A birthday worth celebrating!

As a rule of thumb I don’t like celebrating ‘big’ birthdays. Sure, when you are young an 18th and 21st is something to celebrate as you have finally become an adult (it’s ironic that when we are young we want to be older and when we are older…). After that I really can’t see the point.

My fiftieth hit me far harder than any other ‘big’ ones that happened before then for some reason. Maybe it was the recognising I would have fewer birthdays in the future than in the past? Maybe it was the lovely ‘present’ of a stick from the NHS on that day (all of us in Scotland over fifty will know what I am talking about). I don’t know why I felt the way I did but I certainly did not see any reason to celebrate.

However, there is a fiftieth birthday I am excited about and that is to celebrate the birth of Alan Steel Asset Management in 1975.

Like any new born it started out small – in fact its nursery was the back office of an accountants on Linlithgow High Street. What a time to start a business – the second year of a Labour government that was putting up taxes to record levels, a faltering economy with the threat of strikes becoming greater, wealth leaving the country in droves, a crumbling infrastructure and the threat of nuclear war with Russia. Hard to imagine….

Anyway we survived that and as the company grew, at eleven years old it was time to flee the nest and move to the premises we remain in to this day, Nobel House. A newspaper article at the time to promote the move highlighted how the fifteen employees had the use of technology like Telex and FAX, so we have always been at the cutting edge!

However, like every teenager we suffered growing pains and mistakes were made, such as opening branches in Glasgow and Edinburgh by merging with existing firms that did not have quite the same ethos, and spending a fortune trying to develop a bespoke back office computer system.

Although at the time these were setbacks, looking back they were nothing more than tiny blips in the company’s progress, and as it entered its twenties it started to resemble the business you see today.

Most famously, in 1999, Alan spoke out about the practices employed by Equitable Life in the national press and was rewarded with a gagging order from their solicitors as a result. The threat of huge legal costs meant we had no option but to observe it and of course Alan was proved correct when they closed for business a year later.

Always outspoken, this is just one example of how he was not afraid to speak out if he felt an injustice was taking place.

Our biggest sadness is that Alan is not here to see his ‘baby’ reach this milestone but he can be assured that the five tenets the company is built upon; Fairness, Integrity, Innovation, Knowledge and Fun will continue to guide us for as long as we are around, and we will continue to simply do what is right.

Of course his baby is now a mature business with 43 employees and has taken over all of the office space in the building to become the sole occupier of Nobel House. I am also proud to have been here for 31 of the fifty years and Managing Director for 21 of them.

Of course none of this could have happened without you, our wonderful clients, and the incredible staff who make it all possible. While it is unlikely that I will be the one penning this message when we reach our centenary, I hope some of you will still be here to celebrate that milestone with us.

So until then Cheers!