 553 6000

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WEAVING THE OLD WITH THE NEW After a career in the textiles industry, Paulette Brough moved to the Western Isles and set up Rarebird Designs, which makes handbags, scarves and accessories from Harris tweed, as Peter Ranscombe reports.

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t’s hard not to fall in love with the rugged beauty of Lewis and Harris. There’s something very special about the largest island in the Outer Hebrides, from the rocky cliffs of Harris up to the open skies of Lewis’s moors.

Paulette Brough certainly fell for the island’s charm. “It’s the colours that I love,” she explains from her studio and shop in Stornoway.

“It was the same when I saw the colours in Harris tweed for the first time. They’re not flat colours – they jump out at you as if they’re three-dimensional.”

Those colours are one of the key characteristics that set Harris tweed apart from other woven materials. Each strand of wool is dyed before it is spun – as opposed to the finished spun yarn being dyed – and so coloured threads can be blended together to create a broad range of intricate shades and hues.

When she moved to the Western Isles, Brough began working for a kiltmaking company. She visited a Harris tweed mill with one of her colleagues and became excited by the distinctive material.

Brough began making a handbag for herself from Harris tweed in 2006. The following year, she launched her company, Rarebird Designs, which produces handbags, scarves and accessories.

“When I started the company, I didn’t intend for it to be a

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“I was taking so many orders that I had to get back home to make more handbags to keep up. Within that first year, I realised that I would have to work on the business full-time.�

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“I think that the business would be a lot bigger if it was on the mainland. Every time you want to do something on an island you have to go and catch a ferry, which makes things much harder.”

full-time job,” she explains. “I just wanted something to keep me busy and to help fund trips back to the mainland to visit family.

“I thought that I’d be able to go to fairs on the mainland and then visit family and friends while I was there. But the fairs were so busy and such long days that it didn’t work out quite like I imagined it would.

“I was taking so many orders that I had to get back home to make more handbags to keep up. Within that first year, I realised that I would have to work on the business full-time.

“We originally intended for my business to be a side line to supplement my husband’s income, but we quickly realised that he would have to come and work in the business too to give me a hand. He had been working as a heavy goods vehicle driver when we first moved to Lewis.”

The transition from lifestyle business to full-blown company is one that will be familiar to many entrepreneurs. What starts off as a

relatively-small idea can soon grow arms and legs and success brings more success.

Stephen, Brough’s husband, now runs her second studio and shop at Carloway, on the other side of the island, serving customers and managing the fabric orders. The business employs three people, with other freelancers joining the team as and when they’re needed.

Turnover has already grown to around £120,000 a year and Brough is preparing to expand the business again next year, introducing a broader range of products. “That will boost turnover and help to create more jobs,” she explains.

“I think that the business would be a lot bigger if it was on the mainland. Every time you want to do something on an island you have to go and catch a ferry, which makes things much harder.”

Brough also takes on students during the summer months, passing on the skills she’s learned during a lifetime in the textiles industry.

“We both win – they learn about business and I get extra pairs of hands during the busy periods,” she says.

Before she moved to the Outer Hebrides, Brough had worked as a garment technician at Bentwood Brothers, a clothing manufacturer at Altrincham near Manchester that supplied Marks & Spencer. The company, which was part of the Stirling Group, was de-listed from the London Stock Exchange in 2003 following a management buyout led by Steven Bentwood but later fell into administration in 2010.

“Most of the female members of my family had worked in cotton mills,” she explains. “I could make anything from ladies’ swimwear to nightwear and ladies’ blouses and skirts and jackets – but I’d never actually made a handbag.

I had the skills, but it just took a bit of thinking about.”

Brough had been made redundant and she and Stephen decided to spend some time in the Outer Hebrides, where they had a holiday

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home, which they planned to do up. After the renovations were completed, they decided that they liked life on the islands so much that they chose to stay.

The business has come a long way from those early days when Brough was selling her wares at shows. She found that the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh and game fairs like those at Burghley and Badminton proved popular.

“It was harder to sell Harris tweed at the Devon county show in the summer,” she laughs.

“When it’s 90-degrees outside and inside the tent was like an oven then people didn’t want to think about scarves.

“But the contacts I made at those fairs were really important. I met a lot of shop owners and they wanted to start stocking my products.”

The majority of the 90 shops to which Rarebird supplies goods are in Scotland – including Canongate Jersey & Crafts in Edinburgh, the National Trust for Scotland and Macnaughtons of Pitlochry – along with galleries and smaller shops. Further afield, her products are also sold at the British Museum and the Highland Store in London.

Overseas clients include Tasman

“I wanted to explore making my own prints for my fabrics. I make a lot of things with nice interesting linings and it’s a nightmare sourcing the prints that I want because the prints that I mostly use are cotton prints and they tend to be patchwork.”

International, which has major stands at the British fairs held within Japanese department stores, including Mitsukoshi Nihonbash, which holds the largest British fair in Tokyo, and Hankyu department store in Osaka, which is the longest-running British fairs in Japan, having just celebrated 50 years in October. Brough has visited three times at Hankyu’s invitation to demonstrate and promote Rarebird accessories and interact with Japanese customers. Other exports have been sent to Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States.

The growth of Rarebird has mirrored the revival in the wider Harris tweed industry.

Although the material had been championed during the 1980s by designer Vivienne Westwood, the 1990s was a period of decline, with weavers leaving the trade.

A major turning point came in 2007 when a consortium led by former Labour MP Brian Wilson formed the Harris Tweed Hebrides mill in Shawbost and began targeting a new generation of designers; the mill is now the biggest of the three on the island. Another landmark in the story of the material had come in 2005 when weaver Donald John MacKay won a contract to supply sports brand Nike with 10,000 metres of tweed for its “Terminator” range of baseball caps; MacKay was subsequently appointed as a member of the order of the British empire in the new year’s honours list for his achievement.

Now, brands ranging from Marks & Spencer and Top Man through to North Face jackets, Dr Martens boots and Converse shoes are queueing up to use the material. Celebrity fans have included former Dr Who actor Matt Smith and rapper Tinie Tempah.

Colour isn’t the only factor that sets Harris tweed apart. Its claim to fame is that it’s the “only fabric produced in commercial quantities by truly traditional methods anywhere in the world”.

After the wool is dyed, blended, spun and

warped in one of the three Harris tweed mills on the island of Lewis and Harris, the yarn is then sent out to weavers who work from their homes. They use traditional “treadle” looms – a fascinating sight to see and one that mesmerises tourists visiting the Western Isles.

Once completed, the cloth is sent back to the mills for finishing. The final step in the process is for the famous “Orb” trademark to be added to the reverse of the fabric, which also appears on the label.

The whole process is governed by the 1993 Harris Tweed Act and overseen by a statutory public body, the Harris Tweed Authority – or, as one pun-master at The Scotsman newspaper once suggested, the “last quango on Harris”.

Parliamentary protection for the traditional industry stretches back even further to the original Harris Tweed Association, which was founded in 1909.

While she works with one of the most traditional materials in Scotland, Brough’s business effortlessly weaves the old with the new. She sells her garments through her own online shop and her range includes Harris tweed iPad and mobile phone covers.

Brough has also collaborated with Glasgow School of Art after being introduced by Interface, the public body that acts as a matchmaker for small businesses that want to access academic expertise to help solve problems or develop products and services.

“I wanted to explore making my own prints for my fabrics,” she explains. “I make a lot of things with nice interesting linings and it’s a nightmare sourcing the prints that I want because the prints that I mostly use are cotton prints and they tend to be patchwork.

“They’re only produced for six months so by the time you find them they’re nearly out of date, so you can’t do any large orders. Or you find a nice one and then you can’t get it anymore. I wanted something that was more ‘me’ and more reflective of the Hebrides.” n

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Making a success of succession Debjani Raffan, head of UBS Wealth Management Scotland, tells Bryce Wilcock how the company is helping wealthy families across the globe plan for the future.

TRANSFERRING wealth from one generation to the next can provide families with a real headache but it doesn’t have to be such an arduous task.

In a new report titled “What’s it all for?”, UBS highlights some of the real challenges and dilemmas faced by families when it comes to succession planning.

Through eight case studies, the report delves into scenarios ranging from what happens when

a husband and wife don’t agree to how to cope with complicated family structures and how to involve future generations in the planning process.

“The question of what wealth is fundamentally for has no single answer, and will be a deeply personal matter for most individuals,” the report points out. “Is wealth simply to be enjoyed by the people who have made it?

“Those with children and grandchildren will usually feel a sense of responsibility to their descendants. Setting them up in life though, without taking away their drive and incentives for success, is a complicated task.”

Debjani Raffan, head of UBS Wealth Management Scotland and a client advisor, said “A lot of families are very comfortable with their own family set up but at some point, their family unit expands to involve sons-in-law and

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daughters-in-law and that’s when things begin to get much more tricky.”

The first of the eight case studies features a husband and wife duo who had disagreed on the right thing to do with their wealth.

Husbands and wives often share the same values and attitudes in discussions about family wealth; however, this isn’t always the case. From time-to-time, they can have different views on the big questions around succession, such as how to handle their wealth or what to do with the family business.

“My wife has a clear view that our children should make their own way in the world, but I feel that they face very different pressures now compared to when we were in our 20s,” the husband said. The pair then sat down with an adviser from UBS and were able to structure a plan that suited both of their needs and desires.

Another pressing concern for many families is choosing how to distribute wealth and assets to multiple children. It can be quite straight forward when a family only has one child but how do you remain fair and please everyone when there is more than one?

This can throw up an even bigger challenge when a business is involved. Two of the children may want to get involved in the business and another might have no interest.

Then, which roles do they take up and how is the third compensated for missing out? If families misjudge the situation and get these decisions wrong, it can sow the seeds of lasting resentment, so it is understandable why it is a worry for many families.

The third case study featured in the report analyses a grandfather who had initially intended to divide his wealth 50-50 between his two children, however, as time went on, circumstances started to change, and three grandchildren came along. He also decided one of his children wasn’t financially responsible enough to be given half of the family fortune and wanted to change his will.

With this in mind, he changed his plan to a five-way split of the company shares between his two children and three grandchildren, who were already grown-up. Unfortunately, the grandfather died before his will was formally redrawn. Relationships in the family have since suffered badly, with lawyers now involved on all sides.

“With so much wealth now in the hands of baby boomers, situations can now be more complex and involve multiple generations,” the report highlights. “We often think of wealth

“

“We see a lot of clients involved in philanthropic projects and that is where the next generation is very frequently first involved in the family money.”

being transferred to people when they reach the age of 18 or 21. Because people are living longer, and earning for longer, much wealth now transitions to people who are already in their 30s, 40s or even 50s.

“Sometimes, wealthy couples only start taking these conversations seriously in their 60s.

By then, their children will be adults and have firm views of their own. It’s possible that there will also be grandchildren to consider and the temptation to skip a generation becomes much more real.”

Another factor to consider, which is high on the agenda of many people, is leaving money behind to charitable causes. Philanthropy plays a key role in wealth management and is also a topic close to the hearts of those at UBS. Whilst the majority of people are happy to use their wealth to help their children succeed in life and achieve their goals, many also want to use their wealth to achieve something else, for society or for those less fortunate.

UBS can help its clients identify and get involved in charitable causes through its dedicated philanthropy team, which ensures that the company’s clients individual

philanthropic goals are achieved.

Raffan adds: “We see a lot of clients involved in philanthropic projects and that is where the next generation is very frequently first involved in the family money.”

The fifth topic addressed in the report is one that is encountered by many and can be quite complicated for families when planning for the future. That is, when the next generation get married, what happens then?

The report says: “When it comes to wealth, family structures have always been complicated.

With people living longer, having multiple careers and sometimes multiple marriages, the issues can now be more tangled. There is no set formula for ‘blended families’, with children from more than one relationship. Each situation will be unique and will require a unique solution.”

If one thing is for sure, nothing dissipates wealth as quickly as divorce and remarriage and this is something the team at UBS is all too familiar with, having advised thousands of people on the issue.

Property and education is another common factor that arises. “How do I ensure my children

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“UBS has a lot of experience helping the next generation and it can start as early as the family feels is suitable.”

have a roof over their head?” and “How do I ensure they get the best education?” are just two of the questions often asked by those worried about their children if anything were to happen to them.

House prices have sky rocketed over recent years and so have private school fees. It is now widely accepted that it is almost impossible for young people to get onto the housing ladder without support and most wealthy people will do all they can to prevent their children from struggling.

“Whenever and however parents try to help, they will usually want to do so in ways that don’t take away their children’s desire and ability to find their own path to success,” the report says. “Here the adviser can provide an external sounding board, helping clients map out their goals with clarity and precision before suggesting the right financial solutions for each situation.”

One of the most commonly forgotten factors highlighted is disclosure and discretion.

Many wealthy families may decide that complete transparency involving all the generations is the only sensible way to go about it. Talking about the extent of personal wealth

is, however, quite often difficult. Friends and colleagues may treat you differently if they think that you are “rich”, and there is often the worry of potential stigma for children at school.

UBS’s advisers often help prevent its clients from being affected by this by working closely with them to provide financial training and educating the younger generations about the value of money and the responsibilities that come with wealth.

As Raffan explains: “A client and their family wanting to talk about how to protect or enhance the lives of the next generation need to be armed with the information about what is possible and what is usual.

“UBS has a lot of experience helping the next generation and it can start as early as the family feels is suitable. We can have small individual savings accounts for children and young adults and give them the experience of investing.

“We also have a number of next generation plans where children can talk to other children in another situation, they can have group exercises and learn a little bit more about the world of investing, the world of banking and the world of wealth.”

The last of the topics covered in the report

analyses death and taxes, which – as the common adage goes – are the two things in life that are certain for us all. Everyone wants to leave as much as they can to the people and causes they love, which is why the tax burden has always been a major talking point when dealing with estate planning, and for good reason.

The report by UBS certainly highlights some of the most pressing issues associated with succession planning and some of the best ways to address these concerns. However, as the report points out at the beginning, no two families are the same and every family will have different ideas on how best they would like their wealth dealt with. n

To find out more download a copy of the report please visit www.ubs.com/ wealthtransfer. www.ubs.com/uk

UBS Wealth Management is a business division of UBS AG which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.

How can I see the bigger picture?

By looking beyond the obvious.

Only then can we see the true value. Together we can establish strong, open and long-lasting relationships. With the expertise and resources of our truly integrated, global approach. We’re here to bring the bigger picture into focus.

For some of life’s questions, you’re not alone.

Together we can find an answer.

The value of investments can fall as well as rise.

You may not get back the amount originally invested.

UBS Wealth Management Wemyss House 6-8 Wemyss Place Edinburgh EH3 6DH Debjani Raffan debjani.raffan@ubs.com Tel: 0131 247 5891 © UBS 2017. All rights reserved.

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UNDER THE

SKIN

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Jess Hartwell is part of the second generation of her family to run Skyeskyns, a tannery and five-star visitor attraction on the Isle of Skye that’s won a legion of fans for its famous sheepskins, as Peter Ranscombe reports.

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ew entrepreneurs can have as pretty a view from their place of work as Jess Hartwell does on the Isle of Skye. Based at Loch Bay on the Waternish peninsula in the north-west of the island, Skyeskyns shares its beautiful surroundings with sheep in the fields, eagles in the sky and seals in the sea.

It’s an appropriately rural setting for a very traditional type of business. Skyeskyns is a tannery that turns British sheepskins into leather, creating woollen rugs that last for decades.

