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The Big Profile: Lena Wilson, Scottish Enterprise
Mar 15 2011 By Alasdair Northrop
Lena Wilson is not just the chief executive of Scottish Enterprise – she is arguably the spirit of the economic development organisation. She lives and breathes Scottish Enterprise and no matter what sticks and stones are thrown at it and her – after all this is one of the toughest jobs in Scotland - Wilson manages to get through it all
One of the reasons for this goes back to the time she worked on secondment for the World Bank helping third world countries get support for economic development. “I found myself in all sorts of quite dangerous situations,” says Wilson, sitting in the comfort of a brightly-lit meeting room in Scottish Enterprise’s Waterloo Street headquarters in Glasgow.
“I have been airlifted out of countries. I have found myself in civil disturbances. I was beaten up and mugged in Nigeria. I found myself in quite threatening and dangerous places and I realise how dangerous a place the world can be and how lucky we are in Scotland though we don’t always realise and see that. To an extent with everything that goes with this role, if I am ever feeling down about it I only have to think back about it and all the comment and all the scrutiny can feel like a piece of cake compared to that.”
However she also believes it is right to be thoroughly scrutinised.
One of the biggest bones of contention is her pay package – last year she got £191,000-plus and £11,000 bonus – more than the Prime Minister. The key question in a publicly funded organisation is whether she and the organisation provide value for money. “I come from the standpoint that I am a public servant and I should be transparent and open to scrutiny,” says Wilson, speaking at a speed which challenges the best of shorthand note takers. “I certainly am in this role. I have really felt we have not done a good enough job just being clear about the difference we make – and what we do and what we don ‘t and why that is the case. So I am for more clarity - all the appropriate scrutiny. I think we are the most scrutinised organisation in Scotland.”
Wilson’s appointment in November 2009 as chief executive might be seen as boringly predictable and perhaps unimaginative since she had worked with the organisation for most of her career. But when you examine her experiences and track record it becomes clear the job was made for her, though with the Scottish Government election in May there are no certainties about the future.
Wilson’s first jobs involved helping to start up two electronics companies during the Silicon Glen boom in Scotland and then she gained a place on the Scottish Development Agency’s very prestigious elite management development programme. She was employed in its Locate in Scotland operation and rapidly rose up the ranks and was responsible for helping to bring in thousands of jobs from inward investors around the world.
Although she was with the World Bank for just two years she came up with the idea of an investment toolkit for countries which is a world bank product today.
During her time with SDA, and then its successor Scottish Enterprise, Wilson was involved in a variety of roles ranging from being chief operating officer of the Forth Valley local enterprise company to chief executive of Scottish Development International.
What is certain is that Wilson has clearly made her mark since taking the helm of the controversial agency and does not hold back from telling anybody why they need it. “If Scottish Enterprise wasn’t here there are 40,000 jobs today in the Scottish economy that wouldn’t exist,” she says. And that is just the jobs created or preserved during the past decade.
Over the last few months SE, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Business Gateway network have come under intense scrutiny by the Scottish Government’s Economy, Energy and Tourism committee which is expected to publish its report on the reforms instigated by the current Government just before the election.
Wilson, who had been giving evidence to the committee the day before I interviewed her, heads an organisation with a budget of around £280m employing 1100 people across Scotland. To many critics that seems a lot of money for an economic development agency but she argues that the returns for that investment are substantial. “I am quite obsessed with evidence and evidence-based decision making because I have found there is no shortage of people queuing in the streets to give me their opinion and trying to influence me,” says Wilson.
“And I can put my hand on heart and tell you that every pound we invest this year will generate a return of about eight to one in the Scottish economy. So every £1 we invest this year over a ten-year period will generate an extra £2bn in the Scottish economy.
“I am not saying there are not things Scottish Enterprise could do better. I am a perfectionist and am very driven by quality and we definitely could. I think, quite frankly, Scottish Enterprise was asked to do too many things [in the past]. And if you do so many things it is difficult to get any of them right and you are certainly not going to be pleasing everybody. We were almost the dumping ground for something that couldn’t go anywhere else. I think it really is helpful not to have that now.
“I understand politically sometimes it is difficult to stick to that and I think it is really encouraging that we have been allowed to keep this strong focus and been backed by the government to do so.”
SE spends a great deal of time analysing its effectiveness. “I have yet to find an economic development agency in the world that has gone to this length of understanding its impact on the economy,” says Wilson.
So how is the money spent? Let’s look at this year’s budget. Some £60m has been allotted for the coming year to infrastructure projects like the Edinburgh BioQuarter while more than £26m is invested in companies through its various loans and equity schemes. More than £22m is to be spent on helping companies with innovation and research and development while £28.8m is earmarked for Scottish Development International which helps current and potential exporters as well as working overseas to entice inward investors.
SE also administrates the regional selective assistance grants which have been used to great effect with the biggest recent example being Amazon creating 950 jobs in Gourock and Dunfermline. Amazon is being incentivisied with £2m in regional selective assistance and £500,000 in training grants.
