Worldwide Offices
Scottish Chair Paul Pinson will be co-presenting two private breakfast seminars with Charles Llewellyn on 22 September and 12 October at The George Hotel on George Street in Edinburgh. Limited to fourteen people, these events are designed to be a short and insightful introduction to Vistage and the benefits which membership can bring to any business. Currently a Director with the Zenith Bank, Charles Llewellyn has decades of business experience at board level and has been a Vistage Chair in London since 1996. He will give a talk on The Seven Deadly Sins of a CEO. Scottish Chair Paul Pinson will then lead the group through an issue processing session to demonstrate to prospective members one of the core ways that Vistage can improve their business. Running fro
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Did anyone watch the last episode of Dragon’s Den? Ralf Klinnert, a Livingston-based entrepreneur, walked away with £120,000 funding for his Funky Moves interactive fitness centre. You can watch a clip of it on the BBC website.
Despite Duncan Bannatyne commenting that ‘only an idiot would invest in this’, Theo Paphitis and Peter Jones put up the cash in return for a 50% stake in Klinnert’s busine
The Herald and Scotsman Publications newspapers have both been looking to the future and questioning Scotland’s business leaders about their thoughts on the dreaded double dip recession. Scotland On Sunday quizzed some nineteen business people ranging from David Nish, the Chief Executive at Standard Life, to Leigh Wilson, the Chief Executive at JetLogic private aviation firm. As you might expect, when you ask nineteen people the same questions then you don’t get nineteen identical answers. However, while the interviewees’ views on the likelihood of a double dip ranged from ‘probably not’ to â€
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The Bank of Scotland released the results of their monthly PMI survey today. Seen as an accurate snapshot of the Scottish economy, the results give some cause for optimism. According to the figures, the Scottish recovery continues but the underlying trends have weakened. Activity in the manufacturing and service sectors rose in July and new order growth increased. On the downside, staffing levels at private firms were flat last month after five previous months of growth and the rate of new order growth was the slowest it has been for three months. The manufacturing sector seems to be leading the recovery rather than the service sectors. Activity levels across the Scottish economy increased for the thirteenth straight month in July, with the pace of expansion broadly unchanged in the past three mon
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Like many other Bank of Scotland (BoS) business account holders, your correspondent received a letter from the bank yesterday stating that, from October, BoS would no longer pay interest on my credit balance. The Herald has a lengthy piece on their move here. In the article by the paper’s business editor Ian McConnell, a BoS spokesperson justifies the measure by saying that their small business customers don’t have to pay a monthly maintenance charge on their accounts. That is not altogether true. Under the terms of my BoS Direct Business Cheque Account, I have to pay £15 a month any time that my balance falls below £5000 in credit. That is not an overdraft fee, it is not a lending fee
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The blog was cheered by a brief item in The Scotsman in which the Royal Bank of Scotland announced that Scotland had a higher growth rate of start-ups than the rest of the country. Usually, Scotland is portrayed as lagging behind when it comes to entrepreneurial spirit; so it was heartening to read that the bank had supported some 11,000 new businesses over the last twelve months. Those 11,000 new businesses represent an 18% increase on the previous year. According to the report, start-up growth was up by a smaller 11% across the rest of the UK. Any warm feeling of optimism was quickly frozen by a single line in the readers’ comments column with one wag noting that eleven thousand is ‘an awful lot of
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