While it may be part of an ancient industry, the company has a very modern outlook.

Online sales are an increasingly-important part

of the business and it also has a strong social media presence, connecting it to a flock of fans around the world.

Even on a wet and windy Skye morning, there’s something beautiful about Waternish.

And a tour around the tannery marks a welcome escape from the elements.

As well as producing the sheepskins, the tannery is also a successful tourist attraction, with a five-star rating from VisitScotland.

Guests are taken into the tannery on the ground floor of the building and are shown the machinery and production process, before heading upstairs into the showroom for a chance to browse the range of sheepskins, from

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“People didn’t think it would last beyond a year, but we’re still here, going strong 34 years later.”

natural white or Hebridean brown through to cappuccino colours or fleeces with spots.

Some of the more weird and wonderful extensions to the range include Icelandic, Merino and Norse skins, along with cow and reindeer hides from other producers.

Sheepskins can be stitched together into doubles, triples, quads and sets of eight to create larger rugs, while its other products include beanbags, cushions, keyrings and pouffes.

The business has come a long way since it was founded in 1983 by Lydia and Clive, Hartwell’s parents. “People locally thought it was a hair-brained idea,” laughs Hartwell.

“This was Skye in the 1980s, before the bridge, when nobody hung their washing outside on a Sunday. People didn’t think it would last beyond a year, but we’re still here, going strong 34 years later.

“Mum and Dad were lucky enough to have a croft here in Waternish in the 1980s and had a small flock of black-face sheep. But crofters at that stage were being encouraged to diversify because crofting wasn’t particularly sustainable and – considering our location out here in the sticks – some out-of-the-box thinking was required.

“At that stage, raw sheepskins on the island

as a by-product from the food industry were just being sent to landfill. Dad thought that was a huge waste and that the whole animal should be used. He had a good friend who was involved in the leather saddle business, who encouraged them to go down the tanning route.

“They set it up with their future in mind.

They worked away at that point off the island as teachers, but always planned on coming back to Skye ultimately, which they did in 1999.”

Both Hartwell’s parents were teachers at Rannoch, a private school in Perthshire, with Clive teaching English and later becoming deputy head, while Lydia taught French and history. “Tanning was a bit of an escape during the holidays – something completely different,” smiles Hartwell.

The family returned to Skye for holidays and the occasional weekend to keep an eye on the business, which was run by a small and dedicated staff on a day-to-day basis, including local man John Macleod, the company’s original tanner. Macleod and Clive trained together as tanners at the University of Northampton, while Hartwell’s older brother, Jean-Paul, was also involved in the business on Skye during its early days.

“I’m not sure my brothers and I had much

choice in getting involved in the family business,” laughs Hartwell. “We used to earn pocket money during the school holidays by tanning sheepskins with Mum and Dad. “It wasn’t really your average teenage occupation, but we loved it, it was good fun.

I became more involved after university and a spell working in London, before deciding to move back to Skye.

“Back then, we were attending a lot of exhibitions around the UK, which were a marketing exercise for the business. One evening over a bottle of wine and dinner in a hotel, Dad and I decided that setting up a proper exhibition programme would give me an opportunity to be more involved and a chance to stay on Skye, where it can be tricky for young people to find a way to be here.

“The landscape is incredible – once it gets under your skin, it’s hard to resist the pull. If you like the outdoors then it’s heaven. Between the Cuillin mountains and the dramatic coastline there are endless options for outdoor activities.”

Those same elements that created the dramatic landscape on Skye can also cause the odd problem for entrepreneurs trying to run businesses on the island. As Skye prepares for high winds, the company’s team is busy taking

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“How do we keep young, skilled people here when there’s a lack of affordable housing? That’s an issue that faces all rural areas.”

down a yurt, a large tent that has housed a pop-up café next to the tannery during the summer.

“The weather is a fairly major challenge,” she admits. “There’s no other way to overcome that challenge than to be prepared.”

The “YURTea&coffee” experiment has been a success during its first season and has given tourists an extra reason to make the journey to Waternish and visit the tannery. There are already plans to erect the tent again next year and, if the café continues to be a success, then a more permanent structure will be considered.

“The brain drain is another challenge,” she adds. “We’ve been very lucky with our team, but staffing is an issue in rural areas.

“How do we keep young, skilled people here when there’s a lack of affordable housing?

That’s an issue that faces all rural areas.

“Skye is now a year-round destination – not everything closes down in October, as in the past. There are many more opportunities available.

“We’ve worked closely with Highlands & Islands Enterprise – formerly the Highlands & Islands Development Board when we set up – and it’s been a great support to us and helped

us to develop graduate placements within the business.

“In the past, new ideas and innovation weren’t welcomed by everyone. A sheepskin tannery and visitor attraction were unusual.

We’re not on the main road in Waternish, so overcoming that takes a lot of ongoing enthusiasm and dedication to the dream.”

Hartwell also points to logistics as an issue.

Despite the bridge opening in 1995 to link Skye to the mainland, businesses are still charged by logistic companies as if it’s an island.

Broadband is another challenge. Despite sheepskins being easy to post and the success of the business’s online shop, Hartwell admits that much of the Highlands still struggles with the slow speed of its internet connections.

Despite the issues created by being based on an island, the company has grown to employ 18 full and part-time members of staff and will turn over about £950,000 this year.

Hartwell is proud that Skyeskyns can now offer people jobs all year round.

Over the summer, a stooshie erupted between the BBC and Police Scotland.

The corporation originally reported that “Police Scotland are warning visitors without

reservations to stay away from the Isle of Skye as the island struggles to cope with a massive influx of tourists”, before the force took to Twitter to correct the story, saying: “We haven’t said anything like that at all – our timeline asks people to be prepared, park/drive sensibly and keep the place clean.”

Understandably, the rumpus angered many local tourism businesses. Skye’s population of 10,000 people swells to more than 60,000 during the summer months, highlighting the importance of visitors to the local economy.

“Skye can certainly manage the numbers,” says an adamant Hartwell. “Our infrastructure does need some work, but there are local groups addressing the issues and proposing some great ideas, such as park-and-ride schemes to take the pressure off local hotspots. Government investment is essential at this juncture to support these and help protect the environment that draws the visitor numbers in the first place.

“Skye has always been popular but the past couple of years have seen a massive increase after our landscapes have been featured in so many films and adverts.

“Skye can cope and will cope very well.” n

Profile

Supporting SME growth and enterprise in Scotland: Celebrating the first year of the Scottish Microfinance Fund The Scottish Microfinance Fund is here to help current and future business owners access the funding they need to turn dreams into reality by securing a small business loan of up to £25,000.

Web: dsl-businessfinance.co.uk Phone: 0141 425 2930 Email: info@dsl-businessfinance.co.uk

Founder of SMC Cosmetics UK, Andrew Pearson approached The Scottish Microfinance Fund (SMF) for a loan to get his nail polish manufacturing business in Invergordon off the ground after being turned down by banks, or only offered a loan with high interest rates.

Previously a chartered engineer working in Glasgow, Pearson wanted to move back to the Highlands to raise his young family, and using previous industry relationships, technical expertise and the opportunity to start a new family business working closely with his father, SMC Cosmetics was born.

Nail polish involves flammable raw materials and the start-up cost is significant, so Pearson had a big hurdle to overcome to raise enough funding. The company’s start-up status also meant banks tended to categorise the business as high-risk, so sourcing an affordable loan was almost impossible.

Pearson said: “The SMF stepped in to help SMC Cosmetics UK at a critical time during the start-up phase, ensuring the final stages of the business plan could be executed effectively. Where banks and other sources of finance were looking to charge high rates or take equity, SMF showed its focus was firmly on local, economic growth.

“The business and mentor support we received from our loan officer, Murray Marshall, during this time was invaluable to SMC Cosmetics UK and he ensured our loan was provided in a short time-scale.”

Since launching in December 2016, The SMF has

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“The application process for the Scottish Microfinance Fund is simple, quick and effective.”

lent over £1.7m of its £6m funding pot to more than 90 businesses, thus creating jobs and supporting entrepreneurship across the country.

The SMF is delivered by DSL Business Finance on behalf of the Scottish Government with support from the European Regional Development Fund and the Start Up Loans Company for which DSL is the only Scotland-based delivery partner. The fund provides loans of up to £25,000 to businesses in Scotland encouraging businesses to become established, grow and develop. Successful applicants will receive a competitive interest rate of 6% and will not be burdened by arrangement fees or early repayment fees.

The application process for the SMF is simple, quick and effective and if you do not meet the criteria for a SMF loan, DSL has other funding options available.

Our friendly experienced team can talk you through everything you need to know and give you the support you need every step of the way. Give us a call or visit our website to find out more. n

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A Recipe

For Success Joe and Dawn Reade started the Island Bakery in a garage on Mull and have transformed it into a business that supplies biscuits to the likes of Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, as Peter Ranscombe finds out.

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t seems that Joe Reade was perhaps born to be an entrepreneur. When he was just 12, his parents – Jeff and Chris – bought a derelict farm on the island of Mull and moved Reade and his brothers from the dairy pastures of Somerset to the wet and wild west coast of Scotland.

“Dad had this romantic idea of selling milk to customers instead of selling it to a big processing factory,” Joe laughs. “Back then, fresh milk supplies to the island were very unreliable and people would keep ultra-heat treated (UHT) milk in their cupboards, just in case the delivery didn’t make it to Mull.

“There’d be queues of people at the Co-op wanting fresh milk. So, Mum and Dad set up their dairy and began delivering cartons of milk door-to-door on the island.”

Balancing supply and demand on an island can be tricky and so the family also began making cheese on its farm at Sgriob-Ruadh, near Tobermory, the island’s main town. The result was Isle of Mull Cheese, arguably one of Scotland’s best-known dairy products and still made by the Reades today.

While he was studying geography at the University of Edinburgh, Joe met Dawn, his future wife, and she moved back with him to

Mull to start a bakery. But how did he convince Dawn, who grew up in Belfast, to swap life in a city for life on an island?

“He promised me an unlimited supply of cake,” Dawn shouts from across the office the pair share. Joe laughs and nods.

“Setting up the bakery was another one of my Dad’s crazy ideas,” he admits. “The local baker was retiring and Dad suggested that we could set up a bakery and deliver the bread alongside the milk on the rounds.

“I guess Dawn and I both went into it in a naïve way thinking it would be really nice to run a bakery on Mull. There have definitely been lots of highlights – but it’s really hard work too.

“I think I always expected I would end up working for myself. When you come from a family of entrepreneurs, it seems like a natural step to take.”

And so the Island Bakery was born. Its original premises back in 1994 were a garage attached to a cottage in which one of Reade’s brothers lived.

Two years later, the business expanded by opening a delicatessen’s shop in Tobermory.

Watching which products sold well in the deli, Dawn realised there was a gap in the market for a range of organic biscuits.

The couple had wanted to create a product with a longer shelf-life that they could sell beyond the shores of Mull and so the “Island Bakery Organics” range of biscuits was launched in 2001, with four flavours.

They were an instant hit. Early customers included department stores Harvey Nichols and Selfridges, both of which are still on the roster today.

Crunch time came in 2007, by which point the biscuits were out-selling the produce in the deli. Selling the shop allowed the couple to concentrate on the bakery and to come up with plans to move into purpose-built facilities.

The current bakery opened in 2012 and has some very innovative features. The ovens are powered by wood-chips that come from the forests surrounding the property.

“We believe that we’re the only biscuit manufacturer in the world to use ovens that are wood-fired,” explains Joe. “Wood fired ovens are nothing new, of course, but ours is a bespoke system that keeps the combustion separate from the baking chamber, so we get all the heat but none of the smoke.”

The wood-chip powered biomass boiler isn’t the only renewable energy source that’s used by the bakery, which sits next to the family’s creamery at Sgriob-Ruadh. Another of Jeff’s “crazy ideas” was to install a hydro-electric turbine on the burn that runs next to the bakery and so one of Joe’s brothers now sells him renewable electricity, while a wind turbine on the hill above the farm also provides power.

“Using renewable energy sounds like it could just be a marketing ploy – but it’s not,” argues Joe. “It’s also the right thing to do to help to maintain the beautiful environment on the island.

“It also ties in with our ethos of using organic ingredients. That kind of provenance is really important when you’re a food business on an island.”

Renewable energy also played a key role in the Island Bakery winning one of its most important contracts – supplying supermarket chain Marks & Spencer with own-label biscuits.

The deal accounts for between one-quarter and one-third of the company’s output.

“They are great people to work with,” Joe says. “When I made our pitch to them, I explained that we wanted to use renewable energy in the new bakery – I think that

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“In some ways, we’re mad to run a bakery on an island because it makes logistics so much more difficult.”

appealed to them because they also have very strict environmental credentials with their ‘Plan A’ programme.

“Why else would they award a contract to a small bakery on Mull when they have so many other suppliers on the mainland? In some ways, we’re mad to run a bakery on an island because it makes logistics so much more difficult.”

Yet Joe and Dawn have overcome those difficulties to grow a business that now turns over £3m a year and has almost 40 members of staff, making it one of the largest private sector employers on the island. Dawn’s sister, Lynn Peden, is in charge of the bakery’s accounts and logistics, while Lynn’s husband, Paul, is the firm’s delivery driver, taking the biscuits from Mull down to its wholesaler in Glasgow.

“We have two shifts, the first of which starts at 6am and the second that finishes at 10pm,” explains Joe. “So much of the work on Mull is seasonal, so we’re really pleased that we can offer people year-round jobs.

“A lot of the jobs on the island are seasonal because we’re so heavily reliant on the tourist trade. We saw that with our deli – we would have a great June, July and August, but then the rest of the year was much quieter, which made cash-flow a problem.”

One commentator who was certainly wary of such problems was James Caan, one of the dragons on BBC Two’s Dragons’ Den television series. When Joe appeared on the show back in 2009, Caan described the plan to build an ecobakery as “risky” and “a mistake”, but the baker was nevertheless satisfied because he’d sign-up for the experience just “to get my biscuits on the telly”.

Marks & Spencer disagreed with Caan’s assessment and it isn’t the only big name that stocks the biscuits either. The company signed a deal to supply Waitrose at the start of the year and its goodies are also served to passengers on board both British Airways and Virgin Atlantic.

That’s on top of sales to farm shops, delicatessens and department store food halls throughout the UK. The range now includes shortbread and oat crumbles, as well as apple crumbles, lemon melts, chocolate limes and chocolate gingers.

If everything runs to plan then the bakery can produce 130,000 biscuits in a day. Between 15% and 20% of the firm’s sales are already exported, primarily to Europe, and Joe has his eye on the United States – but he needs a bigger bakery first.

“When we started out, we were just in a garage at the end of a cottage – literally a ‘cottage industry’ – and then when we moved into this bakery it felt like a massive empty shed,” he says. “Now, we’re running at full capacity and so we’ve just applied for planning permission to extend the bakery.”

With cheese and biscuits already ticked-off, it will be fascinating to see in which direction the family’s businesses will grow next. n

HIGH LIFE WINTER 2017 MOTORING

TRAVEL

EQUIPMENT

DRINKS

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HIGH LIFE

David Brown Automotive combines the best of both worlds, producing cars that look old but drive like new, as Josh Sims reports.

D

avid Brown’s road from earth-moving machines to faster moving ones came via an experience in a Ferrari Daytona. “I was at a classic car rally and was really looking forward to driving this car – until I did,” says the man who took over his father’s heavy plant machinery business before launching a Harley Davidson dealership.