“We have had some big job successes that we haven’t seen for years and a very strong pipeline,” she says. However some of these deals take a great deal of time to bring to fruition. Mitsubishi recently announced it would be investing around £100m in Scotland creating a research and development hub for offshore wind technology after acquising Loanhead-based Artemis Intelligent Power. “That has been four years of dedicated relationship building,” says Wilson. “I have been out to Japan three times to meet with them. The first minister has met with them. John Swinney has met them in Japan.”
But although Wilson gets in the spotlight when such big deals are announced she also works quietly behind the scenes to help Scottish businesses. “I can’t tell you who they are because it is in confidence but there were at least two examples recently where we have intervened and helped companies with their relationship and discussions with their banks. We stopped one company going into receivership.”
Wilson is not afraid to use her Scottish and international networks to get things done. “I think part of this role is using any network capability I have,” she says.
She is obviously enjoying being at the helm and says she has made a lot of changes in the last year. “We needed a de-cluttering. So I took 25 per cent out of the senior head count in the organisation. Nothing operationally. I reduced the number of director posts and that is going to generate about £2m saving a year. That has been a very significant change. That has been about 25 to 30 people who have left this organisation at senior levels many of whom I knew very well.
“I wanted to make us a much more opportunity-driven organisation and I really wasn’t convinced we were accessible enough in terms of opportunities.”
Wilson wanted to change the impression that SE was only interested in energy, tourism, electronic markets, financial services, food and drink, and life sciences. “There was an inference that if you were in another sector that somehow that was second class and low priority and you don’t count. That doesn’t mean we won’t make choices and it certainly doesn’t mean it is a free for all and all are equal. But it just opens us up much more to opportunities. I think that has been really important.
“We do turn people down. I think it is really important to do that. I think it is important to do it clearly and quickly. The long agonising ‘no’ is not acceptable. I absolutely believe we don’t do that any more. Because we were worried about criticism or an MSP writing to us we maybe drew things out. There is absolute clarity now. And the clarity is around growth and we have criteria for the type of growth we are looking for.”
One of its key focuses is concentrating resources on supporting companies with big growth potential. Its criteria focuses on all companies – large and small – which have potential to grow turnover by £1m over three years. “It is a myth we only work with large companies,” says Wilson whose organisation is working with just over 2000 firms which meet the criteria. That may seem a small number to some critics but Wilson argues that it simply fell out at that number.
“At any one time there is probably only about 13,000 to 15,000 companies in the Scottish economy with that kind of growth potential,” she explains. “Only two per cent of Scottish companies employ over 50 people.”
She admits that undoubtedly there will be companies that escape the net because they don’t know about them. But she says SE has made a great effort in the last year to find businesses which fit its criteria. “We have gone out and run events and campaigns to be really clear that we are open for business. That’s why I speak at so many things. I want to give a clear message. If you want to grow, if you want to internationalise, if you want to innovate, you should be talking to Scottish Enterprise.
“So I would hope it is not for the lack of awareness or marketing but I accept that could be the case. There may be some companies that just don’t yet understand how they can be helped by us. Some companies don’t want any intervention by the public sector at all. It has been interesting in the last year dealing with companies that said ‘I didn’t believe that any part of the public sector could help me’ and now want to tell others about it.”
SE helps its account managed companies in a variety of ways. “The first thing is to really get to understand what the company strategy and business plan is. Surprisingly sometimes they don’t have one so it is really helpful to think about that. So our help may be in investment funds. Last year we invested £32m in potential high growth companies which leveraged a further £100m from private sector funds.”
She says its help may be on leadership and ambition development or on strategy. “It can be very targeted access of new international markets. It can be around innovation and innovation systems in the organisation. It can be in R&D – a very targeted R&D grant to lever more from them – a whole suite of things.
“And often it’s about who we can connect them to. We can connect them to Globalscots, other companies. Often companies say to me ‘yes, the financial assistance you gave me was helpful but the most helpful thing was the connections you helped me make or the inspiration you brought’.
“And the amount of letters I get complimenting our account managers. 80 per cent of our staff in any one year join us from the private sector – not the public sector. The account managers are subject matter experts and we have a whole range of specialists to support them in innovation, investment in R&D and in international.”
Wilson is keen to dispel the myth it only helps its 2000 account managed companies. “At any one time we are working with 7000 or 8000 companies in Scotland. I am really keen to dispel the myths around this and the myths around elitism but I am unashamed and unapologetic about the fact we exclusively focus on growth. So if a company has the ambition, the capacity, the capability and the wherewithal to grow we want to work with them.”
She says that if anything marked her first year it had been SE’s focus on renewables. “The opportunities for Scotland are absolutely of a transformative nature – transformative in terms of jobs - and GVA wealth creation has to be around renewable energy,” she says. “We could generate 28,000 jobs in the next ten years from offshore wind alone – never mind wave and tidal on top of that. So the renewables piece is going to take very large amounts of public sector cash and it should because no one really understands the investment model yet and this is a clear area of market failure where the public sector should intervene.”
