Where has the time gone?

By Nick Joy

This month, I hope you will forgive a subject a little closer to home, as an important milestone has just passed for me.

Twenty-five years will have passed this month since three rather confused, relatively young idealists bought a salmon farming company in Sutherland.

Loch Duart, as a concept, was created in the year before August 1999 but became a reality in that month. The process of watching my meagre savings slowly disappear, as we trailed from one potential funder to another, culminated in a moment of surreal madness. I was in a hotel in Dunkeld discussing a putative feed contract with the then head of Ewos in Scotland, Neil Spreckley, when the call came through that we had bought the company. It was an extraordinary moment that we had been dreaming of for a long time, and it had dominated everything in our lives. The moment of reality was a cold shower.

I had told my wife that I might not be home as we knew that we were close to signing the deal. I may or may not have had a small dram with Neil before heading off up the A9 to Scourie.

I should point out, for those who don’t know, that I used to work at Joseph Johnston and Sons, who owned the farm before we bought it, so I was a well-kent face in Scourie. It was an amazing sensation arriving on the sites I knew so well but in a totally different capacity. There was a degree of terror too; literally everything I had in the world was on the line. Actually it was “we” as my then wife was wonderfully supportive and brave, especially as we had a young family dependent on us.

It is especially hard on families when someone decides to become an entrepreneur. The public only sees the successes. The pressure in the early years of a business is intense, but at least there is a wage coming in. In contrast, when you are trying to raise the funds, meeting grey people, who talk grey and are simply interested in numbers, it is much harder. Raising funds costs money and in our case, money was in very short supply. I am not looking for sympathy but explaining just how significant that moment was when the call came through. Finally there would be a wage coming into our household – maybe, one day, a good one.

It simply never occurred to me to think how long the business would last. We had a five-year plan and that seemed a very long time. We had very limited experience of running a business, still less one that had been run down considerably. I think we hadn’t realised, with all of our due diligence, just how much it had slipped. On arrival at the sites, it was lovely to meet so many people that I knew and quite a few that I admired. It didn’t take long for the fear to start creeping in, however. The stocks were not in great shape and there were many challenges, from sea lice numbers to grilse percentages. High retained grilse in August is not very good news!

Despite this we survived these challenges, and our worst crisis in 2002/3 when we very nearly ran out of cash. If it wasn’t for the decency of some of our major creditors we would have disappeared at a very young age. I still remember them with great gratitude because they believed in us when it would have been much easier to insist on terms.

Time goes by so fast. Last week I bought a box of 4-5kg fish from our old company without even vaguely remembering the relevance of the time. I was very proud to open the box and find that the quality of fish was as good as I can recall ever seeing.

So if you had asked me all of those years ago, whether would I have expected Loch Duart to still be going after 25 years, I probably would have said “no”. I would have been so pleased to know that it still does exist, and as a separate company doing its own thing, with its own identity and aspirations and excellent quality of production. I am sure I would have been proud of that and, to tell you the truth, I still am.