“It was like driving a truck, with no modern comforts. And then it broke down. It looked fantastic, but the technology was very dated. The fact is that many classic cars of the past are wonderful in terms of styling, but by today’s standards they’re mechanically awful.”

That conflict led Brown to launch his own company, Silverstone-based David Brown Automotive, to produce cars that are the best of both worlds: taking a donor vehicle and re-building it from the ground up – complete with modern interior, braking and engine systems – to produce a car that looks old but drives new. Brown’s first offering was his Aston Martin DB5/6like Speedback GT. But now, less expectedly, he’s done it with the Mini. And that’s the Mini from the first time around – 1969.

The appeal to some will be clear, as it is to Brown.

While he has no wish to forego the comforts and mechanical superiority of modern cars, he’s less impressed by their cookie-cutter styling. In contrast, the cars of yesteryear – and specifically the 1960s and early 1970s, he argues – came out of a “revolutionary period of freedom in design, which resulted in some of the most beautifully sculptural products, including cars”.

That’s an idea that, increasingly, is not lost on the wider car industry. Put white-walled tyres on it and Cary Grant in the passenger seat and if it was seen snaking its way along the French Riviera it would not

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have looked out of place half a century ago – yet the Fiat Spider 124 is a new car, built by robots in Japan, yet with lines borrowed from its Pininfarina-styled namesake launched in 1966.

The Spider follows a growing line of cars that have, over recent years, re-imagined a past classic – retro in mood but modern in engineering: from the Fiat 500 to the Dodge Challenger, BMW’s Mini and, before that – arguably the vehicle that started the trend – the homage that was Volkswagen’s Beetle concept.

That was the work of J Mays, the celebrated auto designer who spent much of his career at Ford. He also re-imagined the short-lived Thunderbird and the cultish Mustang for the company, updating the spirit of the original to provide a car of distinction that both helped

“

“I wouldn’t say it was laziness, more expediency on the part of car companies, but I reckon maybe just 5% of all the cars on the road now are really competent design”

remind the market of the maker’s historic import, but also gave a certain audience a welcome break from the box-on-four-wheels school of car design.

Marc Newson – the acclaimed product designer, car nut and designer of a concept vehicle for Ford – complains that he can look at most cars on the road today and tell you which computer programme was used to design it.

Does this desire to look back speak poorly of car design in the 21st century?

“I wouldn’t say it was laziness, more expediency on the part of car companies, but I reckon maybe just 5% of all the cars on the road now are really competent designs,” argues Mays. “Everything else is a mish-mash of copies.

“Car companies have to work very quickly now but while designs have to be true to the brands, it’s important they still differentiate themselves. Why? Because that’s how cars become meaningful to drivers. They have

HIGH LIFE

“

“When everybody else starts doing it, that’s when it’s time to get out.”

to have resonance – and resonance to more people than just the designer.”

Even a good idea can be overdone. “People started to typecast me as the [pioneering] designer of retro-futurist cars. But when everybody else starts doing it, that’s when it’s time to get out,” adds May. And he did. That advice, however, seems to have fallen on deaf ears. To re-issue a classic requires that a car-maker has a classic design to re-issue, of course: Land Rover, for example, has its new Defender on the way, while Ford has a fresh take on the legendary Bronco in the pipeline.

But if you don’t, well this year’s international car shows have not been without their roster of retro designs all the same: from Honda’s Urban EV concept to the forthcoming Toyota Century. Given this century’s troubled times, the reassuringly familiar certainly sells: retro – a slightly damning adjective now – is cute, accessible, some might argue unchallenging, but certainly has personality.

It’s easy to see why re-issue or retro seems to make for smart business for the mass market. After all, the re-imagining of an iconic car, or nodding to some mythic past, is to build on something already part of the public consciousness – media interest is guaranteed, it plays to the zeitgeist’s demand for authenticity, and nods to what for many was the golden age of car design, before sales departments, safety regulations and even software made so many cars look much the same.

It’s happening in the motorbike world as well, from Royal Enfield’s “new” Bullet 500 to the Brough Superior and Ural sidecar: these are all, by some viewpoints, outmoded products, brought back to life less out of nostalgia – their customers are typically not old enough to remember the vehicles the first time around – so much as out of an appreciation for form.

Some people, it seems, will pay big money to express their appreciation too. Jaguar’s special operations workshop, for example, has launched a special edition of just six

examples of its Lightweight E-Type, a car that dates back to 1961. Sorry, each was pre-sold.

Eagle, a specialist car restorer, beat them to it. In 2014 – and akin to the David Brown Automotive operation – it launched its own version of the E-Type, taking a donor car and rebuilding it bolt by bolt from the ground up, but putting in modern advances in electrics, braking, cooling, corrosion protection and the like along the way. It’s yours for £400,000. For £150,000, you can have a similarly overhauled Jensen Interceptor from Jensen International Automotive; £100,000 buys you a David Brown Automotive Mini. Yes, six figures for a Mini.

Despite being an icon of Britain’s “swinging sixties”, it won’t come with a Union Flag. And yet, intriguingly, so many of the cars that have been deemed worthy of re-invention were, in their first incarnations, also symbols of national pride in their respective home countries.

Maybe what is driving the popularity of their modern makeovers is less petrol as a touch of patriotism. n

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HIGH LIFE

ICE, ICE ///////

B A B Y

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Josh Sims explores the wonderful world of ice wine – and finds out how these very rare drinks are now having an influence on the whisky industry too.

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hink of wine and the sunnier climes of Southern France, California or Australia may spring to mind. The rather colder climes of the Niagara Peninsular, in Canada, probably won’t.

And yet this corner of the world – best known for its waterfalls – is one of the country’s premier wine-growing regions, with several dozen wineries. Indeed, it’s the world’s leading maker of ice wine: it makes close on 90% of global production.

If ice wine is not a drink you’re familiar with – even if you pride yourself on being a bit of a bon viveur – you are not alone.

“Ice wine is tricky and expensive to make, which is why most winemakers steer clear of it,” explains straight-talking Aussie Craig McDonald, the winemaker at Peller Estates, arguably maker of the best ice wines.

“It’s a luxury item – most if it is consumed by the domestic market, so not a lot gets exported, so it doesn’t have the name

that might be expected. It’s a real ‘no compromise’ product to make. And then we’re at the mercy of the weather to make it happen in the first place.”

Indeed, the harvesting of grapes for ice wine only happens each winter if the estate gets a sustained period of very cold weather – at least four days of minus eight degrees centigrade, but not, ideally, colder than minus 10. Then a team of hardy pickers dash to the vines – often at very short notice, and in very long johns – and enjoy endless working days with frozen fingers.

Why harvest in such brutal conditions? Because it’s then that the water content in each grape is effectively forced out to leave just the tiniest drop of what in the trade they call “nectar”.

The colder it is, the more water freezes as a percentage of sugar. It’s the resulting super-concentrate that is used to make ice wine.

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“Sweetness is only one measure of a real ice wine – it’s that slow process of freezing on the vine that makes all the difference.”

Yes, ice wine is typically sweet, akin to dessert wine but not as cloying – in part thanks to spending between six and 10 months in French oak barrels. “It’s this that gives it an edge,” says McDonald. “It’s not just syrupy sweet.” There’s a greater range of flavours and, its fans say, applications – as suitable an accompaniment to savoury dishes, for example, as a table wine.

Not that ice wine goes as far. Only around one millilitre of liquid is achievable from around 10 grapes, which is why the same number of grapes that would give you a bottle of ice wine – you need around three kilograms worth – would give you something closer to seven

bottles of more conventional table wine. That goes some way to explaining why a small bottle of ice wine – 375ml – is likely to set you back upwards of £40.

Those with an appreciation for severe weather will also now understand why ice wine is a rarity: there are not many places on the planet that are hot enough in the summer to grow the grapes in the first place, but also cold enough come winter to make ice wine feasible. Thanks to cold fronts coming down from the Arctic, and hot ones rising from the Gulf of Mexico, Niagara has just that unusual micro-climate: “We’re dealing with two massive weather

systems here – and with a variability that keeps us on our toes,” notes McDonald. “The seasonal shifts here in Niagara are like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

Demand for ice wine is on the up – such that Peller Estates has had to tackle the problem of Chinese counterfeits; most likely full of cheap dessert wine. There are other places, Peller Estates points out, that say they make ice wine – notably wineries in Austria and Germany – but some of these are produced artificially, by freezing the grapes mechanically, resulting in a less full-bodied, less intense, less aromatic version that your oenophile would identify as unmistakably “other”.

HIGH LIFE

“It just tastes sweet,” says McDonald. “But sweetness is only one measure of a real ice wine – it’s that slow process of freezing on the vine that makes all the difference.”

Indeed, ice wine – or at least “icewine”, as it’s been branded – has an appellation regulation that stipulates it must be frozen on the vine.

“And the icewine police are big on imposing rigid controls to allow you to have that icewine status,” McDonald adds.

Scotch whisky, of course, is similarly tightly controlled by the Scotch Whisky Association, which brooks no great deviation from its definitions before it will stop a brand from calling its product “Scotch”, widely perceived as essential for appealing to certain markets internationally. Yet it’s thanks to a new experimental whisky from Glenfiddich – in collaboration with Peller Estates – that ice wine might get the recognition it at last deserves.

Winter Storm, as the whisky has been called, is

made using the barrels ice wine is made in.

“And no, I’d never heard of ice wine either,” admits Brian Kinsman, Glenfiddich’s “malt master”, the man who designs the company’s whiskies. The two drinks aren’t blended – rather the oak becomes the medium for transferring flavours from the ice wine into the whisky.

“We went into the process fully accepting that it might not work at all,” adds Kinsman, and all the more so given that, since ice wine production is a small-scale business, Glenfiddich could only get hold of fewer than 100 barrels – for all production – which meant there was little room for trialling. “But, at the end of the two-year process, I think it has worked well.”

“And, for us as winemakers, the idea of using the ice wine process to make a whisky was an exciting one,” McDonald adds. “We just thought, ‘let’s try it, let’s see what the hell happens’.

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“For us as winemakers, the idea of using the ice wine process to make a whisky was an exciting one.”

“There’s already been a real halo effect. But there’s more of a local acknowledgement that we have a world-class product with our ice wine coming on too.

“For a while, we’ve had a hard time putting it up on a pedestal – that’s just part of the Canadian psyche. But now we’re taking a more confident approach.” n

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Peter Ranscombe travels to Skye to visit the Three Chimneys, a restaurant-withrooms that’s been wowing guests for more than 30 years, both with and without its Michelin star.

Clean F

ew names conjure up images of fine dining like the “Three Chimneys”. Opened in 1985 by Eddie and Shirley Spear, the restaurant has become one of the most famous in Scotland, with diners making the journey to the Isle of Skye to sample fresh Scottish produce cooked to the very highest of standards.

Since the Skye Bridge opened in 1995, the island has become far more accessible to visitors. Many of the roads are now dual-track – in fact you’d be forgiven for thinking you were still driving along the West Coast of the mainland in places – and only the final stretch along Loch Dunvegan leading to Colbost is still single-track.

The Spears were quick to capitalise on the increase in tourists by opening The House Over-By in 1999, turning the Three Chimneys into a restaurant-with-rooms. Six of them to be precise, just across the car park from the old cottage with its white-washed stone walls and black slate roof tiles in which dinner is served.

Calling it picturesque just doesn’t do it justice. As the tide ebbs and flows in and out of the sea loch, the kelp

sweep fields reveal seals at play, while ducks, geese and waders call Colbost home at different times of year.

The Three Chimneys began winning awards not long after opening, being crowned “Scottish Restaurant of the Year” in 1990 and picking up a plethora of prizes on a regular basis ever since. Its trophy cabinet is now bursting at the seams, having scooped the “Editor’s Choice: UK Restaurant of the Year” title in the 2018 Good Food Guide.

Both the AA and VisitScotland rate the establishment as a five gold-star restaurant with rooms, with the AA also awarding it three rosettes for its cooking. Its breakfast and wine list have also won awards.

For many years, perhaps the only thing missing from the restaurant’s pantheon of prizes was a Michelin star. In 2014, head chef Michael Smith – who took over kitchen duties from Shirley in 2006 – won the eatery’s first star. He left just months later and the following year’s guide didn’t award the restaurant a star.

Yet Shirley was sanguine, saying at the time that the star had been “a complete surprise” and that she “completely”

respected the guide’s decision the following year. Instead, she threw her support behind Scott Davies, who took over from Smith as head chef.

And, having tasted his food, it’s easy to see why Shirley has so much confidence in Davies’ abilities. His dishes lived up to the hype that surrounds the restaurant.

An amuse-bouche of langoustine bisque with sour apple and rye crumbs was rich and had an almost vanilla-like creaminess. The combination of sweetness, sourness and toastiness worked extremely well.

Melt-in-the-mouth wood pigeon served alongside beetroot and caramelised onion followed as a starter. While the bird was superb, it was the palette of colours used on the plate that really caught the eye, from the green of kale through to the orange of carrot and the yellow of sweetcorn.

Game was the order of the day for the main course too; venison was paired with a creamy mushroom duxelle and ash-smoked celeriac, which echoed the earthiness of turnip. Again, pretty as a picture on the plate, but it was the taste that made the dish a real winner.

Pudding almost felt like a disappointment for once after such marvellous savoury courses.

There were no faults with the chocolate mousse encased within a chocolate shell and served with quenelles of sour salted caramel and sweet chocolate ice creams, but the dish simply didn’t sparkle to the same extent as the previous two.

A return trip is definitely in order to sample the set menu and its accompanying paired wines though. The eight-course “Skye, Land & Sea” tasting menu looked superb, with an impressive array of seven wines to match.

One of the most exciting elements of the wine list was to see such a wide selection of high-quality half bottles, ideal for diners on their own or couples looking to pair different wines with different courses themselves.

The 2016 Willi Bründlmayer Grüner Veltliner “Terrassen” from Austria bristled with aromas

of granny smith apples, apricots and faint flowers, leading into rounder apple, bruised pear and peachy notes on the palate to balance the fresh acidity – ideal for cutting through the richness of the langoustine bisque.

With two game dishes, syrah from the Northern Rhone was high on the agenda for the red, and the Domaine du Murinais Les Amandiers hit the spot. The nose of the wine from Crozes-Hermitage was full of developed notes of mushroom, manure, damp hedgerows, smoke, blackcurrant, blackberry and a twist of redcurrant, with rich and rounded vanilla enveloping the black plum, black cherry and blackcurrant flavours on the tongue.

As intriguing as the wine list was the selection of Scotch back in the lounge in The House Over-By. As well as local boy Talisker, the shelves were brimming with other whiskies, from Balvenie to Highland Park and back again.

The lounge also doubles-up as the breakfast room, with a stunning view over the sea loch.

If there’s room for a cooked breakfast after the previous night’s feast then it’s well-worth the effort.

The split-level bedroom – following the contours of the hillside – was extremely comfortable, with a massive bed and an evenmore generously proportioned en-suite. The home baking was, perhaps unsurprisingly given the quality of meal, simply awesome.

Not just an amazing place for a relaxing retreat from the world, The House Over-By could also make an interesting getaway for private meetings or for rewarding key business teams. Few places can rival Skye’s dramatic landscape – who wouldn’t be inspired in their business or personal lives by such a stunning location? n Rooms in The House Over-By start from £345 a night, including breakfast. Dinner in the Three Chimneys starts from £68 per person, while the tasting menu is £90 per person with the accompanying wine flights are £55 per person.

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“Having tasted his food, his dishes lived up to the hype that surrounds the restaurant.”

