Scottish Recruiter with Global Ambitions
Sunday Herald's Interview of the Week features Nick Price, CEO of Bright Purple.
The colour purple stands
for one of Scotland’s booming companies, with aspirations to go global. Bright
Purple, based in Edinburgh's Rose Street, is outward looking and ambitious but
wants to stay firmly rooted in Scotland.
Scottish Enterprise and Scottish Development International are now championing the recruitment specialist as a fast-growth business with a new presence in New York. Bright Purple is on Scottish Enterprise’s International Strategic Development Programme, designed to help Scottish companies break out of the domestic straitjacket.
Economic adversity has
highlighted the fact that only 4000 Scottish companies export their goods and
services beyond the UK. This underwhelming number
has fostered a sense that the public-sector agencies can never make more than a
marginal difference to Scottish exports, but they are important facilitators.
The step change will be made by more self-reliance at business grassroots who
must sort out their own passports to internationalisation, and Bright Purple’s
transatlantic ambitions are a template that others will follow.
Nick Price, 49, the founder
and managing director of Bright Purple, was born in Wales, but has lived in
Scotland since he was 17. “I want to tell people that
we are a successful Scottish company and we are doing well at the moment,” he
says. “We’ve become too reticent to talk things up in Scotland – but that’s
what we need to do. When companies such as JP Morgan make a decision to come
and locate in Scotland they do their homework and they read about the country:
if they think this is a negative place, then they will simply go somewhere
else.
“I’m heading over to New York next week where we are always well received. We recently placed the head of US operations for a major global bank in Wall Street. But it’s also because we’re Scottish. There are thousands of Scots working around the world, and we have a ready-made connection with them.”
The Edinburgh company is up
for a National Business Award in London next week in the category of
fastest-growing company. Its rate of growth is also impressive. Revenues have
increased from £12.6 million to £18.7m in the last financial year.
“We’re on target for £35m this year, which puts us on a trajectory to become the £100m-a-year Scottish company that our chairman wants us to be,” says Price.
“We might be in a downturn but there is still a global shortage of skills. Scotland needs real skills and industry knowledge, you only get that from people who are living and breathing that industry. You can’t buy experience,” he says. This skills shortage has ensured that key people in IT and finance can still earn a premium. But Price says it is about the whole package, including the culture of the place that you want to work in. He says: “Recruitment is still all about people and relationships. The internet can never change that but it can help you find the right people.”
Read the full story at The Sunday Herald.
