Insider at 40 - a look back at our history

This month marks 40 years since Ray Perman and Alistair Balfour launched Scottish Business Insider.

To commemorate such a momentous feat of longevity in this industry, we spoke to a variety of past staff members to piece together the publication's history.

To start at the beginning, the first of those is London-born Perman, who was the Financial Times’ correspondent in Scotland until 1981, before being persuaded to join the launch of the Sunday Standard as deputy editor.

"I lasted there until 83, but was made redundant when they decided to scrap the publication," he explained. "The only jobs I was being offered were back in London, so we thought about trying something new."

Alongside former Sunday Standard business editor, they used their redundancy payout to try and fill a gap in the market.

"At the time the Herald and Scotsman only really concentrated on quoted companies from the point of view of investors, but we were also interested in those not on the stock exchange - so we thought there was a market there," explained Perman.

"It was a very different corporate landscape of course, we had four or five FTSE 100 companies headquartered here, the banks in particular were very supportive of us, with both the Royal Bank and Bank of Scotland taking advertising for the first couple of years and buying copies for all their brand managers.

"We wrote about people rather than money, looked for stories about how businesses are run, trying to give them a sense of pride."

Casting his mind back to the ecosystem of the 80s, Perman points out that along with the banks, there were 11 life assurance offices and one major commercial insurer, General Accident, based in Perth.

A large part of the whisky industry was owned and managed in Scotland and there was an important manufacturing base, with engineering companies like Weir, Motherwell Bridge and Anderson Strathclyde.

North east Scotland was the European base of many oil majors, plus a myriad of local support firms, including John Wood. Dundee had Timex and NCR to supplement jute, jam and journalism, while elsewhere in the country there were still several paper mills, Scottish & Newcastle beer, Kwik-Fit tyres and Morrison and Lilley in the construction industry.

"For us that meant plenty to write about, we knew the chief executives of these companies – they were much more accessible than if we had all been based in London," Perman has previously stated. "And they all used local support services: accountants, lawyers, PR and advertising agents, headhunters and IT consultants."

'My belief about business is that if you knew what was involved you’d never start one - you go in with a blinkered view of what’s involved, so we made all the mistakes, we were under capitalised, we didn’t understand the market, but we survived and eventually thrived' - Ray Perman, co-founder of Insider

Balfour and Perman's first recruit was advertising director Diana Griffiths, who had been in a similar position with the Scotsman.

"We were all working part time from my spare bedroom, making the paper up on the dining room table," Perman recalled.

"Once we hired another ad sales person we realised we had to have offices, so got a space let to us by Ian Rushbrook, director of Ivory and Sime, over in the west end of Edinburgh at a reasonable rate."

Perman had anticipated making losses early on, with the hope of breaking even in the second year and into profit by the third. This prediction came true, but he admitted it was "quite scary for a while", given Insider began as a sole tradership in his name, meaning all the debts were personal.

"I had trouble persuading my bank that as we grew bigger, the overdraft should grow - ad agencies paid in three months, whereas our printers wanted money in one month - so the overdraft grew quite sharply.

"My bank, Clydesdale, was getting agitated, the branch manager was supportive, but head office wasn’t - and told him to get rid of us," said Perman. "Thankfully the Bank of Scotland took us in and we got a lot of support from them, as well as a 70% government-guaranteed small business loan, which gave us much more stability and eventually we converted to a limited company."

From the beginning, Insider was distributed by post, but the mailing list had to be created from scratch, so Perman and Balfour worked with a variety of trade associations to work out who and where to send it.

In 1992, Lonrho, the owner of the Herald and the Evening Times, was being broken up and management wanted to do a buyout, approaching Perman to join as development director. He left Insider that year, but remained the largest shareholder.

Balfour took over as managing director and led the magazine through the 90s, until an approach from Trinity Mirror at the end of that decade saw Insider sold to the news group - now named Reach - for £3m.

In September 2000, Alasdair Northrop took over as editor and remembers on his first day involved addressing an audience of more than 600 at the annual Insider Deals and Dealmakers awards.

"Although I had had some experience of speaking to large audiences in my previous job as business editor of the Manchester Evening News., I had never spoken to so many people," he remembered.

The event was already a firm fixture on the Scottish business calendar and the turn of the Millennium was one of the most dramatic years for dealmaking, with the £50bn acquisition of NatWest by RBS taking the overall prize.

Northrop said that the new owners had ambitious plans for growth, building on its hosting of events and putting together lists like the Top 500 companies in Scotland.

Perman noted that these two successful strands started inauspiciously.

"During our first January, the ad team were crying out for something to help them during what's typically a very lean month, and I had found that putting normally disparate information into a list got it far more interest, so that’s when we started the Top 100 Companies, which we had to construct that from annual reports, Companies House filings; from scratch essentially," he explained.

"As we developed the business, I started to send people to conferences - there was one in New York, run by a magazine called Folio, for magazine publishers which was very useful for us to learn from - and the time I went, on my way back I picked up a copy of Business Week, which featured a Corporate Elite of America supplement focusing on people rather than companies, so we started our own Corporate Elite issue and it became very popular.

"A PR firm suggested doing a dinner based on that, so that’s when events started," he added.