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Mixing the old and the new has worked for The Ivy on the Square, the restaurant brand’s new outlet in Edinburgh, writes Peter Ranscombe.

O

n paper, The Ivy on the Square shouldn’t work. The restaurant sits below a modern office block with a branch of discount retailer TK Maxx as a neighbour and one of Edinburgh’s busiest Sainsbury’s Locals sitting opposite.

Yet it does. The Ivy Collection – the company that has now rolled out 20 restaurants and cafés throughout the UK – has managed to bring a touch of the magic from the original Ivy in London’s theatreland into a glass-walled development on the corner of St Andrew Square and South St David Street in the Scottish capital.

Inside, the new restaurant has the same Parisian-inspired mix of geometric Art Deco shapes and lines and Art Nouveau patterns and flourishes as the original eatery, even down to the two panels of leaded glass at the door.

There’s a Paolozzi-esque feel to the primary colours in the artwork on the walls – from test

tubes to lightbulbs – which feels appropriate given that the Leith-based father of Pop Art was one of the designers commissioned to create works for The Ivy when it reopened in 1990.

While the setting works, it’s the food that earns the newcomer its place among central Edinburgh’s eateries. A starter of crispy duck salad had an aromatic freshness from beansprouts, coriander and ginger and a heat from five-spice dressing, finely chopped red chilis and toasted cashews, balanced by colourful and juicy watermelon.

General manager Eric Garnier was rightly proud of the 12oz rib-eye steak served on the bone and highlighted its Scottish credentials.

The steak was indeed excellent, although I’d like to see more made of its provenance on the menu; simply labelling beef as “Scottish” without mentioning the breed, the supplier and the location these days is a missed opportunity, particularly when it comes to helping the thousands of visitors to Edinburgh to fall in love with our local produce and ask for it at home.

A classic baked apple tart fine with vanilla ice cream was skilfully served at the table with flambé Calvados, adding a touch of theatre during the busy lunch service. If anything, the atmosphere sounded even more exciting upstairs on the first floor, with its views of Jenners department store across the road or out onto St Andrew Square.

Garnier recommended a deliciously-juicy

bottle of Tabula’s Damana 5 Tempranillo from Ribera del Duero in Spain to accompany the steak and my companion’s hake and chorizo stew. Other eye-catching wines on the list included the A20 Albarino from Bodegas Castro Martin, Paul Jaboulet Aine’s Mule Blanche Crozes-Hermitage Blanc and a Chardonnay from Creation Winery in South Africa.

And so, to the bill. The Ivy on the Square charges very similar prices to its “Market Grill” outlet in Covent Garden, which appears to be the template for the chain. Those prices put it on a par with similar eateries in the middle of Edinburgh – like Hadrian’s Brasserie at the Balmoral hotel or the Galvin Brasserie de Luxe at the opposite end of Princes Street in the Waldorf Astoria Caledonian. n Find out more about The Ivy on the Square at www.theivyedinburgh.com

HIGH LIFE

The

joy of

hidden

SURPRISES

Christmas came early for the Dyson household when Harrods delivered The Knightsbridge hamper for us to sample for BQ readers, writes Steve Dyson.

T

he excitement began with the opening of the smart, branded wicker basket, feeling around the dark interior to discover just what treats it contained.

It was one of those irresistible experiences and the first thing we fished out was a tin of chocolates, then biscuits, followed by mince pies, almonds, fudge and a jar of chutney.

There was then a flurry of polystyrene packaging flying around the room as what began

as a calm rummage turned into a competition about who could find the best.

Hurray! Here’s a whole Christmas cake. Boo! A tin of black tea. Woo-hoo! A Christmas pudding.

Oo, hard luck: a small jar of mustard. Then jam, chutney, brandy butter and a large tin of ground coffee.

Whoever packed the hamper knew what they were doing, with the very best saved until last at the bottom of the hamper: champagne, and two bottles of wine.

The Knightsbridge felt like an ever-giving gift, and I’m sure we weren’t the first recipients to start our tastings with the alcohol.

The bottle of Harrods Rioja Crianza was delicious with a casserole we were having that evening, delivering a vibrant taste of dark berry fruit with a hint of thyme and a touch of vanilla.

A few nights later we opened the Harrods Sauvignon Blanchette from New Zealand to eat with a pasta dish, and this time were hit with distinctive gooseberry and nettle flavours.

But we controlled ourselves and put the bottle of Harrods Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru Reserve Champagne away for a special tipple on Christmas Day. What we did allow ourselves to enjoy over the next few days were the delicious mince pies contained in a rich butter pastry and containing a potent drop of brandy.

Next went the tin of assorted chocolates and the box of winter spice chocolate almonds, both

shared fairly among family and guests – apart from the one or two that disappeared when someone crept down in the middle of the night.

We also tried the spiced black tea, a rich brew that raised you above the usual Typhoo experience, and the spiced “Omani-grind” coffee, which had us comparing notes to identify the various floral and berry notes it left on our palates. There was enough of both to enjoy again closer to Yuletide.

We were sorely tempted by the rest of the hamper, including the Christmas cake and Christmas pudding, but these and the other “treats” were put away with the champagne to enjoy in December.

The variety and number of the tasty moments was impressive, but the real joy of The Knightsbridge hamper was that moment of delivery, which saw us acting like young children around a Christmas tree, bright-eyed and eager for discovery.

And that’s the attraction of Harrods’ hampers for businesses who take marketing seriously – to deliver several weeks’ worth of seasonal warmth to valued clients without breaking the bank.

Delicious! n The Knightsbridge Hamper is priced at £250, with other foodie gifts from Harrods ranging from £35 to £5,000. To order call the corporate service at Harrods team on 020 7225 5994 or e-mail corporate.service@harrods.com

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HIGH LIFE

2013 San Gabriel Arcangelo Pavone

2015 Vittorini Marche Bianco Crocifisso

2013 Il Civettaio Poggio Al Commessario

Everyone deserves a

SECOND CHANCE E ntrepreneurs are naturally at home in the drinks industry. It’s a sector that’s full of creativity and innovation, giving ambitious individuals the chance to put their ideas to the test.

The latest enthusiast to join their ranks is Rob Seddon, who featured in BBC Two’s Second Chance Summer television series back in the spring. The programme chronicled the escapades of a group of Brits in Tuscany as they tried to turn an old farmhouse into a bed and

breakfast-cum-restaurant, while at the same time tending to its vineyards and olive groves.

I don’t normally watch “reality” TV, but the mixture of Tuscany’s beautiful landscape, Toby Jones’s gentle narration and the romance of making wine had me hooked. Seddon’s was the standout story for me – by the end of the series, he knew he wanted to work in the wine industry.

Now, he’s fulfilled that dream. His new company, Jackson & Seddon, is importing

Drinks writer Peter Ranscombe samples the first wines imported by Rob Seddon, the star of BBC Two’s Second Chance Summer television series. organic wines from small producers in Italy and selling them via a recently-launched wine club.

His “business partner” is Jackson, a five-yearold English springer spaniel, officially called “Sunraycourt Benedict the First”. The pair makes for an engaging combination and has won legions of fans on social media.

The wine club offers a series of boxes to help members explore the wines of Seddon’s beloved Italy. The “Discovery Box” (£50) features three organic wines produced in the centre of the country, and is followed by the “Journey Box” (£145 for three wines each month for three months), the “Explorer Box” (£275 for three wines each month for six months) and finally the “Odyssey Box” (£540 for an annual subscription).

The three bottles in the initial “Discovery Box” were very impressive. After smelling the lemon and grapefruit aromas on the nose, along with a twist of lemon sherbet, I was expecting the 2015 Vittorini Marche Bianco Crocifisso to be light-bodied, but it surprised me with its roundness, which came from its unusual combination of white pecorino grapes and red sangiovese.

Judging by his Instagram photos, Seddon shares my passion for steak and the 2013 Il Civettaio Poggio Al Commessario – a blend of 65% sangiovese, 20% cabernet sauvignon and 15% merlot – would make an ideal match to a juicy piece of beef. Wood smoke, damp earth, vanilla and a mix of red and black fruit on the nose graduate into crisper red cherry flavours on the palate.

My favourite from the trio was the 2013 San Gabriel Arcangelo Pavone, which balanced concentrated red cherry, vanilla and cinnamon flavours with enough fresh acidity and tannin to work with food, all wrapped up in a warming 15% alcohol by volume. Top-notch sangiovese.

The inspiration and motivation Seddon received on Second Chance Summer clearly led him to discover some first-rate wines in Italy.

Keep an eye on this entrepreneurial importer. n

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Partner

Investing together for growth Growth Capital Ventures is bringing new and exciting investment opportunities to a wider range of investors

Partner

“

“We identify opportunities which have the potential to deliver significant investment growth, precisely because they are helping to solve pressing long-term challenges.”

FINTECH firm Growth Capital Ventures has been leading its own quiet revolution in the north east of England identifying and structuring investment opportunities that have the potential to deliver market-beating returns to investors alongside wider positive social and environmental benefits.

GCV received over £1m in investment from Scottish based Maven Capital Partners, in order to strengthen its team, develop new technology and to make growth focused investing more accessible and rewarding.

Co-founder Norm Peterson explained: “We are delighted with the backing we’ve received from Maven, they are one of the UK’s leading private equity firms and alternative asset managers. There’s a strong strategic fit and we are exploring opportunities where our investors can co-invest alongside Maven and other institutional investors into high growth businesses and property related projects.”

Maven’s investment has allowed the GCV team to focus on identifying and structuring investment opportunities for its growing investor base and develop the co-investor model further whilst expanding its geographical reach.

Peterson added: “Our investor network is expanding and we have introduced some interesting investment opportunities to our members over the past year. We identify opportunities which have the potential to deliver significant investment growth, precisely because they are helping to solve pressing long-term challenges.

“We then look to co-invest into these deals

alongside institutional investors and other professional investors, including venture capital funds, private equity firms, angel networks, family offices and high net worth individuals.

We are keen to expand our relationships in Scotland and co-invest into deals.”

Earlier this year GCV worked with Atom bank, one of the UK’s leading digital challenger banks, to close a £16m investment round to support continued growth and expansion.

“Over 40 members of the GCV Investor Network invested £1m into Atom, alongside one of Europe’s leading hedge funds,” he added. “There was a lot of interest, the offer was oversubscribed within a few days with GCV members investing between £10,000 and up to six-figure sums.”

Peterson points to Atom’s business model as one of the reasons for the positive interest from its investor network: “Our investors are drawn to disruptive businesses, those that can really make a positive difference. Atom is a perfect example of a business using technology to create and maintain a competitive advantage, challenging and changing the way things are done in the banking sector.”

“They are based in the north east of England, not London. There’s a good reason for that.

Atom doesn’t need to be. Like Scotland, the north east has some amazingly talented people and Atom has managed to tap into that talent pool.

“Atom has created over 300 high-quality jobs and they are not competing for talent in a London market that will be even more challenging as technology giants Apple, Google

and Facebook plough billions of pounds into the capital.

“Atom has focused on creating a business with a lower cost base than their traditional banking competitors. A technology and digital focus mean Atom are not burdened by the cost of high street branches or legacy IT systems.

“This translates to huge cost savings when compared with a traditional bank. More importantly, this lower cost base means Atom can provide better mortgage rates for borrowers and better interest rates for savers.”

Technology plays an important part in GCV’s business too. GCV launched its online investment platform GrowthFunders to open up growth focused investing to a wider online investor base. GrowthFunders allows suitably qualified retail or everyday investors to invest alongside its network of institutional and professional investors through its FCA regulated platform.

“Co-investment is a core part of our approach,” Peterson explains. “We want to make it simple for everyday investors to participate in growth-focused investment opportunities and build a diversified portfolio.

Investing online means members can review investment opportunities at a time that’s convenient for them and invest into carefully selected investment opportunities, many of which offer generous tax reliefs designed to minimise downside risk and maximise potential returns.”

Whilst future expansion plans are heavily technology focused, with GCV launching

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“We want to make sure our members enjoy the experience of co-investing into exciting businesses and property development projects.”

a property focused peer-to-peer lending platform in Q1 2018, the team recognises the importance of a personal service when dealing with investor members.

Jordan Dargue, head of investor relations, explains: “Our investor base is quite diverse.

We have our online investor members investing between £1,000 and £10,000 into single deal, whereas our offline investors are investing between £10,000 and £250,000.

“Either way, a personalised service, tailored to suit our investors, is extremely important.

Whether that’s online or offline we want to make sure our members enjoy the experience of co-investing into exciting businesses and property development projects.

“Like Atom bank, we’re based in the north east of England and, at the moment, the north east doesn’t have a strong and structured group of angel networks. Our north east based members are keen to change that, so we’ve

recently launched G Ventures, the first of our regionally focused offline investor networks.”

The G Ventures Investor Club is an exclusive group of high net worth individuals who will meet monthly and will be briefed on new investment opportunities in which they can invest anything from £10,000 to £250,000, perhaps five or six times a year.

With the first network established in the Tees Valley, GCV plans to roll out the concept in 2018, with G Ventures Investor Clubs planned for Scotland and the rest of the UK. She added: “Our members tend to be entrepreneurs themselves, and they are keen to back the next generation of entrepreneurs, they are also keen to diversify and get involved in property related deals. The common theme is that the investment opportunities can demonstrate the potential to deliver better risk-adjusted returns than typical mainstream investment products.

“Typically, our investors are looking for property deals that target a minimum 1.5 times return on capital and when investing into early stage and later stage businesses they are looking for 3 to 10 times money return.

“Financial returns are the primary driver of investment. Many of our business investment opportunities make use of tax efficient structures including Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS).

“EIS offers a number of benefits to our investors, including income tax relief of 30% on the ingoing investment, no capital gains on profits and qualifies for business property relief and relief from inheritance tax. Whilst the tax benefits help to minimise downside risk and maximise potential upside, many of our members are also looking for investments which capture their imaginations and provide opportunities to invest in businesses or projects that can make a positive difference.”

Partner

Future plans include an increase in property related investment opportunities. Peterson explains: “There are real problems with housing delivery across the UK. We are not building enough of the right homes in the right locations. This lack of supply has been compounded by lack of finance for the smaller regional housebuilders which were wiped out in the credit crunch.

“Our investors have recognised this problem.

We are identifying investment opportunities and structuring funding solutions in order to develop smaller, high-quality housing schemes in desirable locations. There is an underserved market and a real opportunity for our investors to make a positive impact, alongside a healthy financial return.”

GCV’s investment team have been busy identifying and structuring investment opportunities over the past few months.

“We have a strong pipeline of innovative businesses looking for capital to grow and some very interesting residential development projects that we are busy assessing at the moment,” he continued. “We have a steady stream of innovative businesses and property entrepreneurs applying for funding.”

Quality deal flow is an important part of the process and The GCV team assess between 10 and 20 deals every week.

Peterson explains: “We see a lot of investment opportunities but only take forward a small number where we feel we can add real value. We work very closely with the entrepreneurs we support. In many cases, particularly earlier stage businesses, the entrepreneur has a solid idea and needs help to prepare and present the business as a robust investment opportunity.

“It can be the same for a property project.

We look for an opportunity where we can see something different, an angle where we can add value. On property development projects it might be an option to improve the layout of a scheme and enhance sales values. Whereas an early stage business we might work with the founders to enhance the business model and revenue model.”

The GCV investment team are now completing a funding round for Intelligence Fusion (IF), an early stage technology business.