Wilson also defends SE’s £67m investment in the Edinburgh BioQuarter – it has already invested £55m and plans another £12m this year - which it claims will eventually create 6500 new high value jobs. She says there are huge opportunities in life sciences around drug testing and drug discovery and translational medicine. Those are huge opportunities.
But Wilson says not every promising sector needs huge amounts of public money to support it. “One of the fastest growing sectors in Scotland is quality food. We are talking about great Scottish food manufacturers getting into US multiples. That is resource-intensive but it doesn’t take a lot of budget. So this idea that the importance which you attach to a sector is the amount of money you spend on it I think is misleading.”
Wilson is passionate about increasing the number of exporters in Scotland. “Too few firms export,” she says. “I think the statistics say only five to six per cent of Scottish firms export and that is far too low. All the evidence tells us there are two factors here. Companies believe it is more difficult than it is to export so they overestimate the challenges and underestimate the benefits. Just knowing that and understanding that leads you to get out there. We have just run more market awareness events and sector events around exporting than we ever have.”
Wilson believes Scottish Enterprise is very good at what it does. A survey commissioned by the Royal Bank of Scotland rated SE as the sixth best investment promotion agency in the world with Austria as number one. “We were the only UK agency in the top six,” says Wilson. “I wasn’t chief executive at the time so believe me next time it will be higher than sixth because I know what it was we had to do better.”
You get the feeling she may well succeed.
Biography: Lena Wilson
Born in a working class family in Yorkhill just outside Partick, Lena Wilson was one of five children whose parents were determined for them to succeed in life.
They moved from their tenement in Yorkhill to the new town of East Kilbride when she was two and Wilson thrived. “This was my mum and dad’s attempt to get us out to a great green environment and for them it was like moving hundreds of miles away – not just 15. It was a big thing to get their family out to what they regarded as the countryside at the time.”
Her father had been a white-collar administration worker in Glasgow but joined Rolls Royce in East Kilbride as a labourer so the family could move there. Then he worked his way back up and changed companies working in storage, distribution and logistics. Until he retired he was a logistics manager. “They were really dedicated wonderful parents who focused on education, giving their kids confidence, and making sure their kids got the best start in life.
”My mother was an absolutely inspirational woman who did absolutely everything for her family. She didn’t work when she was raising us but later she went out to work in Motorola and was an operator in all the clean suit gear on the twilight shift from five until ten five nights a week to get us all through university.”
She died five years ago and it is a regret to Wilson that she wasn’t around to see her get the chief executive’s job. However her father is still alive and takes a great interest in all matters relating to economic development and Scotland’s economy. “It has become a bit of a hobby for him now. He gave me all his feedback on the committee hearing.”
Wilson really enjoyed school and threw herself into everything.
She had lots of hobbies and was someone who “stuck in and did well”. Indeed she was real head girl material – the trouble was her comprehensive school didn’t have such roles.
“I was definitely not a scientist at school although, actually subsequent to leaving school, I developed, through the jobs I had, a great interest in science and engineering and often people have assumed I am an engineer or scientist. But I was very interested in English, history, and economics. I was also very interested in music.
After leaving school I did a BA in public administration at Glasgow Caledonian University.
At that stage she was thinking of going into the diplomatic service or the UN. ” I was thinking of doing a business degree or law and the public administration degree seemed to me quite vocational so it mixed my interests. It was heavy on economics but also went into politics, sociology, decision making and that kind of international, public service elective.”
As she was finishing her degree Wilson did the milk rounds and was offered a place on IBM’s graduate development programme in London. However she needed to try to get together some money to go down to London and saw an advert in the East Kilbride job centre for a girl Friday which changed the course of her life. “Can you imagine an advert like that now? It obviously didn’t put me off too much because I applied for it and actually it was the very early months of an investor in East Kilbride called Victor Electronics.
“To cut a long story short I was employee number four or five at the time. I ended up going off and doing a post graduate qualification at night in quality management and engineering and statistical process control and all that and I became part of the start-up team.”
The company specialised in cable assemblies and plastic injection moulding and circuitry and sub contract electronics. “I became the quality manager and took us through BS5750 at the time. Prior to that I had never even wired up a plug. I was 22 and it was an amazing opportunity; I think when I look back now they definitely mistook enthusiasm for actual ability. There are times I think back how I was lucky I swam and didn’t sink. I rolled ten years’ experience into a gruelling two.”
A couple of years after she started one of the directors left to join a competitor company from Florida in the US. He headhunted Wilson to join them as part of the start-up team of Techdyne in Livingston.
”So we started the whole process again of negotiating a new town factory. We didn’t have our own HR departments so I was giving people colour blindness tests to make sure they could wire plugs the right way and stuff like that and learning myself how to solder and do plastic injection moulding. By the time I came out I could have probably passed myself off as a technician.
“I was really learning early on about the art of leading and managing people and motivating people and working in challenging environments. I think it has probably stood me in good stead even today because I do have that manufacturing background and understand a lot of the issues and always take a keen interest in all things manufacturing.”