Back to Northrop, and during his 15-year reign, new listings were introduced - like the SME300 - alongside rankings of the top performing lawyers and accountants. "In addition, our researchers Alison Service and Tracy Taylor also produced lots of interesting statistics for our Scotland’s Economy in Numbers feature."

The Scottish PLC Awards, Corporate Elite Awards and Deals and Dealmakers were soon joined by the SME300 Awards, the Made in Scotland Awards and the Scottish Accountancy Awards.

On the editorial side, things like the Rising Stars feature saw between 30 and 40 leaders of growing Scottish companies being profiled each year, with the likes of James Watt and Martin Dickie of BrewDog featuring on the front page at the start of their careers.

"Putting the Corporate Elite profiles together was a huge, but enjoyable, task and my taskmaster was a previous editor of Insider, Chris Baur, who was managing editor when I joined," said Northrop. "Chris, a former editor of the Scotsman, was a wonderful mentor and provided me with sage advice over my early days at Insider."

There were highs and lows during his tenure, with Northrop remembering: "The saddest time - and most frightening - was when Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS had to be rescued as a result of bad management and the credit crunch.

"But on the positive side, we also wrote about some amazing success stories, including flight search engine Skyscanner and the turnaround at bus maker Alexander Dennis, following its rescue by a group of Scottish business people."

John Penman joined Insider in 2003 as editor in chief, alongside Northrop and Erikka Askeland on the reporting team, while Gordon Adam and David Hughes were heading the commercial side.

"The magazine was still trying to find its feet after it had become part of the Trinity Mirror, I was also business editor of the Daily Record, so I tried to help bring some synergy to the two; with limited success," he said.

"I did, however, oversee a design change which was done by a wonderful designer called Mike Gill, as well as beginning a move to the more regular business news reporting approach Insider takes today."

Another Insider stalwart was Jackie Malloy, who led the events team from 2004 to 2012.

"In my early years I helped develop the Insider Elite Awards and the SME300 Awards – the latter being created as the number of PLC’s in Scotland began to reduce and the Scotland PLC Awards became more challenging to deliver," she recalled.

"I was very proud to be a part of Insider Events, we were recognised as the industry leader in corporate events and I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity of meeting so many amazing people in business, a number of whom I’m still in contact with today.

"Of course things didn't always go to plan, so on occasion there were awards trophies not turning up on time and a cheap replicas being circulated among the winners, award presenters being in the toilet when they’re called up on stage and general backstage chaos requiring plan B or C having to be implemented," Malloy added. "The team worked hard, but with so much laughter, which of course was mostly at the post-event parties in the bar until the wee small hours."

Northrop was in charge of launching Insider's first website, but he admits it wasn't much to shout about, being mostly focused on the printed product and event promotion.

A year after he left, work was undertaken to upgrade Insider's web presence, led by new members of the team including researcher Steven Wilson, reporters Scott McCulloch and Kristy Dorsey, deputy editor Philip Gates and editor Ken Symon.

Gates remembers 13 March 2017 as a big moment, as this was the day insider.co.uk went live.

"Along with regular contributors to Insider, we created - from a standing start - a whole new online readership for the well-established print magazine, delivering the stories of the day to populate the new web pages.

"It was a major shift in focus, as previously the magazine had given its writers time and space to provide a detailed and in-depth coverage of the Scottish business scene," Gates pointed out. "Now we had to provide two daily bulletins and populate the social media channels with the latest news, views, interviews and analysis.

"The result was that we regularly broke the biggest business stories first and it led to the biggest highlight during my time at Insider – in our first year, being honoured at the Scottish Press Awards as runner-up to the Daily Record as Digital Team of the Year."

Memorable stories for Gates included daily blogs written by one of Insider’s contributors travelling in China with a Scottish Chambers of Commerce delegation on its historic visit to grow links between the countries.

In addition to the long-running lists, the Football Financial Index was added, ranking Scotland’s top teams, while the events team organised more than 30 events a year, including awards dinners, breakfast briefings, conferences, roundtable discussions, exhibitions and roadshows.

"It was also rewarding to see how certain stories would spike in interest and go viral on social media," recalled Gates. "Our first such success was about a Trinidadian farmer, Ramgopaul Roop, who farmed by day while studying remotely at night for a business degree at Edinburgh Napier University; who then travelled over especially to receive his degree at the graduation ceremony."

Wilson added: "Coming in runner-up in digital team of the year at the Scottish Press Awards to the Daily Record in 2018 was a pleasing achievement, especially given the strong competition in that category that year.

"In our debut year online, we also did successful live stream interviews with two of Scotland's most well known businessmen in Jim McColl and Tim Allan."

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic hit all industries hard and the decision was taken to suspend publication until there was more certainty about the outlook.

Current editor Peter Walker joined that autumn to help with online content, but while the following year the magazine was restarted as a quarterly, Symon left as its editor and former BQ Scotland editor and Sunday Herald business writer Kenny Kemp came in on a temporary basis.

In May 2022, it was confirmed that physical publication of Insider would end, with the team now focusing solely on the website and events.

Thank you for your readership - and here's to another 40 years.

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