GCV has supported the company which operates in the security and intelligence sector for the last 18 months, structuring and completing an initial proof of concept

round, all the way through to the current EIS eligible seed round. IF demonstrates how GCV incubates and nurtures companies with high growth potential.

The seed round is currently overfunding, passing its initial target of £400,000 and is now well on the way to raising £500,000 of investment. The company has already gained traction with early sales to key customers and has been well received by GCV’s co-investor network.

Peterson says: “We are delighted IF has overfunded and is set to raise up to £500,000 from a combination of institutional, professional and online investors. The investment was anchored by members of the GCV investor network which unlocked commitment from an institutional investor.

We then partnered with the one UK’s leading crowdfunding platforms, to open this opportunity up to their network too”.

Michael McCabe, founder and CEO of IF, said: “The support received from the team at GCV has been invaluable. The team have been involved across many areas, helping to prepare the investment documents and arranging introductions to their investor network.

Capitalthe Ventures “The Growth team have coordinated online and offline campaigns and have been instrumental in helping this investment round exceed the initial target. I’m delighted we have raised capital from a diverse investor base.

“Having a combination of institutional money and investment from professional

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business angels together with online investors is a very powerful solution for us. I’m looking forward to working with the GCV team as we enter our next phase of growth.”

And co-investment is a core part of GCV’s investment and funding strategy moving forward.

Peterson concludes: “We’re working with institutional investors and angel networks who already have a strong presence in Scotland, but there’s more we can do. We have a growing investor network and our members like the co-investment approach.

“It is a catalyst to increase the number of deals we do and will help to support more innovative businesses and property entrepreneurs. We are keen to build relationships with both potential investors and entrepreneurs across Scotland and the rest of the UK.” n

Growth Capital Ventures

Growth Funders Co-invest in deals with real purpose.

To find out more about investing into high growth businesses and projects, or to find out more about raising capital visit www.growthfunders.com or call 0330 102 5525.

G

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bqlive.co.uk

THAT TAKES THE

biscuit

Baker James Shepherd stumbled across the story of Aberffraw biscuits by accident, but has turned the ancient treat into a recipe for success by supplying hotels, national grocers and now international customers, writes Maria McGeoghan.

T

here is no finer aroma in the world than the whiff of cooling shortbread. And, for James Shepherd, it’s also the smell of success – thanks to a chance encounter one night when he was watching TV. Born and brought up in North Wales, James always considered himself a decent home cook, and he and his wife Natasha enjoyed watching the nation’s favourite food show, The Great British Bake Off. During an episode in October 2012, one of presenters Mel and Sue’s

short information films on the history of food grabbed his attention.

The film mentioned that the oldest biscuit in Britain was called the “Aberffraw biscuit” – or sometimes the “Aberffraw cake” or “Teisen Berffro” – and was said to originate from 13thcentury Anglesey. Shaped like a scallop shell, legend has it that a Welsh king was holding court in Aberffraw and while his wife was walking on the beach she spotted a pretty scallop shell and asked for a cake to be baked

in the same form. The Aberffraw biscuit was born.

“Me and my wife turned to each other and said ‘That can’t be right’,” says Shepherd, 38, who spent ten years working as a journalist in North Wales before heading up e-commerce at a cookware company. “I’d never heard of them, but the film showed a woman in a mill in Anglesey making shell-shaped biscuits.

“I suppose I spotted that it was a great story and I knew what the marketing potential would

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be. We started to look into it and I thought I might try and make a few.”

The father-of-two set about trying to replicate the ancient Aberffraw biscuit recipe with mixed results. “I’ve always been a keen cook and I do all the cooking at home,” he explains. “I’ve always enjoyed cooking for friends and family.

“I found a 19th-century recipe that called for loaf sugar, which I’d never heard of. I tried to replicate it but it just looked like sludge so I updated the recipe as best I could. There are just three ingredients – flour, butter and sugar – and I created a special stamp to make it look like a shell.”

Shepherd was still working full-time and honing his recipe for the biscuits in his own kitchen at the weekend. Then, in May 2013, he was happy with his product and the couple decided to launch their biscuits at the Llangollen Food Festival.

The revival of the ancient Aberffraw biscuit was, as Shepherd foresaw, a good story and was covered in the Daily Post, on Radio Wales and in the Sunday Times, before The Great British Bake Off reappeared to play another hand in their success.

“I got a call from The One Show,” recalls Shepherd with a grin. “They had seen the

story and wanted me to send some biscuits up so Paul Hollywood could taste them. I had to tell my boss I had to leave work and dash home and make some biscuits. He wasn’t very happy.”

Biscuits baked and despatched, Shepherd once again found himself on the same sofa with his wife waiting for a verdict on his efforts from the most famous baker in the country.

“We just held our breath,” he says. “Then when he tasted one he said that it was a nice biscuit with good flavour. Phew. Yes, it was a big risk and we breathed a sigh of relief.

“That was my first commercial sale because I had to invoice the BBC. If he hadn’t liked them then it could have been the first and the last.

Come to think of it, I don’t think they ever paid that couple of quid.”

That high-risk gamble paid off almost immediately when the Imperial Hotel in Llandudno got in touch to ask Shepherd to supply his biscuits and it is still a customer now.

Shepherd had been working his notice and reducing his hours at the cookware company so that he had time to set about designing the logo and packaging for his biscuits.

“I’d sat in traffic on the A55 for two-and-ahalf years commuting to the Wirral and that was enough,” he says. “We have never thought

about moving. We love the space and the clean air of North Wales.

“I never thought I would set up my own business, but I love being my own boss, being able to drop the kids at school and having time to think about what I do next.

“I was never one of those people who knew what I wanted to do. I remember a physiotherapist came to school to talk about their career and I thought I might give it a try.”

He spent a year studying at Cardiff University before realising that it wasn’t for him and then tried engineering at Leicester where he met his future wife – also from North Wales – on his first night out in the city. Engineering wasn’t for him either and, after a spell on the Hotpoint production line putting screws into washing machines, he spotted an advert for an apprentice journalist.

“They took a real punt on me, but I was smitten by journalism and spent the next ten years loving it,” he says. “There was a lot of sitting in Abergele Town Council listening to them debating park benches, but I also interviewed both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.”

As he made those first steps towards setting up his business, he is full of praise for the business mentor assigned to him by the Welsh

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Assembly to help him grow and succeed. “It was fantastic,” Shepherd says.

“I’d had no exposure to the food trade and I’d never run a business. The mentor told me to simplify the products and get a nice box done.

We wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t taken his advice.”

With a clam shell logo, the classy-looking box holds nine biscuits and retails at £4. “It’s not an everyday biscuit,” Shepherd explains. “But it seems to suit everyone with its Welsh tradition, and tourists coming to Wales seem to like it.”

He outgrew his home kitchen and found a bakery unit in Llanrwst to work from and has now bought the unit next door to give the growing business some extra space. The smell of rows and rows of cooling shortbread is delightful, and Paul Hollywood was right: it’s a lovely, buttery biscuit.

In 2015, Shepherd launched biscuits flavoured with chocolate, lemon and ‘Bara Brith’ – a Welsh fruit loaf – and he is now looking at developing a gingerbread recipe.

Earlier that same year, he did a deal to supply

“

Marks & Spencer, which was launching a series of 25 artisan products from around the UK to be sold in 180 stores.

“It was fantastic news and we celebrated when we got the deal,” says Shepherd. “Then the order came in to do six pallets of biscuits in six weeks so I took on two staff to help me.”

That same year, Shepherd was named Welsh food and drink entrepreneur of the year and the Aberffraw Biscuit Company won the ambient food manufacturer of the year prize in the Food Awards Wales. Its traditional shortbread also won a 2015 Great Taste Award.

Shepherd has just completed a deal with the Co-operative to stock his biscuits in 60 stores and is looking at launching a new range – Shepherd’s Welsh Biscuits – with a major retailer. He’s also producing individual biscuit packets for hotels, has completed a “tiny” deal in the United States and is proud to be on the shelves in Kuwait after signing a contract with high-end stockist Dean & DeLuca.

With a total of four employees, turnover at the Aberffraw Biscuit Company has gone

“Always follow your gut instinct. Whenever I haven’t done that I always get bitten.”

from £70,000 to £113,000, with further growth forecast. Shepherd is interested in talking to investors to look at funding a flow wrapping machine for the individual packets of biscuits for hotels, which have proved to be very successful.

When we meet on a beautiful sunny morning in Llanrwst, the only cloud on his horizon is the price of butter, which has doubled since the Brexit vote last June.

“The 25-kilo block price is crippling,” admits Shepherd.

“It would be cheaper to go in to supermarkets and buy the small packets, but I use too much. All the experts seem to be saying that the price will come down again and it can’t come soon enough.”

Shepherd doesn’t hold back when it comes to sharing his secrets for running a successful business. “Always follow your gut instinct,” he says. “Whenever I haven’t done that I always get bitten.

“Be super organised – I suppose I always have. I used to be the only journalist in the office with a neat desk. And don’t be afraid to ask for help.”

And does he still like eating shortbread now that he lives and breathes it? “I have one biscuit a day – just to make sure it’s right,” he grins. n

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Special Report - International Trade

THURSDAY 22 MARCH 2018 THE AWARDS NOMINATIONS ARE OPEN UNTIL 19 JANUARY 2018 in the following categories:

MOST ENTREPRENEURIAL EXPORTER OF THE YEAR MICRO EXPORTER OF THE YEAR SMALL EXPORTER OF THE YEAR

BQ has launched the Scottish Export Awards 2018 sponsored by HSBC and in association with Scottish Enterprise and Highlands & Islands Enterprise.

The Scottish Export Awards sponsored by HSBC and in association with Scottish Enterprise and Highlands & Islands Enterprise take place once again on the 22nd March 2018 at the Glasgow Hilton. The event will bring together export businesses from across Scotland to recognise and celebrate their achievements.

Exporting remains central to the Scottish Government’s growth agenda and the campaign aims to recognise those exporters who have made the transition from great local companies to potentially world-class exporting businesses based in Scotland.

The awards and accompanying international trade campaign are about highlighting those wealth creating companies that are selling their products, services and expertise into scores of overseas markets.

Bryan Hoare, Group Commercial Director said: “If you are reading this article knowing

that you have company activity in export markets I’d encourage you to enter the Scottish Export Awards 2018. Last year we had a great mix of entrants with companies employing as little as four staff to those in their hundreds.

The structure of the awards categories means that it is a level playing field for all entrants and we get great satisfaction in uncovering some of Scotland’s newest export talent as we do recognising those more mature export businesses.”

The BQ digital series of “Around the World in 80 Trades” features also give chance to Scottish Exporters to receive free PR about their export achievements throughout the campaign.

Hoare continued, “We’d like to hear from any Scottish Exporter who has an interesting story to tell so we can use their experiences to inspire others to consider internationalising their business for the first time”. n

LARGE EXPORTER OF THE YEAR

Sponsored by

EXPORT TEAM OF THE YEAR ECOMMERCE EXPORTER OF THE YEAR HIGH GROWTH MARKET EXPORTER OF THE YEAR EMERGING MARKET EXPORTER OF THE YEAR SCALE UP EXPORTER OF THE YEAR

Sponsored by

HSBC SCOTTISH EXPORTER OF THE YEAR

This award will be presented to a company that has made an outstanding contribution to Scotland’s export profile and success. The winner of this award will be selected from the winners of the above award categories and announced on the evening of the awards.

Nominations for the Scottish Export Awards 2018 sponsored by HSBC and in association with Scottish Enterprise and Highlands & Islands Enterprise are open now and are free to enter. For more information go to www.bqlive.co.uk/ScotExportAwards18.

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Special Report - International Trade

Technology and international trade Alison McGregor, CEO of HSBC in Scotland The symbiotic relationship between technology and international trade is fast becoming the cornerstone for exporting. Not only does technology underpin innovations that make trade more efficient and safer for individual businesses but it is also used to tackle wider issues such as fraud and money laundering that can present a risk to would be exporters.

With international exports worth £29bn to the Scottish economy, growing beyond our borders is a key priority.

As one of the world’s largest international banking and financial services organisations, with a presence in more than 67 countries, it is our responsibility to enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to export and grow globally.

In doing so we’re also supporting the economies in which we are present. With this also comes

a responsibility to tackle financial crime, reduce risks and make global trade less challenging.

Safeguarding businesses In today’s sophisticated world, any business or individual is susceptible to financial crime.

As an international bank, it is incumbent on ourselves, with our international knowledge and financial expertise, to ensure there are safe passages to market for our export-fit domestic businesses. That includes tackling the global issue of financial crime while also developing innovative, world-leading technologies to make international business efficient, safer and easier.

The rise of online banking means companies are using a variety of digital platforms to do business, bringing international trade closer to home. However, the more digitally present a company is, the larger the risk for exposure.

Other risks can simply come in the form of understanding the country and landscape in which you are trading. Due diligence is critical to ensure your business is cooperating with possible sanctions and embargoes. This thorough knowledge of the trading landscape will increase vigilance of potential fraud; minimising the risk of inadvertent involvement in illegal activity optimises returns by avoiding unexpected costs and business disruption.

This is why, at our global centre of excellence for risk and compliance in Edinburgh, we’re investing in our best teams and expertise in developing the technology and skills to fight financial crime.

In fact, we delivered more than 3.1 million hours of targeted training on financial crime last year to our staff.

Special Report - International Trade

Edinburgh was an ideal location due to its: global reputation in banking and finance; unique pipeline of high-level data science, financial and technical expertise; and the city’s readily available connections to European, American and Far Eastern markets.

At the centre, a variety of activities are undertaken across financial crime compliance, regulatory compliance, wholesale credit and market risk, operational risk and risk analytics.

The building is a hive of technological and human intelligence. Half of our employees here are directly involved in money laundering prevention.

We have a passion to tackle these issues, which is why earlier this year we held an event with Police Scotland and the Scottish Government, bringing together our senior leadership to better understand how we can work together. Specifically, we see three component parts to our role: the expertise of front line staff; the impact of technology on our capability to detect crime; and the influence of partnership working in delivering results.

However, we must remember the opportunity to export outweighs any perceived threats.

Streamlining the export process Today, almost everything we do in banking and finance circles back to technology. Since 2015 HSBC has invested US$1bn to ensure we’re driving forward innovation in our sector and delivering better access to international markets for our domestic SMEs. Scottish brewer WooHa, known for its awardwinning and KeyKeg conditioned beer, is a prime example of how SMEs, no matter their size, can reap enormous reward from overseas trade. The brewer began trading in April 2015, and received HSBC finance to upgrade its facilities through the purchase of a new 6.2 acre farm in Moray and hire an additional four employees. Today, the business is able to increase production five-fold and ramp up an ambitious export strategy.

The business is forecasting that 80% of its revenue next year will be via exports, with its focus to be on dramatically increasing supply to the US market.

This year, Scotland’s food and drink exports grew by £421m in 2016, to a record £5.5bn.

Exports to the EU countries alone were worth £2.3bn – up £133m on last year.

The market for export is buoyant and we must ensure we navigate a clear journey to international opportunities for Scottish SMEs. One way is to make some of the complex

“

“Scottish brewer WooHa Brewing Company, known for its award-winning and KeyKeg conditioned beer, is a prime example of how Scottish SMEs, no matter their size, can reap enormous reward from overseas trade.”

processes involved in exporting easier. Particularly pertinent for WooHa is the digitising of paperbased processes through innovative technologies.

When businesses have an import or export focus, the level of paperwork involved can be enormous and complex – often becoming a drain on company resources.