After five years Wilson decided it was time to move on. “There was only so much intellectual stimulation from shipping product and I quickly realised it really wasn’t for me,” she says. “Being 26 and having been with two start-ups from scratch and taking them each to about 300 people and several million pounds turnover at the time and dealing with US management teams and meeting deadlines and hosting customer visits and learning about quality was a massive experience.”
She saw an advert for the Scottish Development Agency’s very prestigious graduate development programme. Following months of tests and interviews and then a weekend away to choose the final few she was accepted. ”It was really one of the proudest days I can remember when I got that letter saying I had been accepted,” she recalls.
Ironically Wilson was the last person to be recruited for the programme but she has now brought it back 21 years later.
“We have got a bunch of really talented graduates from many disciplines and I have taken a really keen interest in the mentoring of them. As well as looking for the brightest and the best and a great attitude we are looking for subject matter expertise as well. I am really passionate about that.”
Wilson took a £5000 cut in her salary to become an information and research officer with Locate in Scotland. She also did an MBA at the University of Strathclyde Business School as soon as she joined spending two nights a week at the institution. She is now on the school’s advisory board.
Meanwhile she was quickly promoted and was the first female executive LIS had for investment in Japan. One of her biggest and earliest tasks was organising the first big healthcare conferences it had in Japan promoting Scottish healthcare opportunities. She also worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and in Seoul.
Then she got a more senior post on the US covering the southern states. “I did that for a couple of years and that was my first experience of working with the oil industry and I was up and down to Aberdeen.”
It was the heyday of inward investment in Scotland and many deals were done and Fridays were often a celebration day. But equally losing a deal was devastating. “I remember a digital project and Scotland certainly had the best case and in the end they made a decision based on the corporation tax issue. We lost that project and it was like a death.”
Wilson stayed with Locate in Scotland until 1994 when she successfully applied for a job as director of development for Forth Valley Enterprise to widen her experience in the SDA. “I wanted to get on in the organisation and got hooked by economic development and I suppose I was brave enough to jump a couple of steps at the time in terms of the career ladder.
Later she was promoted to become chief operational officer of the LEC. She became heavily involved in the creation of new business parks in the area in co-operation with the local council. “You couldn’t get any inward investment because there weren’t any business parks,” she says. “I was working on a whole series of infrastructure projects, business development projects and with the chemicals industry and the tourism industry. I was just gathering experience and knowledge all the time.”
In 1998 she was seconded to the World Bank following in the footsteps of Robert Crawford who was chief executive of Scottish Enterprise between 2000 and 2003. Scottish Enterprise had an internal competition and Wilson was one of three put forward for the post. “I went down to London and met someone who was on his way back from Africa and he interviewed me in a Heathrow Airport coffee shop and offered me the job there and then.”
Her role was as a special adviser. “It was great because I wasn’t hooked in the bureaucracy of the system so much and I got a senior special adviser post so I would regularly find myself with the president of the World Bank.”
She was working with the bank’s multilateral investment guarantee agency (MEGA). “It is like the insurance arm of the World Bank and we provided political risk insurance to big corporations that go into politically fragile countries. There are lots of actuaries and lots of insurance specialists and risk analysts.
“What they didn’t have was anybody who understood how international businesses make decisions, how to attract foreign investment and the business side of it. So I was advising on how we should be doing that and the kind of materials we should be using and the content.
“But also I was actually involved in projects with governments so my clients would be the Prime Minister or the Minister of Economy and working with them and starting up investment promotion agencies and working with them as promotion agencies to equip them to attract foreign investment.”
She worked with about 28 countries over two and a half years. “That was definitely the most transformative experience of my life,” she says. “First of all it was incredibly daunting. I had never worked in a developing country before and it was the first time I realised how transferable your skills can be to other environments so I could take what I knew from the developing world. But also it was really humbling. I was in countries where we stayed in the best hotels and realised most of the world lives on less than two dollars a day.”
“But I also got to work with global leading politicians. I got to sit alongside the president of the World Bank. I got to go to Harvard. I won a place on the executive development programme whilst I was there which was a tremendous experience.”
Today she acts in an advisory capacity to a team within the World Bank that undertakes foreign investment. Last year she delivered a seminar at the International Monetary Fund in Washington.
After her time with the World Bank she came back to a brand new role at SE as senior director of customer relations. “That was all part of Robert Crawford’s quest to get SE the ethos of customer and the closeness to customer. It was about seeing ourselves much more as a service-orientated business like a big-five consulting firm as well as an economic development agency.
“It was transformational and I got the chance to actually work on significant transformation projects which were tremendous for me in my career. It was change management. It was a blank sheet of paper.”
When Jack Perry succeeded Crawford he appointed Wilson as chief operating officer of SE. “That was all about much better integration of the organisation. I think we had become quite fragmented with 12 different local enterprise companies and it was to bring a stronger sense of one Scottish Enterprise. There was quite honestly duplication and so a lot of the work there was leading us towards the reforms John Swinney was brave enough to make in 2007. We had actually wanted him to do some of this before but the political will just wasn’t there to do it.
