Bright Purple helps youngsters as company goes for growth
Nick Price isn’t one for adopting false airs or graces. “I’m an original Neet,” says the co-founder of Edinburgh recruitment firm Bright Purple Resourcing, and director of trade body ScotlandIS – referring to the acronym used to describe young people not in education, employment, or training. “If there had been such thing as a Neet in 1977 then it would have been me. But it didn’t stop me,” he laughs.
Bright Purple may be one of the rising stars of Scottish business as it seeks to treble turnover to £100 million over the next three years but Price likes to remember where he has come from. He’s not shy to mention his lack of a university education and how, as a plucky 16-year-old from the mining town of Oakdale, in Blackwood in the Welsh Valleys, he travelled alone to Glasgow to find work and has stayed in Scotland ever since.
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“I was from a mining family, I could see the writing was on the wall and that I needed to do something different,” he says with a soft Welsh lilt which hasn’t disappeared even though Price now refers to himself as “essentially Scottish” and is a keen follower of Scottish football.
His humble beginnings and his gratitude to Andrew Muirhead & Son, the West Coast leather company that gave him his first big break, remain a key motivation for Price today even though his days of hard, dirty manufacturing work are far behind him.
He refers to his first employer, now part of the Scottish Leather Group, as his “finest” and would like to offer other hard-up but motivated young people the same step-up he was offered back then.
Price and Bright Purple’s chairman – City recruitment veteran Peter Flaherty – have decided to take on six so-called Neets on a six-month contract and will offer at least two of them a job at the end of the experience, which will be supported by Scottish Government-funded training.
For Price, it doesn’t matter which side of the tracks his staff have come from – he’s looking for sharp, motivated youngsters who can help the technology recruitment specialist as it embarks upon an ambitious international expansion.
Earlier this year, the company, with its headquarters in Edinburgh’s New Town, opened its first overseas office in Singapore but Price was last week in Lithuania, which has been touted as the location for its next international move. New York is also a strong possibility.
“I doubt Singapore will be the last international office,” Price says, preferring to keep his cards close to his chest until contracts are signed and plans have been finalised. “Before we went to Singapore we looked at the States and it [the economy] is a bit fragile right now but our talks there are not finished.”
With the economy still in such a parlous state, it’s a bold move by Bright Purple to set such an ambitious turnover target – particularly when rival recruiters are reporting difficulties.
But Price won’t hear any talk about how he has potentially created a rod for his own back. No matter what the economy throws their way, Price believes he and his staff need a goal to make sure they are motivated enough to seek out the opportunities that do exist.
“If we are going to be successful, we need to be ambitious,” he says.
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