HSBC’s global trade and receivables finance team facilitates more than US$500bn of documentary trade for customers every year, and in doing so must manually review and process up to 100 million pages of documents, ranging from invoices to packing lists and insurance certificates.

To make this easier, HSBC has developed a cognitive intelligence solution devised with IBM, which uses optical character recognition, advanced robotics, advanced analytics technology including intelligent segmentation and text analytics to identify, digitise and extract key data from all of this documentation.

By digitising this process we will make transactions quicker and safer for both buyers and suppliers, leading our industry forwards, and we will reduce compliance risks through an enhanced ability to manage this volume of data.

Blockchain Another fast-emerging technology, increasingly synonymous with financial technology, is blockchain. Blockchain records transactions in

blocks and then forms chains of permanent data. It is the technology behind cryptocurrency bitcoin and is set to revolutionise the financial industry.

The immutable nature of blockchain helps ensure banking is more secure and transparent and can be applied to a range of financial services.

When applied to the digitisation of paperbased processes, blockchain could not be a more important asset. Currently, more than US$2tn of global trade depends on the physical exchange of documents, such as letters of credit. These are issued by banks to be used by importers and exporters to reduce the risk of trading with each other and give suppliers certainty over payment.

Considering the rapid growth in Scotland’s food and drink sector alone, it is critical to our economy to get these processes right.

We understand that innovation is the lens through which we will truly understand what our customers want and need. And in this world, behind every innovation are the technologies and expertise to give businesses the global launch pad they need for international trade. n

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Special Report - International Trade

Driving the future of global trade Global markets are evolving rapidly and that represents a world of great business opportunity that Scottish Enterprise can help you with.

It’s highly likely that many components in your smartphone originated from China. Your clothes may have been imported from Indonesia or Vietnam, and the coffee you’re drinking perhaps came from Kenya or Costa Rica. You may even be planning a business trip to Hamburg, Houston or Hanoi.

As we turn our minds to new trade agreements with the European Union and

other major markets, it’s worth considering the explosion in global trade in recent decades. In less than thirty years, China has become the world’s second-largest economy and emerging economies now account for over half of world gross domestic product (GDP) and almost 80% of global economic growth.

As marketplaces around the world continue to evolve with pace, Scottish Enterprise – in

partnership with Invest Northern Ireland, Highlands & Islands Enterprise and VisitScotland – has taken a forward-facing look at how world trade could look in 2025 to help businesses anticipate future trends and opportunities for growth. The GlobalScots network has contributed their experiences too, to help businesses understand the huge scale of opportunities presented by trading overseas in

Special Report - International Trade

the next decade.

“We want to ensure that Scotland’s approach to trade will remain effective in the longer term, understanding how trade might evolve and at the pace and nature of some of that change,” said Ewan Mearns, strategy partner at Scottish Enterprise, who oversaw this project.

“We’ve tried to look from the outside in; understand the demands from overseas, and what’s really driving growth.”

What will global trade look like?

Global trade agreements are likely to become regionalised and more fragmented as developing nations seek to compete on their own terms, creating a wealth of opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as they take a lead role in driving trade, with digital disruption levelling the competitive playing field between them and larger firms.

Value chains will become more international in nature. From the sourcing of raw materials to production, sales, and services, increasingly businesses will look globally for the best comparative cost and quality of skills and materials.

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Factors driving those decisions will be dominated by innovation, talent and skills, and data and technologies, including the growing applications of robotics, AI and online digital platforms.

How do those things affect the capabilities that companies need, to capitalise on these opportunities?

Primarily, in three distinct ways, Mearns says. “First is innovation; understanding how to innovate, including product, process and service model innovation.

“Second is being able to operate digitally; blending physical and digital trade seamlessly, and thinking about how to evolve a business model.

“The third part is adopting a global mindset from the outset; the strategic agility to switch between markets, forge new partnerships overseas and respond to market needs and global shocks.”

Where will we see changes in demand?

There will be an extra 800 million people on the planet in 2025 and an extra billion aspirational consumers. The ability to solve

“Digital trade, using online platforms and social media channels, is quite a new aspect of trade for many companies.” problems like access to water in developing nations will represent a significant business opportunity, whilst “young”, tech-savvy and entrepreneurial populations in Asia and Africa will drive the development of scores of new business ideas.

“When you stand back and think about what’s changing in the world,” Mearns says, “population growth is driving a lot of that change. Increasingly affluent consumers have bigger demands, in terms of products, infrastructure and services, which will grow in importance.

“88% of the new middle classes will be in Asia by 2025, so Asia will really fuel that growth.

“There are huge opportunities, and we have a number of firms specialising in areas like clean water technologies, where they could rapidly scale to meet these emerging demands.

“Businesses can access Scottish Enterprise’s free research service to get more detailed insight on these trends and market specific information.”

How will we trade in the future?

Markets in India, China, Southeast Asia, and Africa are expected to grow fastest of all, and digital platforms like Amazon, Flipkart and Alibaba will become increasingly important trading channels worldwide.

“We want to make sure that Scottish companies are using these platforms as a springboard to success both at home and overseas,” syas Mearns.

An example of recent success is textiles specialist Johnstons of Elgin. Scottish Enterprise put it in touch with experts who understood the importance of social media and its influence in China, and helped it to build a social media presence in that market on WeChat.

“Digital trade, using online platforms and social media channels is quite a new aspect of trade for many companies, and raises questions about company capabilities and understanding.

What we want to do is develop successful market entry models, like Johnstons of Elgin, to make it easier for other Scottish businesses to then trade in those markets.

“But for the next decade, digital technology is an interesting one. In places like Africa, they don’t have the legacy of fixed technology infrastructure; they’re going straight to mobile, which represents a brand new opportunity.

“Internationalisation will always be a powerful driver of business growth. And with global markets changing so fast the opportunities are huge.

“Jump in, take the right advice, and learn from that,” Mearns concludes. n If you have a question about international trade you can get in touch with one of Scottish Enterprise’s export advisers at www.scottish-enterprise.com/exportadvice.

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ALL THE WORLD is a nano-second away

The Highlands and islands are better connected to the rest of the world than ever before, and that’s a business opportunity too good to overlook.

Getting more businesses to do more international trade is at the heart of the Scottish Government’s international strategy. Martin Johnson is the regional head of international trade and inward investment for Highlands & Islands Enterprise, and he feels that for Scotland to continue to be a successful economy, even more businesses need to seize the opportunities offered by international trade.

“Our economy benefits hugely from world class players across a really broad range of growth sectors, from energy and life sciences to creative industries, tourism and food and drink. Targeting the right international markets is a fantastic tool to accelerate business growth.

“For instance, we have some fantastic seafood, from varieties of fish through to shellfish; some of the finest natural resources in the world

which are being sustainably harvested. When those products are landed in the Highlands and islands, there are businesses who can buy those, add value to them, and sell them to markets all around the world.

“Aquaculture is a huge part of our economy.

All of Scotland’s salmon is farmed off the Highlands and islands,” he says, explaining that all of the topography, the sheltered water needed

for this industry falls into this area.

It’s a huge success story over the last 30 years; salmon, behind whisky, is Scotland’s second most popular export. Quarter one salmon sales were valued at £483m, a 56% increase in export value on the same period in 2016.

Food and drink is a very strong sector, Johnson says, “because of the quality of the

Special Report - International Trade

natural ingredients and the quality of the land, factors which also contribute significantly towards tourism being another major source of international trade activity for the area.

“We have beautiful countryside, we have the most amazing wildlife, and we have a good dash of history in terms of ancestry – we have an excellent product for tourists to come and enjoy and experience. And we have some great businesses packaging that up and promoting it proactively, not just to the consumer but also to other businesses, so that you have overseas tour operators promoting Scotland to their clients.

“In both areas, more businesses could trade internationally, and those who already do could do more.”

Those well-established areas of international trade expertise are invaluable to the Highlands and islands. The growth that’s happened can be credited to the two main forms of connectivity bolstering international trade all over the world: highways, and the information superhighway.

“A big change over the past 20 years or so has been the development of the physical supply chains, so you can get seafood to any part of the world within 48 hours, and you can bring customers in from anywhere. Our region is better connected than it’s ever been; Inverness airport is almost at a million passengers a year with connections to London Gatwick and Heathrow as well as Schiphol – three of the largest cargo and passenger hubs in Europe.

“The ongoing investment in information and

communication technology (ICT) and access to superfast broadband moves us away from just the movement of goods and people, and into the movement of knowledge. There are examples of knowledge-based businesses that are using the internet to find customers, promote themselves, win and deliver business over the internet.

“This part of Scotland is as connected now as New York or London in terms of the digital world.”

So, where does this open up the most significant opportunities for the businesses of the Highlands and islands, for whom exporting is not currently such a prominent part of their business?

“We have a number of manufacturing and engineering businesses, which service the global supply chain from our region. When you think of Scotland and oil and gas, Aberdeen is a centre of excellence, but the second cluster is in and around the Cromarty Firth near Inverness – you could argue this is the best natural harbour in the UK. “In time, the know-how and business base we’re building around marine renewables will allow us to pursue market opportunities all around the world.

“The life sciences sector is dominated

by Johnson & Johnson’s LifeScan, which manufactures diabetes test strips – very complicated devices made of plastics and metals – and it manufactures billions of them in Inverness, which are exported all around the world.

“The creative industries: in textiles, this part of the world is well thought of in terms of Shetland knitwear and Harris tweed from the Western Isles, and knitwear in general. The textiles

sector has always been outward looking about international trade and we’ve seen a resurgence of that sector focussed on selling to Europe, to Asia – Japan in particular – and North America.

There’s a design-based, customer-savvy mix of traditional materials and design and modern manufacturing, as well as hand-crafted goods.

“Another strand to creative industries is music and media; again, this region is fairly famous for its traditional music alongside its modern musicians.

“The main export markets for the Highlands and islands are currently Europe, the United States, and Japan. North America remains important for obvious reasons; including its sheer scale,” Johnson says. “Europe is on our doorstep, and whilst language is different, people have become very familiar with the geography – and proximity is an important part of that.”

Emerging markets, looking ahead, would include China, a huge market that can feel a little too big for businesses, especially novice exporters. It’s made out of many regions and each of those is vast. But support is available to help businesses break those down and identify the best places to invest time and energy.

And the potential for growth in Africa is also sizeable: “The education of a large, young, growing population on top of some vast natural resources from oil and gas, through commodities to agriculture, will make this an emerging market in the decades to come. We’re starting to see Africa as a continent, despite all its challenges, move forward.”

There’s a huge array of support available to businesses looking to move into these areas.

As Johnson concludes, it’s about growing your business and becoming more profitable. “It’s about spreading risk – if you’re in five markets and one goes bad, the other four can be good.

“And it can be tremendously exciting too – going out, meeting new people, getting new ideas, new perspectives on your business and creating new market opportunities.” n

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We do a lot of

listening John McGavigan is a manufacturer which earns most of its money selling overseas, but that doesn’t mean it is ignoring domestic markets.

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‘Our activities in central Europe, are very important and strategically central to what we’re going to do in the next three to five years.”

Steve Mathers is a man on the move. Director of Glasgow-based manufacturer, and HSBC Scottish Exporter of the year 2017, John McGavigan, a three-week span of October and early November saw him in both Japan and Germany on business, before making his way back to Scottish soil. But this shouldn’t be surprising for the man at the helm of a firm exporting some 90% of its goods.

McGavigan is a manufacturer for a range of technical and decorative plastic components and assemblies for the global automotive industry. It supplies many of the global car brands around the world, from its manufacturing operations in Scotland and China. The company has exported for more than 30 of its 150-year history, with the geographic scope expanding as the client base has grown.

So, how’s business? “Very buoyant,” comes the unsurprising response. “We’re heading for another record sales year. Let me just work something out…” he says, trailing off as he taps the keys of a nearby calculator, “…further growth of about 36% this year, globally. Quite a busy year.”

McGavigan manufactures quite a range of items, ranging from printed components you see in the vehicle instrument cluster, interior plastic trim you’ll find in the door panel, and complete decorative plastic button and switch assembly units you’d use when you control the temperature in your car, or change the channel on the radio.

Most of its customers are established global brands, with manufacturing and assembly interests in each of the major economies, so in many ways those customers encouraged the international growth of the firm.

The firm exports to locations as far afield as Asia and the Americas, as well as more locally within Europe. Without strong export channels, the business would not exist in the way we recognise it now.

Its export channels are often well trodden routes, so legislative and taxation matters are usually well defined – or are, in some instances, supported by the operations of its clients.

“We’re now shipping products into the Japanese markets, which has been quite a milestone for us, because it’s technically very difficult to enter into the supply chain in Japan. We’re also now supplying into Malaysia, which is also a growth area for us in the automotive sector.”

By contrast, and not unsurprisingly, not every market entry will go perfectly. “The US has been relatively slow,” Mathers says,” and we may need to look at extending or increasing our presence in the US market by putting manufacturing capabilities into Mexico. The discussion between partners of NAFTA, amongst other factors, means we’re holding back any significant investment decisions there, but it’s still very much on our radar.

“It’s not going to have a negative effect on the growth of our business; Asia, and our activities in central Europe, are very important and strategically central to what we’re going to do in the next three to five years, and we’re already working with many of those customers. The American market is more of an incremental opportunity for growth; we do supply products into the North American market already, but growing that is going to be, to some extent, influenced by the political and trade conditions that are in place over the next year or so.”

Exporting forms a huge part of its business, but that doesn’t mean that domestic business wins aren’t also celebrated. Of its growth this year, Mathers says: “We’ve experienced growth in our export markets but also domestic manufacturing, with new programmes for the UK automotive industry, mainly Nissan – we’re supplying the interior trim for the Nissan Qashquai.

“It’s been a big success; it’s been refreshing to see that as an organisation, despite some political turmoil, they’ve made a commitment as a long-term manufacturing platform for Europe, in Sunderland.

“For us, it’s a breakthrough to some extent,” he continues. “Whilst our revenue is predominantly going outside of the UK, which is great for export purposes, we wanted to get an increase balance in the UK domicile automotive industry. The programmes with Nissan, and a couple of other smaller programmes we’re just picking up, are playing an important part of balancing our business.

“From a strategic perspective, it’s good to have a business that is high export yield, but at the same time you don’t want to be entirely dependent upon export, because political changes can influence that.

The ongoing discussion with Brexit is a consideration; we must make sure our business is sufficiently derisked not to have a negative impact should there be a hard Brexit.

“We don’t see that as being a game changer, even

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“Don’t be daunted by the opportunity that exporting can bring. It is an opportunity that is very important to the economy but also the individual business.”

if a hard Brexit happens, because the nature of applying World Trade Organisation rules to our business would be nominal,” he adds.

In March, the John McGavigan team was crowned large exporter of the year, and overall Scottish exporter of the year, at the HSBC Scottish Export Awards in association with Scottish Enterprise, a significant achievement and recognition for the 450-strong team working across its sites. The judges felt the company’s story was “an inspiring one”, having continuously innovated to meet changing customer demands.

“It was an excellent result, but it was recognition for the McGavigan team as a whole.

The one thing that we pride ourselves on is working hard to satisfy customers; whilst it’s very easy to look at a company from a balance sheet perspective, the thing that really makes a difference is the relationship we have with them.

“That growth has come from building up long term, trusting relationships with our clients on a global scale. It’s important to continue. The reward itself was a recognition of the results from the hard work that’s gone in from the team, both here and in our Asia operation.”