“It was making it much more efficient and much more effective. Scotland is too small a country to have such fragmentation. So bringing one approach and making sure our leverage was much higher. Making sure there was a much stronger focus on results. We did quite a lot of organisational change and streamlined the organisation very significantly.”
Finally in 2009 she was appointed as chief executive. “It certainly wasn’t an ambition on the first day I joined,” she says. “But when I came back in 2000 I was quite clear that I would only rejoin if I had a seat at that top table. I was willing to be very flexible on what it was and didn’t think it would be customer relations but I took that on.
“For the five years before being appointed I had done everything I could to be appointable - and by that I mean taking on every challenge and every responsibility, delivering success, delivering results, making sure I was connected and relevant to the business community in Scotland. I took on SDI for nearly two years as well as being chief operating officer. I just wanted to show my commitment and passion.”
However she reveals that if she hadn’t got the job she wouldn’t have stayed. “I wanted to be the chief executive of this organisation. I was so passionate about Scotland and the economy and the difference that SE can make. I think my passion has got stronger and stronger and stronger. I have done business in over 40 countries now. It is realising what you have got and the potential of what we have.
“When you realise how much Scotland is admired outside and how much we bicker with each other inside Scotland, I really wanted to be part of doing something about that. I am far too ambitious and optimistic for the country to be dragged down by that.”
Mar 15 2011 By Alasdair Northrop
Lena Wilson is not just the chief executive of Scottish Enterprise – she is arguably the spirit of the economic development organisation. She lives and breathes Scottish Enterprise and no matter what sticks and stones are thrown at it and her – after all this is one of the toughest jobs in Scotland - Wilson manages to get through it all
One of the reasons for this goes back to the time she worked on secondment for the World Bank helping third world countries get support for economic development. “I found myself in all sorts of quite dangerous situations,” says Wilson, sitting in the comfort of a brightly-lit meeting room in Scottish Enterprise’s Waterloo Street headquarters in Glasgow.
“I have been airlifted out of countries. I have found myself in civil disturbances. I was beaten up and mugged in Nigeria. I found myself in quite threatening and dangerous places and I realise how dangerous a place the world can be and how lucky we are in Scotland though we don’t always realise and see that. To an extent with everything that goes with this role, if I am ever feeling down about it I only have to think back about it and all the comment and all the scrutiny can feel like a piece of cake compared to that.”
However she also believes it is right to be thoroughly scrutinised.
One of the biggest bones of contention is her pay package – last year she got £191,000-plus and £11,000 bonus – more than the Prime Minister. The key question in a publicly funded organisation is whether she and the organisation provide value for money. “I come from the standpoint that I am a public servant and I should be transparent and open to scrutiny,” says Wilson, speaking at a speed which challenges the best of shorthand note takers. “I certainly am in this role. I have really felt we have not done a good enough job just being clear about the difference we make – and what we do and what we don ‘t and why that is the case. So I am for more clarity - all the appropriate scrutiny. I think we are the most scrutinised organisation in Scotland.”
Wilson’s appointment in November 2009 as chief executive might be seen as boringly predictable and perhaps unimaginative since she had worked with the organisation for most of her career. But when you examine her experiences and track record it becomes clear the job was made for her, though with the Scottish Government election in May there are no certainties about the future.
Wilson’s first jobs involved helping to start up two electronics companies during the Silicon Glen boom in Scotland and then she gained a place on the Scottish Development Agency’s very prestigious elite management development programme. She was employed in its Locate in Scotland operation and rapidly rose up the ranks and was responsible for helping to bring in thousands of jobs from inward investors around the world.
Although she was with the World Bank for just two years she came up with the idea of an investment toolkit for countries which is a world bank product today.
During her time with SDA, and then its successor Scottish Enterprise, Wilson was involved in a variety of roles ranging from being chief operating officer of the Forth Valley local enterprise company to chief executive of Scottish Development International.
What is certain is that Wilson has clearly made her mark since taking the helm of the controversial agency and does not hold back from telling anybody why they need it. “If Scottish Enterprise wasn’t here there are 40,000 jobs today in the Scottish economy that wouldn’t exist,” she says. And that is just the jobs created or preserved during the past decade.
Over the last few months SE, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and the Business Gateway network have come under intense scrutiny by the Scottish Government’s Economy, Energy and Tourism committee which is expected to publish its report on the reforms instigated by the current Government just before the election.
Wilson, who had been giving evidence to the committee the day before I interviewed her, heads an organisation with a budget of around £280m employing 1100 people across Scotland. To many critics that seems a lot of money for an economic development agency but she argues that the returns for that investment are substantial. “I am quite obsessed with evidence and evidence-based decision making because I have found there is no shortage of people queuing in the streets to give me their opinion and trying to influence me,” says Wilson.
“And I can put my hand on heart and tell you that every pound we invest this year will generate a return of about eight to one in the Scottish economy. So every £1 we invest this year over a ten-year period will generate an extra £2bn in the Scottish economy.
