BRIAN DAVIDSON’s life could easily have taken a very different path. During
his teens, he played guitar in his spare time in a band called The
Jacobeats. The band became the backing group for famous acts such as The
Searchers, Georgie Fame and Alan Price. Their manager arranged for them to
make a demo disc and wanted them to go on a European tour with Sandie Shaw,
but every member of the band was busy with an industrial apprenticeship and
decided to stick with those instead.
The youngest of nine children, Davidson was born and brought up in Buckie,
Scotland, where his father was a stevedore at the local docks.
He left school at 15 to do a six-year electrical apprenticeship with a local
company. He stayed on and, when the owner of the business decided to close
it down, Davidson, by now 24, got together with the manager and bought the
business for £100. Ten years later the manager retired and Davidson bought
out his partner’s share for £80,000 - borrowing £50,000 from the bank and
using £30,000 of savings - and ran it himself.
Over the next few years he grew the business until he had 70 electricians
working for him. Then, in 1984, an unpaid contract worth £250,000 forced him
to close down.
He said: “I was pretty devastated. For the last 15 years I had worked my way
up. I had to pick myself up and carry on.”
He got a job as manager of an electrical engineering firm in Coventry, moving
his wife and two children with him, and spent six years with the business
before moving to East Midlands Electricity, which was in the process of
being privatised.
He spent a difficult time there. “It was good to start with, but there were a
couple of years when it was really difficult because I had to make a lot of
people redundant, something that I didn’t enjoy.”
After three-and-a-half years he left and bought the bones of an office
refurbish-ments and air-conditioning business for £20,000 from a woman who
was retiring. “All that was there was the name and the fact that she had
done some contracts over the years.”
Nevertheless, it was a relief to be running his own show again. “I was glad to
get back into the contracting scene, it was back to what I knew best,” he
said.
Six years on in 2000, and by now 51, Davidson went to look at a manufacturing
business in America that was making ground-source heat pumps that could be
used to heat and cool buildings by harnessing the natural warmth of the
earth. Inspired by what he saw, he took on the franchise for the UK and
Ireland, which was given to him for nothing. Back in 2000, however,
environmentally friendly energy production was not yet in vogue and Davidson
was ahead of his time.
It was to be the start of a long, uphill challenge. He said: “We came back to
the UK and for the first two years I was just going round and talking to
people - consultant engineers and architects and end users like councils -
trying to explain the technology and trying to get an opportunity to install
the equipment in buildings in the UK. I was very optimistic when I started,
thinking that next week is our week. I could see that this could be good,
but for the first two to three years it was all money going out and nothing
coming in.”
There were other hurdles to overcome. “We thought at first that we could buy
the product from America and resell it in the UK but it didn’t work like
that. We had to design the pipes that go in the ground.
Nobody knew how to do that so we had to develop our skills in doing that. Then
we had to install it because nobody knew how to install this equipment.”
In the end, it took three years before Davidson secured his first order, from
Gloucester police headquarters. Within three months he had secured another
three large projects. As orders came in, he gradually wound down the office
refurbish-ment business and switched employees and resources over to the new
business, Geothermal International.
He said: “It was good because we started with very low overheads.”
Then, in 2004, Davidson found that instead of being out on a limb with his
ground-source heat pumps, his product was suddenly the centre of attention,
as interest in the environment and environmentally friendly methods boomed.
“In 2004 and 2005 there was a huge swing towards this technology, which was
helped by the media and the government. People became much more aware of the
environment - and everybody has got a carbon footprint now. We were in the
right place at the right time.”
Earlier this year, his company received the ultimate stamp of approval when
Scottish and Southern Energy, a large UK energy firm, bought 20% of
Geothermal International for £15m, valuing the business at £75m.
Davidson retains a 51% stake in the company, which now installs 500-600 heat
pumps a year and expects turnover of £12m this year.
Davidson, 58, who is married with two children, puts the secret of his success
down to being relentlessly optimistic.
“I’ve always been inclined to see the bright side of things. I’ve always felt
that if you work very hard at something and you have a conviction that you
know it’s going to be successful, then it’s just a matter of time before
things happen.”
He offers this advice to budding entrepreneurs. “You’ve got to have faith in
what you’re doing, and make sure that if you’re going to do something you
put 100% effort into it. It’s very easy to waver, but you have to have a
strong personality to say ‘No, this is the way forward’.”