But its winning streak actually kicked off in February, when it was placed at number 77 in the Sunday Times Lloyds SME Export Track 100. The league table ranks Britain’s small and medium-sized companies with the fastest growing international sales. McGavigan was up seven places from last year, one of just nine Scottish companies to be placed.

Hot on the heels of that listing, the director

of its Suzhou facility, Lifeng Wang, picked up an award for best supplier collaboration at the YanFeng Visteon China Supplier meeting.

Securing this kind of award demonstrates the time and effort it put into building relations with partners in its varied export markets.

To sell effectively within any region, whether inside Europe or further afield, cultural sensitivity and an appreciation of local business protocol is essential. What may fit for one market may easily not work in another. Mathers and his team have worked hard to make sure they understand and respect the cultural and professional expectations in each and every one of the countries they approach.

“It’s most important to research the markets that you’re entering into. Developing cultural sensitivity and understanding how trade is conducted; seeking expert advice, which is readily available from organisations like Scottish Enterprise through Scottish Development International (SDI), and also tapping into resources like the GlobalScot network. Talk to likeminded businesses.”

And that extends into his advice for newer exporters: “Don’t be daunted by the opportunity that exporting can bring. It is an opportunity that is very important to the economy but also the individual business. You can be large or small; the dynamics are exactly the same. If you’re going into a new market on a business-tobusiness or business-to-consumer basis, having local presence is extremely important, and establishing good relationships through trade organisations is a great way to start.”

Entering markets in Asia could be considered one of the trickier moves for a novice exporter; China cited as an example where it takes a little adjustment to understand the local customs and taxation regulations, so it’s important to have a local partner to help guide you through the processes. The same can be said for South American regions, where import tariffs can be challenging.

Indeed, simply being a firm with Scottish heritage is a unique selling point in most industries; the hardest part can be breaking down the whole world into penetrable markets.

“Don’t be put off by the sheer scale, and the fear factor,” Mathers reinforces. “You’ll quickly overcome it when you start to realise the value.

Many nations are interested by products that are coming from Scottish markets, it gives you an advantage. Play to the cultural background and build upon it.”

Looking to 2018 and beyond, Mathers confidence in his team and in the way he does business shines through. They recognise that one of the interesting things about the business world is that it never stays still. “We are continuing to build,” he assures me. “And we’re probably going to increase our physical presence in key European markets, through the establishment of technical support offices initially in Germany, which will increase the level of support we can provide to customers in that market.

“It’s very much continuing to grow; the future of our growth is making sure that we’re close to our customer needs. We do a lot of listening.”

But when he does the talking, his words of wisdom apply to everyone. “Don’t let the fear factor get in your way,” he concludes. “Once you get past it, you’ll see growth in every aspect.” n

Special Report - International Trade

MAKING YOUR OVERSEAS OFFER MORE COMPETITIVE UK Export Finance (UKEF), the UK’s export credit agency and part of the Department for International Trade, is helping Scottish companies realise their exporting ambitions with UK government-backed financial support.

Growing overseas business will be key to growth for many firms in Scotland as they look to thrive in a global marketplace. Bank research shows that, on average, firms that start exporting grow by a third in just two years. Exporters can see levels of growth that might not be possible domestically, spread business risk, realise economies of scale not always achievable in their home market, increase revenues and profits, and extend the commercial lifespan of their products and services. Overseas markets also present attractive opportunities for revenue growth and

diversification, leading to innovation.

Having the right finance and insurance in place can make you more competitive when undertaking any business activity, and exporting is no different. That’s where we come in. UKEF is a government department with a mission to ensure no viable UK export fails for lack of finance or insurance. Over the past five years, we provided over £14 billion in support for UK exports to businesses across all sectors and all sizes.

We help companies selling overseas find the right finance and insurance, complementing what is available from the private market, to help them win contracts, fulfil them and guarantee payment – even in difficult or new markets.

Last year alone, UKEF provided £28.9 million of support for Scottish exporters, resulting in over £234 million worth of sales. Scottish companies we have supported include Falkirkbased Alexander Dennis, the UK’s leading bus and coach manufacturer. With a turnover of over £500 million a year, international sales are vital to the firm’s success.

When Mexico City’s Metrobus, the city’s transport authority, was opening a new route through Paseo de La Reforma, it turned to Alexander Dennis (ADL) for a one billion Mexican Peso (£41 million) deal for 90 low emission red

A UKEF-supported ‘Enviro500’ bus from Alexander Dennis Ltd. in Mexico

‘London’ buses in order to relieve congestion.

However, Metrobus required support in order to finance the contract. UKEF was able to step in and provide a “buyer credit” guarantee on a bank loan to Metrobus, enabling it to access the finance to buy the buses and secure the business for ADL. In addition, thanks to its expanding range of foreign currency support, UKEF was able to provide the support in Mexican pesos, allowing Metrobus to repay in local currency.

UKEF’s support meant ADL was able to secure the business in a rapidly growing market, supporting jobs in ADL’s UK sites in Falkirk and Guildford, as well as throughout the supply chain.

UKEF support can be transformative for Scottish companies like Alexander Dennis, which exports to markets all over the world. We help companies in Scotland get the finance and support they need to realise their exporting ambitions; so, whether you’re exporting for the first time or competing for large overseas contract, UKEF is here to help.

Why not get in touch to find out more? n

Find out more at www.gov.uk/uk-export-finance or email customer.service@ukexportfinance.gov.uk

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A

MAPPER OF LIFE AND

DEATH

Atlantic Geomatics is embarking on an innovative project to map every single plot of each graveyard in England and in doing so double the size of the business. Founder and chief executive Tim Viney explains all to Paul Robertson.

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magine being able to find out at the click of a button everything you need to know about where and when an ancestor was buried, availability of plots nearby, the flora, fauna and trees – preserving the past, while embracing the future. By using the knowledge of cemetery managers and working closely with burial ground users, entrepreneur Tim Viney and his team has done just that by creating a solution that will facilitate complete burial ground management, protect the heritage this information contains and maximise the potential it offers.

Having started the project in Cumbria, with commissions from Northumberland, Worcestershire, Oxfordshire and London among others, Tim’s company Atlantic Geomatics is in advanced discussions to roll out the system England-wide and, in the process, transform the business.

“I was approached three years ago by local parishes to map churchyards,” says Viney. “One wanted an electronic record so I asked them why and they said they wanted to keep it up to date but didn’t know how.

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“It is also a great tool combining history, technology, geography, heritage and culture.”

“We developed a prototype by mapping and creating a digital record of every grave. We could say where the space was – the shortage of burial space is well documented – where the trees were, how old they were and type, as well as the current graves.

“We then thought others may have a need so sent a questionnaire to 300 churches across Cumbria. We had 120 replies and 90% didn’t have a map. Most only had one copy of their burial registers, which obviously would be a risk and so I saw an opportunity.”

Viney secured a grant for £90,000 from Innovus, which works in partnership with the University of Manchester, and developed a web-based prototype. He is having ongoing discussions with the Church of England and the Commonwealth War Grave Commission – amongst others – about mapping every single one of the 11,000-odd churchyards in England, with interest also from the Church of Scotland and the Church in Wales.

He enthusiastically demonstrates his brainchild, producing at the click of a button amazing electronic images, pictures and full details of everything within the graveyard from the oldest person to the newest plant. It is a record now protected from theft and fire, a sophisticated, intuitive database that can be easily updated.

“We have worked hard to create an effective workflow, we can now do four graveyards a day, therefore we can bring the costs down,” says Viney. “We have developed a system so the client can employ volunteers or even schools to help them manage it and keep it up to date.

“We went to a secondary school at Wigton and spent a day with 35 GCSE students, showed them the old books, how we map the churchyards, etc. They then tested our system – they were a great testing ground because they didn’t do what they were told. From an educational perspective, it is also a great tool combining history, technology, geography, heritage and culture.

“Currently, if you contact a church they have to find the old register, write it all down then send out the information asked for to the client – our system can do it in 10 seconds. All you need is a computer and a browser. It can

be a good revenue earner for both the church and us.”

Viney is also targeting a public platform by the end of 2017, with a systematic roll out over four or five years. He is projecting his workforce will double from its current 20 and turnover to increase significantly from its current £850,000.

“We want to build a team energised by this fascinating project, it is innovative,” he says. “We’ll need people for customer service, logistics, training, IT, software developers as well as more surveyors. It is taking the business to a whole new level. We want to make information available in an easy-to-use format.”

Atlantic Geomatics is a company Viney formed in 2002 after 22 years working overseas in a variety of countries. His journey is fascinating.

Born in Reading, he was four when his father was moved to Cumbria, which is where he is now once again based and regards very much as home. Having studied surveying at the University of East London, his passion was to apply his trade overseas. His chance came in 1981 and a job in Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein.

“I had married Julie by this stage and we had two small children so I was not quite sure whether to go,” he recalls. “I was offered it on single status so turned it down but then they offered it on married status.

“I went on my own for three months and when I got to Baghdad they were at war with Iran – the only way in was via Iraqi Airlines to Damascus. We had to close the blinds and the lights went out in Iraqi airspace as we were escorted in by fighter jets.

“We stayed on a compound just outside Fallujah and had no connection with the UK. I was based next to a customs yard so got to know a few drivers. There was one from Carlisle who could exchange goods and messages home in return for giving him a shower and a beer.

“After three months, I thought ‘I can’t bring my wife and family here’. The only way you could make a phone call was by Cable & Wireless from a single room on a Friday [their day off]. I went down to the office and it was packed with people – there was one man at

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a desk with one telephone and you could see the wires out of the wall. You wrote down on a slip of paper your name and telephone number then waited. Sometimes it was five minutes, others five hours.

“I was eventually called and said to my wife I think I will do another three months then come back as I don’t think you should come out. She replied: ‘We discussed this, I am coming out and that’s it’ and put the phone down. I had been waiting hours to speak to her.”

They stayed there for two years. Viney worked for a contracting company from Kuwait mapping an area the size of the Netherlands for irrigation – a huge project. They were taking water out of the Euphrates then channelling it across the desert and into the Tigris.

In 1984, they moved to St Lucia. “Of all the projects that was the most exciting,” says Viney. “We recruited and trained 120 locals to determine who owned all the land – it took three and a half years. We got to know so many people and the inside of the island. We now had three kids and had a wonderful time.

“The land didn’t have good title or secured tenure, there were no records of who owned what. There were all sorts of disputes over

whose was what but, out of 1,000, only eight went to the High Court, thanks to getting to people on the ground, resolving disputes – it was a massive business lesson for me in terms of dealing with people from a client relationship perspective.”

It was back to the Middle East and Qatar in 1988, a similar project to St Lucia, dividing the land for future developments that have since transformed the country and Viney’s first exposure to technology. “In St Lucia, it had been 100% paper,” he says. “Here we got to use and develop geographic information systems (GIS) – an intuitive way to build up pictures of people and places using maps.”

Then, in 1994, it was Bermuda for eight years and it was here the idea for Atlantic Geomatics was born. “As a chartered surveyor, I didn’t make huge sums of money but the quality of life and working in such diverse places, with people from all around the world, was amazing,” he says.

“While in Bermuda, I ran the survey department converting all mapping into digital format and then started to manage the government property more efficiently by developing a property information

management system (PIMS).”

A Canadian company called Atlantic Geomatics was commissioned to build the PIMS, Viney became friends with the directors and had initial discussions about setting up a UK branch. His friends then left the company but he still went ahead and registered the company in the UK. He bought a house in Pooley Bridge. “I love the area,” he says. “I met my wife at school and it is where we wanted to settle.

“Atlantic Geomatics began by working out of a small farm building but has evolved,

“

“I didn’t make huge sums of money but the quality of life and working in such diverse places, with people from all around the world, was amazing.”

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weathered the storms and grown. I took over a small surveying business run by an old friend with three employees. I had 22 years working overseas, signed a deal, with zero handover and was confronted with pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) and national insurance, all of which meant nothing to me.

“Everything was manual, the accounts, ledgers for letters being posted, one for sales, purchase, payroll – it was a good way to learn.

We could transform it into a modern business.”

So, in a nutshell what does Atlantic Geomatics do? “We measure the environment, natural or built, providing information for consultants, architects, engineers about what is where,” says Viney. “It is high-level, detailed information. Adding attribution to digital mapping makes the data more powerful and supports better decision making. Add the roads, trees, buildings – a database to click on that tells you how high the tree is, where the lamppost is, when it was serviced – and it is an intuitive, interactive tool.

“It can be used to map stagnant water, record cases of malaria and pinpoint where the outbreak was, allowing much more informed decisions to be made. Utility companies can see if they cut a cable exactly who will be affected. We want to make this software available for everybody, web-based, easy and friendly to use.”

“

“Our burial ground management system is the first ever complete solution of its kind, offering a comprehensive, high-quality and secure tool.”

His firm was involved in assessing much of the flood damage and reinstatement works needed in and around Cumbria in 2015, including the collapse of the A591 between Grasmere and Keswick, producing a three-dimensional (3D) model so it could be strengthened when rebuilt.

At 63, Viney has been married to Julie for 40 years. Their eldest son Jonathan is a teacher, daughter Rachael a doctor in Newcastle while youngest son Ollie is financial director of Atlantic Geomatics. He also has eight grandchildren, aged zero to five. He continues to be an expert witness in boundary disputes, but it is attracting more investment, interest and making the technology created by Atlantic Geomatics more accessible that keeps him fired up.

“I love the business and the burial ground management system is my big driver,” he says.

“It is an ambitious, transformative project.

We also want to create a Northern geomatics body for surveying, working with the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Chartered Institute of Civil Engineering

Surveyors to create awareness about what we do. Everywhere else I have worked our industry had to be licensed but not in the UK – I don’t think that is right.

“Our burial ground management system is the first ever complete solution of its kind, offering a comprehensive, high-quality and secure tool that will become a world leading resource.

“Future developments will include a publiclyaccessible website, which will be a secure platform to complement the burial ground management portal.

“This sister site will become the ‘go to’ online resource for public research, either for general interest, genealogy searches or to arrange visits to the graves. Data will be accessible through a secure website and mobile applications, making it easy to locate a grave, view images and to search the historical data.

“This will streamline interaction with the public, attract visitors and even have a future income-generating potential for maintenance and management purposes. As a proud Cumbrian company, we’re really excited.” n

Profile

Is it time to push the boundaries?

For businesses considering going international, Gareth Magee provides ten top tips for forging more formal and valuable relationships in your target market.

Online marketplaces have transformed how retailers find, and then transact with, buyers from all around the globe. With an abundance of these websites providing businesses with unprecedented access to new markets, it’s no surprise that small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) are taking advantage of them and using the internet to further their global ambitions. They offer a low-risk, easy-access means of reaching an extensive new base of potential customers.

Not only do these marketplaces provide a window for your product or service, but they can provide processing, delivery, fulfilment, auctioning, ordering and currency exchange solutions.

Many SMEs, however, will have ambitions that lie far beyond direct online sales. How do you scale up from these online marketplaces and take your international push to the next level? How do SMEs take the next step and forge more formal, specific and valuable relationships with customers and suppliers in their target markets outside the UK? It’s not always easy, but here are some practical steps that can be taken to start you off on the right foot.

Here are my top ten tips: 1. Get really good local advice – talk to someone that has a strong international network with offices all around the globe, and find a good, local adviser who can help you make sense of the local laws, legislations, taxes, and ways of doing business.