“I am not saying there are not things Scottish Enterprise could do better. I am a perfectionist and am very driven by quality and we definitely could. I think, quite frankly, Scottish Enterprise was asked to do too many things [in the past]. And if you do so many things it is difficult to get any of them right and you are certainly not going to be pleasing everybody. We were almost the dumping ground for something that couldn’t go anywhere else. I think it really is helpful not to have that now.
“I understand politically sometimes it is difficult to stick to that and I think it is really encouraging that we have been allowed to keep this strong focus and been backed by the government to do so.”
SE spends a great deal of time analysing its effectiveness. “I have yet to find an economic development agency in the world that has gone to this length of understanding its impact on the economy,” says Wilson.
So how is the money spent? Let’s look at this year’s budget. Some £60m has been allotted for the coming year to infrastructure projects like the Edinburgh BioQuarter while more than £26m is invested in companies through its various loans and equity schemes. More than £22m is to be spent on helping companies with innovation and research and development while £28.8m is earmarked for Scottish Development International which helps current and potential exporters as well as working overseas to entice inward investors.
SE also administrates the regional selective assistance grants which have been used to great effect with the biggest recent example being Amazon creating 950 jobs in Gourock and Dunfermline. Amazon is being incentivisied with £2m in regional selective assistance and £500,000 in training grants.
“We have had some big job successes that we haven’t seen for years and a very strong pipeline,” she says. However some of these deals take a great deal of time to bring to fruition. Mitsubishi recently announced it would be investing around £100m in Scotland creating a research and development hub for offshore wind technology after acquising Loanhead-based Artemis Intelligent Power. “That has been four years of dedicated relationship building,” says Wilson. “I have been out to Japan three times to meet with them. The first minister has met with them. John Swinney has met them in Japan.”
But although Wilson gets in the spotlight when such big deals are announced she also works quietly behind the scenes to help Scottish businesses. “I can’t tell you who they are because it is in confidence but there were at least two examples recently where we have intervened and helped companies with their relationship and discussions with their banks. We stopped one company going into receivership.”
Wilson is not afraid to use her Scottish and international networks to get things done. “I think part of this role is using any network capability I have,” she says.
She is obviously enjoying being at the helm and says she has made a lot of changes in the last year. “We needed a de-cluttering. So I took 25 per cent out of the senior head count in the organisation. Nothing operationally. I reduced the number of director posts and that is going to generate about £2m saving a year. That has been a very significant change. That has been about 25 to 30 people who have left this organisation at senior levels many of whom I knew very well.
“I wanted to make us a much more opportunity-driven organisation and I really wasn’t convinced we were accessible enough in terms of opportunities.”
Wilson wanted to change the impression that SE was only interested in energy, tourism, electronic markets, financial services, food and drink, and life sciences. “There was an inference that if you were in another sector that somehow that was second class and low priority and you don’t count. That doesn’t mean we won’t make choices and it certainly doesn’t mean it is a free for all and all are equal. But it just opens us up much more to opportunities. I think that has been really important.
“We do turn people down. I think it is really important to do that. I think it is important to do it clearly and quickly. The long agonising ‘no’ is not acceptable. I absolutely believe we don’t do that any more. Because we were worried about criticism or an MSP writing to us we maybe drew things out. There is absolute clarity now. And the clarity is around growth and we have criteria for the type of growth we are looking for.”
One of its key focuses is concentrating resources on supporting companies with big growth potential. Its criteria focuses on all companies – large and small – which have potential to grow turnover by £1m over three years. “It is a myth we only work with large companies,” says Wilson whose organisation is working with just over 2000 firms which meet the criteria. That may seem a small number to some critics but Wilson argues that it simply fell out at that number.
“At any one time there is probably only about 13,000 to 15,000 companies in the Scottish economy with that kind of growth potential,” she explains. “Only two per cent of Scottish companies employ over 50 people.”
She admits that undoubtedly there will be companies that escape the net because they don’t know about them. But she says SE has made a great effort in the last year to find businesses which fit its criteria. “We have gone out and run events and campaigns to be really clear that we are open for business. That’s why I speak at so many things. I want to give a clear message. If you want to grow, if you want to internationalise, if you want to innovate, you should be talking to Scottish Enterprise.
“So I would hope it is not for the lack of awareness or marketing but I accept that could be the case. There may be some companies that just don’t yet understand how they can be helped by us. Some companies don’t want any intervention by the public sector at all. It has been interesting in the last year dealing with companies that said ‘I didn’t believe that any part of the public sector could help me’ and now want to tell others about it.”
SE helps its account managed companies in a variety of ways. “The first thing is to really get to understand what the company strategy and business plan is. Surprisingly sometimes they don’t have one so it is really helpful to think about that. So our help may be in investment funds. Last year we invested £32m in potential high growth companies which leveraged a further £100m from private sector funds.”
She says its help may be on leadership and ambition development or on strategy. “It can be very targeted access of new international markets. It can be around innovation and innovation systems in the organisation. It can be in R&D – a very targeted R&D grant to lever more from them – a whole suite of things.
