Kwik-Fit founder urges Highland firms to ‘batten down the hatches’
sir Tom Farmer advises businesses on best way of dealing with financial crisis
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Entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Tom Farmer told business leaders in Inverness yesterday to batten down the hatches during the economic crisis.
The Scots businessman, who founded the Kwik-Fit tyre company in the 1970s and sold it to Ford in the 1990s for £1billion, told his audience that it would be a “difficult time” for everyone but not to “despair”.
The 67-year-old, who is a devout Roman Catholic and committed to charity work, was making a speech at Eden Court to local entrepreneurs.
He said: “It’s going to be a difficult period for all of us in our personal and business lives.
“Now is the time to batten down the hatches and, quite simply, look around to see if we are wasting any money.
“We need to look at where you can save the pennies and what we can do to ensure that we don’t miss out on any opportunities.”
He added: “I don’t think people should despair or give in because, at the end of the day, this won’t last forever.
“I have no idea how long it will last for, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. I just don’t know when this light will come.”
Sir Tom, who was born at Leith, left school at 14 and started work at an Edinburgh tyre factory. He graduated from storeman to van driver, before starting his own company making £15 a week.
The father-of-two retired to San Franscico, aged 28, after selling his company for £400,000.
He moved back to Edinburgh a few years later to find a new challenge and founded Kwik-Fit.
He revealed that the secret to his success were the people that worked for him.
When asked how he would sell the Highlands and islands, he replied: “I would sell it with one ingredient – its people.”
He said: “I would recognise that this place is different in terms of operating a business as say Glasgow or Birmingham. You have to appreciate that there is a certain quality of life in this kind of place.
“I would sell it on its quality of people. Not only have you got some of the best country that God created, you have got the best people.”
He added: “That’s the great thing about being up here. You don’t suffer up here with the same pressures of life as elsewhere.
“Of course we all suffer from financial pressures. It’s difficult to run a business anywhere.
“At the end of the day you have certain luxuries. You don’t have to travel two miles across a city centre, never knowing if or when you will get out of the other side.
“There are huge benefits working in communities where you know the people and having networks like today when every so often you can come together and talk to other people like yourself.”
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