2. Research the political, economic and cultural differences – don’t let differences become barriers.

Gareth Magee is a partner at leading accountants and business advisers Scott-

3. Do your homework on the company in question.

Run some proper credit checks and undertake some due diligence – know who you are talking to. Ask for references too.

Moncrieff, which, through its membership of the Moore Stephens network, helps Scottish businesses realise their international potential.

E: gareth.magee@scott-moncrieff.com

4. It sounds simple, but do a Google search. News searches in particular can provide you with a lot of information that you want to know, and perhaps some the other party might not want you to know.

T: 0131 473 3500 www.scott-moncrieff.com

5. Call them. It may sound old school, but a call

will give you a really strong sense of how they do business.

6. Don’t limit your engagement to a particular individual. Engage with more than one person on both sides of the relationship and start to build a network of connections from the very outset – this will stand you in good stead.

7. Understand local bribery and corruption rules – don’t fall foul or offend.

8. Get advice in terms of what your foreign exchange exposure might be and how you can mitigate against this.

9. Think about whether you might need export finance or protection against overseas bad debts.

People like Bibby (bibbyfinancialservices.com) have products that can help.

10. Ultimately, be prepared to travel – and not just once. There’s absolutely no substitute for face to face interaction.

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“Going international is hard work, and an owner manager will have to put in a lot of hours to achieve success.”

Being prepared at home is critical too. It may be the ideal time to reconsider the spread of responsibility within the core business and re-purpose some members of staff to take on some of the crucial tasks.

Scottish businesses have clearly demonstrated their capabilities, and we have a long history of heading overseas to make our fortunes. We are visionaries, innovators and hard workers – so why should we be contained by borders? n

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A family photo of the Atom bank team; the Atom pull brings a unique mix of talent and experience, including global talent too!

A talent magnet Everything about Atom bank is exceptional.

Behind the banking app is a uniquely human team, constructed of industry experts from academia to law to the civil service, living on the doorstep of Atom’s County Durham office or three hundred miles away, new to the industry or with decades of valuable experience behind them.

Bringing together this team of diverse, talented individuals has been no mean feat… but how do you find the very best the world has to offer? And how do you persuade them to come and work for your challenger bank?

Simple. You build it. Build it out of eco-mud walls and no dress code, with apple fences in the car park, and stotties in the local shops, next to a nature reserve, with fresh ideas, tenacity and an open mind – and they will come, as BQ’s Suzy Jackson discovered.

Partner

Right people, right reasons There are some great benefits to working at Atom bank – but the primary perk is definitely the job itself.

Atom is a bank full of hoodie-wearers but it’s not like your dad, trying to be cool and hip and ‘down with the kids’… This bank is substance over style; the style element of Atom bank is what you see presented in the app and in their products, and they polish the boots of that to perfection.

But their people. Their people are authentic in every way. No one changes into their work persona on entering the building; instead they come to work as themselves. Individuality and respect is key at Atom.

Sean Gilhome, resourcing manager at Atom bank, tells me that a strong team is a diverse team: “We’re about idea generation and doing things differently, to do this we need a diverse workforce, with different experiences and backgrounds to ensure we have well thought out suggestions,” he says.

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“We’re trying to be at the forefront of technology but that doesn’t mean that we have a bunch of robots working for us”

“We’re trying to be at the forefront of technology but that doesn’t mean that we have a bunch of robots working for us,” adds Gareth Johnston, HR business partner. Individuality, creativity and personality are important; what they bring to a business is really valued here.

“Maximising the range of demographics of our people within the business will only enhance the scope of experience, skills and insight that we can draw upon. We’re also trying to disrupt the industry and we’re not going to do that by employing a bunch of stereotypical bankers!”

“Some of the roles we recruit for are pretty niche and sometimes that means we need to delve into talent pools that are a little further afield but we continue to invest our time into initiatives such as Women in Finance and the Tech Talent Charter to try and develop our own talent pools more locally.”

“Let’s not forget the people we’ve got within the business already, we place a massive emphasis on self-development, sponsoring people through professional qualifications and other development to ensure we can promote internally.”

A diverse team is the only true way to engage with, serve, and represent the diverse customer base Atom are building. Sean adds: “We look for individuals who are passionate about changing an industry, about creating something that we can all be proud of and making a difference.”

And in return, the package is good, with flexibility and long term rewards baked in. “This makes sure Atom has people who are here for the right reasons. This results in low attrition and a real family feel, an environment that encourages creativity, opinions and challenge,” he says. “This should reassure customers that everyone here at Atom wants to do a fantastic job for them, always putting customers first when making decisions and striving to make their lives better.”

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The All About Me Fund Every year, the Atom team gets help to learn something new that’s not job-related, but that’ll develop them as well-rounded, happy, human beings. Highlights of 2017 included:

Scuba Diving Lessons Guitar Lessons Ballet Dancing Learning Chess Cake Decorating

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Who works at a bank like this?

The Commuter

The Returner

Katy Ringsdore has been Atom’s head of PR for just more than two years. Her office is in Durham, and her house is in Bristol. Yes, that Bristol.

“It’s extremely exhausting,” she concedes. “I get the train to London on a Monday, work from London all day then get the train to Durham that evening. I work in Durham until Thursday then fly to Bristol on a Thursday evening - this flight is nearly ALWAYS delayed.”

391 miles on the rails and around 280 by air each week, but Katy shrugs it off. “I love Atom!” Her enthusiasm is contagious as she adds: “It is an incredibly special place to work - I have never had a better job.”

Vincent Golding made the move back to the North East from near Leeds in early 2017, bringing his daughter back to be raised closer to his family. Having settled into a career in the banking sector already, Atom’s location allowed him to stop trawling through job sites as their advert for operations trainer was too good to resist!

“We’re building a bank! How many people get to say that,” he asks. “And we’re having a good time doing it. What more could anyone want from their job?”

His commute now is double what it was when he was based in Yorkshire, but it’s 100% worth it, he says… you could almost say it’s a ‘canny’ drive! “I’d stopped using that when I wasn’t living in the North

“

“

“It is an incredibly special place to work – I have never had a better job.”

Living through the week in Durham, Katy has learned the local love of the word ‘champion’ and credits the people she shares her work life with as being ‘100%’ the reason she adores her job so much.

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Number of sessions delivered across two dedicated “learning weeks” in 2017

“We’re building a bank! How many people get to say that?”

East, but I’m so pleased it’s a regular part of my vocabulary.”

And after ten years in Yorkshire, he’s settling into his ‘fun, crazy and fast’ job at Atom by celebrating the fact that stottie cakes are available everywhere…

846*:

Fruit bowls distributed across the business.

An apple a day, and all that. *Figure correct at time of going to print!

Partner

The Commuter

The Returning student

Kate Horwath has a chunky commute from the wilds of Yorkshire, a favourite service station (which she wouldn’t name), and a talent for finding the beauty of a yellow-stickered reduction in aforementioned service station (likely why she wouldn’t name it!).

Why would you do that run every day? “It’s Atom! Look,” she confesses, “I realise it’s a cliché, that people will only think I’m saying this because my gaffer might read it and I need to keep a roof over the head of my child, but it’s absolutely, totally genuine.”

Kate loves the humanity that she finds in her role as copy manager at Atom. “There’s no stuffy office culture, an idea you have in the morning can be discussed with your boss by lunch,” she says,

George North, media specialist spent a year commuting from West Yorkshire before the pull of Newcastle became too strong for him, and he succumbed to the bright lights of the big city – again, having been here as a student at Northumbria University.

He’s halved his commute, but more importantly for him, he now car-shares with two colleagues; significantly important when, after falling in love with the Tyne Bridge on a visit, he now stares at ‘that bridge’ from a queue of stationary cars if he hits rush hour!

“Throughout education and growing up,” he says, “you are taught about this tough and strict expectation of what ‘the big wide world’ is like. Atom is nothing like that. It encourages uniqueness and

“

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“There’s no stuffy office culture, an idea you have in the morning can be discussed with your boss by lunch.”

describing her thoughts on joining the Atom team as ‘well worth it’.

And if you take just one thing away, Kate says that stotties are a real thing, and encourages you to get Googling!

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Toilet rolls given away at company meetings. A useful prize for anyone!

“Atom encourages uniqueness and personality.”

personality like nowhere I’ve ever seen, and I couldn’t imagine there being anywhere like it.”

Relishing life back in the Toon, George particularly likes his constant proximity to a Greggs sausage roll, and being able to use the phrase ‘howay, man!’ to express disdain to – well, anyone, really.

Too many to count: meltdowns due to milk shortages at head office.

Hey, nobody gets everything right.

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A lot

of bottle

Giles Cooke has played a key role in growing Alliance Wine from a small Scottish player into a major importer and distributor. Along the way, he’s also managed to launch a wine company in Australia and create a brand in tribute to his father, writes Peter Ranscombe.

H

alf the enjoyment of sipping a glass of wine is the way the liquid tastes; it’s the complex and concentrated fruit flavours, it’s the sweetness of the oak, it’s the refreshing acidity and the chewy tannins that give the drink its structure. The other half is the story behind the bottle; the story of the vines, the story of the grapes, and the story of the winemaker and their inspiration, which can add even more pleasure to the wine in the glass.

Our Fathers Shiraz made in the Adelaide Hills region of South Australia using fruit from the Barossa Valley has one of those stories. The wine was created as a standalone project by Giles Cooke, whose day job is as wine development director at Ayrshire-based Alliance Wine and as the winemaker and one of the founders of the Thistledown Wine Company in Australia.

Cooke, who is based in Edinburgh, is one

of only 369 people in the world to hold the illustrious “master of wine” qualification, the ultimate achievement for any expert in the wine business. He created Our Fathers as a tribute to his own Dad, who died in 2013 at the age of 74, just 50 days after being diagnosed with lung cancer, which had spread to his brain.

Cooke’s mother, who suffered from mental illness, died shortly after his father, and then Cooke himself was hit by a heart attack in May 2015. The three events and the care his family received gave him the drive and desire to “give something back”, but instead of simply running a marathon or shaving his head to raise money for charity, he decided to turn to what he knew best – making wine.

All the profits from Our Fathers support Scottish Association for Mental Health (SAMH), St Columba’s Hospice in Edinburgh, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation.

While the project is a tribute to his own father, the name of the wine also has a second meaning.

While walking through a vineyard in the Barossa Valley, surrounded by 125-year-old vines, Cooke was struck not only by the great age of the plants themselves but also by the contributions of the generations of farmers who had tended the grapes down through the decades. Their dedication means that Cooke and his fellow winemakers now have vines that produce grapes with concentrated and complex fruit flavours.

Perhaps given his choice of university degree, it’s unsurprising that such thoughts about heritage and history crop up so many times in conversation with Cooke. Born in Essex, his family moved to Edinburgh in 1976 when he was five and he was educated at the city’s Royal High School.

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“

“It’s not about being the biggest, but it is about doing things the right way.

Alliance has always been about getting out there and doing stuff ourselves.”

After studying history at the University of Sheffield, he joined retailer Majestic Wine, working at several of its wine warehouses in London before switching to Alliance Wine in 1994 and moving back to Edinburgh.

Alliance had been founded in 1984 by Christian Bouteiller and Jonathan Kennett, and initially served Scotland as a wine importer and distributor, selling to restaurants and independent bottle shops.

When Cooke joined, it was turning over around £2.5m a year, before expanding south of the border. Having been with the company for nearly 25 years now, he’s seen it grow from a small Scottish operation to a major UK player, which makes its own wines on four continents and has annual revenues of some £28m.

It now has direct sales staff covering Scotland and Central London, while selling to regional wholesalers and retailers in other part of the UK. “It’s been so many different companies in that time,” Cooke explains.

“Some of those changes have been almost

imperceptible, but others have been in big, difficult chunks. Change has been the only consistent thing during those processes, a restlessness to do better.

“People at Alliance would recognise that I’m not very good at sticking with the ‘status quo’ and standing still. I thrive on the ‘new’, but dealing with the ‘new’ all the time throws up challenges for everyone else, which I’ve come to terms with over the years.

“It’s not about being the biggest, but it is about doing things the right way. Alliance has always been about getting out there and doing stuff ourselves.”

Cooke took over buying duties for the company after he passed his master of wine exams in 2001 and he set out to make Australia and Spain the country’s specialities. In 2006, the company launched Alliance Wine Australia, the start of its wine production business.

Alliance also now has winemaking projects in Argentina, Chile, France, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa and Spain, coupled with a fresh

focus on exporting the wines to customers outside the UK. The business is selling to 14 countries, including Australia, China, South Korea, Canada, the United States and Europe, and is moving into Taiwan, Malaysia and Japan.

“I thought it was inevitable that the traditional model of a ‘UK importer brings in wine, puts on margin, passes it on to a distributor, passes it on to a retailer and everyone gets a cut’ would eventually get squeezed,” explains Cooke. “So, for us to have our own production projects would in the end allow us to control distribution and would stop people from selling from under our feet and compromising our commercial position within the UK. “It would allow us to add value and be closer to customers, producing wines in the styles that customers were asking for. Down the track, if we owned the brands and all the intellectual property then it would give us access to international markets, which would allow us to expand beyond the UK – that focus has only

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come in the past four or five years.”

The first project the company launched was One Chain Vineyards, which makes wines including The Googly Chardonnay and The Wrong Un Shiraz Cabernet in its “Cricket Series” and The Courtesan Riesling, The Exhibitionist Merlot, and The Opportunist Shiraz in its “Character Series”. Initially the company focused on buying bulk wine from other producers and packaging it for the UK market.

Within two years, the One Chain brands were bottling a massive 100,000 cases of wine thanks to a bumper harvest in 2008 and the signing up of national customers, including household names such as Majestic, Oddbins, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. Movements on the foreign currency markets meant the wines became more expensive, but Alliance was already looking at ways of making the business more sustainable and in 2011 launched the Thistledown Wine Company, focusing on the production of higher-quality – and highermargin – wines, using top-quality chardonnay, grenache and shiraz grapes from the Barossa Valley.

The move involved Cooke teaming up with fellow Alliance director Fergal Tynan – another master of wine, who Cooke had met when the pair studied together – and Australian

consultant Peter Leske. They make their products at a winery that’s set up to handle the relatively small production volumes needed for their high-end tipples.

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“My role during the harvest has changed over time too. In the past, I would have been helping in winery, but now we have a team in place, we’ve found the best way I can help is

“We’ve found the best way I can help is by being out in the vineyard with the growers, sampling grapes and making choices.”

Cooke and Tynan spend two weeks in Australia each November, assessing wines from the previous vintage and grading the quality of the liquid in each barrel, ready for bottling in January. They also visit their growers, checking the vines and their expected production for the following harvest.

Cooke then returns for three or four weeks during the harvest. “It’s difficult to pick which weeks to visit, because last year’s harvest was quite late, and the previous two had been really early,” he confesses.

“It’s an anxious time for me, sitting at home, talking to the growers each night, trying to choose when to go. During February, my body may be in Edinburgh, but my mind has already wandered off to Australia.

by being out in the vineyard with the growers, sampling grapes and making choices.

“During the last harvest, I drove 5,500km in three weeks between vineyards, constantly sampling and trying to pick the grapes at the right times, so they were perfectly ripe. We’re based in the Adelaide Hills, but we get fruit in from Langhorne Creek, McLaren Vale, the Barossa and Clare valleys, and now an old vine project up in the Riverland – which has extended my range.”

Cooke’s mind and body may sometimes be in two different places at once, but his focus is always on making quality wine, whether it’s the grenache for Thistledown or the shiraz for Our Fathers. And it shows in each and every bottle. n

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