“And often it’s about who we can connect them to. We can connect them to Globalscots, other companies. Often companies say to me ‘yes, the financial assistance you gave me was helpful but the most helpful thing was the connections you helped me make or the inspiration you brought’.
“And the amount of letters I get complimenting our account managers. 80 per cent of our staff in any one year join us from the private sector – not the public sector. The account managers are subject matter experts and we have a whole range of specialists to support them in innovation, investment in R&D and in international.”
Wilson is keen to dispel the myth it only helps its 2000 account managed companies. “At any one time we are working with 7000 or 8000 companies in Scotland. I am really keen to dispel the myths around this and the myths around elitism but I am unashamed and unapologetic about the fact we exclusively focus on growth. So if a company has the ambition, the capacity, the capability and the wherewithal to grow we want to work with them.”
She says that if anything marked her first year it had been SE’s focus on renewables. “The opportunities for Scotland are absolutely of a transformative nature – transformative in terms of jobs - and GVA wealth creation has to be around renewable energy,” she says. “We could generate 28,000 jobs in the next ten years from offshore wind alone – never mind wave and tidal on top of that. So the renewables piece is going to take very large amounts of public sector cash and it should because no one really understands the investment model yet and this is a clear area of market failure where the public sector should intervene.”
Wilson also defends SE’s £67m investment in the Edinburgh BioQuarter – it has already invested £55m and plans another £12m this year - which it claims will eventually create 6500 new high value jobs. She says there are huge opportunities in life sciences around drug testing and drug discovery and translational medicine. Those are huge opportunities.
But Wilson says not every promising sector needs huge amounts of public money to support it. “One of the fastest growing sectors in Scotland is quality food. We are talking about great Scottish food manufacturers getting into US multiples. That is resource-intensive but it doesn’t take a lot of budget. So this idea that the importance which you attach to a sector is the amount of money you spend on it I think is misleading.”
Wilson is passionate about increasing the number of exporters in Scotland. “Too few firms export,” she says. “I think the statistics say only five to six per cent of Scottish firms export and that is far too low. All the evidence tells us there are two factors here. Companies believe it is more difficult than it is to export so they overestimate the challenges and underestimate the benefits. Just knowing that and understanding that leads you to get out there. We have just run more market awareness events and sector events around exporting than we ever have.”
Wilson believes Scottish Enterprise is very good at what it does. A survey commissioned by the Royal Bank of Scotland rated SE as the sixth best investment promotion agency in the world with Austria as number one. “We were the only UK agency in the top six,” says Wilson. “I wasn’t chief executive at the time so believe me next time it will be higher than sixth because I know what it was we had to do better.”
You get the feeling she may well succeed.
Biography: Lena Wilson
Born in a working class family in Yorkhill just outside Partick, Lena Wilson was one of five children whose parents were determined for them to succeed in life.
They moved from their tenement in Yorkhill to the new town of East Kilbride when she was two and Wilson thrived. “This was my mum and dad’s attempt to get us out to a great green environment and for them it was like moving hundreds of miles away – not just 15. It was a big thing to get their family out to what they regarded as the countryside at the time.”
Her father had been a white-collar administration worker in Glasgow but joined Rolls Royce in East Kilbride as a labourer so the family could move there. Then he worked his way back up and changed companies working in storage, distribution and logistics. Until he retired he was a logistics manager. “They were really dedicated wonderful parents who focused on education, giving their kids confidence, and making sure their kids got the best start in life.
”My mother was an absolutely inspirational woman who did absolutely everything for her family. She didn’t work when she was raising us but later she went out to work in Motorola and was an operator in all the clean suit gear on the twilight shift from five until ten five nights a week to get us all through university.”
She died five years ago and it is a regret to Wilson that she wasn’t around to see her get the chief executive’s job. However her father is still alive and takes a great interest in all matters relating to economic development and Scotland’s economy. “It has become a bit of a hobby for him now. He gave me all his feedback on the committee hearing.”
Wilson really enjoyed school and threw herself into everything.
She had lots of hobbies and was someone who “stuck in and did well”. Indeed she was real head girl material – the trouble was her comprehensive school didn’t have such roles.
“I was definitely not a scientist at school although, actually subsequent to leaving school, I developed, through the jobs I had, a great interest in science and engineering and often people have assumed I am an engineer or scientist. But I was very interested in English, history, and economics. I was also very interested in music.
After leaving school I did a BA in public administration at Glasgow Caledonian University.
At that stage she was thinking of going into the diplomatic service or the UN. ” I was thinking of doing a business degree or law and the public administration degree seemed to me quite vocational so it mixed my interests. It was heavy on economics but also went into politics, sociology, decision making and that kind of international, public service elective.”
As she was finishing her degree Wilson did the milk rounds and was offered a place on IBM’s graduate development programme in London. However she needed to try to get together some money to go down to London and saw an advert in the East Kilbride job centre for a girl Friday which changed the course of her life. “Can you imagine an advert like that now? It obviously didn’t put me off too much because I applied for it and actually it was the very early months of an investor in East Kilbride called Victor Electronics.
“To cut a long story short I was employee number four or five at the time. I ended up going off and doing a post graduate qualification at night in quality management and engineering and statistical process control and all that and I became part of the start-up team.”
The company specialised in cable assemblies and plastic injection moulding and circuitry and sub contract electronics. “I became the quality manager and took us through BS5750 at the time. Prior to that I had never even wired up a plug. I was 22 and it was an amazing opportunity; I think when I look back now they definitely mistook enthusiasm for actual ability. There are times I think back how I was lucky I swam and didn’t sink. I rolled ten years’ experience into a gruelling two.”
A couple of years after she started one of the directors left to join a competitor company from Florida in the US. He headhunted Wilson to join them as part of the start-up team of Techdyne in Livingston.
”So we started the whole process again of negotiating a new town factory. We didn’t have our own HR departments so I was giving people colour blindness tests to make sure they could wire plugs the right way and stuff like that and learning myself how to solder and do plastic injection moulding. By the time I came out I could have probably passed myself off as a technician.
“I was really learning early on about the art of leading and managing people and motivating people and working in challenging environments. I think it has probably stood me in good stead even today because I do have that manufacturing background and understand a lot of the issues and always take a keen interest in all things manufacturing.”
After five years Wilson decided it was time to move on. “There was only so much intellectual stimulation from shipping product and I quickly realised it really wasn’t for me,” she says. “Being 26 and having been with two start-ups from scratch and taking them each to about 300 people and several million pounds turnover at the time and dealing with US management teams and meeting deadlines and hosting customer visits and learning about quality was a massive experience.”
She saw an advert for the Scottish Development Agency’s very prestigious graduate development programme. Following months of tests and interviews and then a weekend away to choose the final few she was accepted. ”It was really one of the proudest days I can remember when I got that letter saying I had been accepted,” she recalls.
Ironically Wilson was the last person to be recruited for the programme but she has now brought it back 21 years later.
“We have got a bunch of really talented graduates from many disciplines and I have taken a really keen interest in the mentoring of them. As well as looking for the brightest and the best and a great attitude we are looking for subject matter expertise as well. I am really passionate about that.”
Wilson took a £5000 cut in her salary to become an information and research officer with Locate in Scotland. She also did an MBA at the University of Strathclyde Business School as soon as she joined spending two nights a week at the institution. She is now on the school’s advisory board.
Meanwhile she was quickly promoted and was the first female executive LIS had for investment in Japan. One of her biggest and earliest tasks was organising the first big healthcare conferences it had in Japan promoting Scottish healthcare opportunities. She also worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and in Seoul.
Then she got a more senior post on the US covering the southern states. “I did that for a couple of years and that was my first experience of working with the oil industry and I was up and down to Aberdeen.”
It was the heyday of inward investment in Scotland and many deals were done and Fridays were often a celebration day. But equally losing a deal was devastating. “I remember a digital project and Scotland certainly had the best case and in the end they made a decision based on the corporation tax issue. We lost that project and it was like a death.”
Wilson stayed with Locate in Scotland until 1994 when she successfully applied for a job as director of development for Forth Valley Enterprise to widen her experience in the SDA. “I wanted to get on in the organisation and got hooked by economic development and I suppose I was brave enough to jump a couple of steps at the time in terms of the career ladder.
Later she was promoted to become chief operational officer of the LEC. She became heavily involved in the creation of new business parks in the area in co-operation with the local council. “You couldn’t get any inward investment because there weren’t any business parks,” she says. “I was working on a whole series of infrastructure projects, business development projects and with the chemicals industry and the tourism industry. I was just gathering experience and knowledge all the time.”
In 1998 she was seconded to the World Bank following in the footsteps of Robert Crawford who was chief executive of Scottish Enterprise between 2000 and 2003. Scottish Enterprise had an internal competition and Wilson was one of three put forward for the post. “I went down to London and met someone who was on his way back from Africa and he interviewed me in a Heathrow Airport coffee shop and offered me the job there and then.”
Her role was as a special adviser. “It was great because I wasn’t hooked in the bureaucracy of the system so much and I got a senior special adviser post so I would regularly find myself with the president of the World Bank.”
She was working with the bank’s multilateral investment guarantee agency (MEGA). “It is like the insurance arm of the World Bank and we provided political risk insurance to big corporations that go into politically fragile countries. There are lots of actuaries and lots of insurance specialists and risk analysts.
“What they didn’t have was anybody who understood how international businesses make decisions, how to attract foreign investment and the business side of it. So I was advising on how we should be doing that and the kind of materials we should be using and the content.
“But also I was actually involved in projects with governments so my clients would be the Prime Minister or the Minister of Economy and working with them and starting up investment promotion agencies and working with them as promotion agencies to equip them to attract foreign investment.”
She worked with about 28 countries over two and a half years. “That was definitely the most transformative experience of my life,” she says. “First of all it was incredibly daunting. I had never worked in a developing country before and it was the first time I realised how transferable your skills can be to other environments so I could take what I knew from the developing world. But also it was really humbling. I was in countries where we stayed in the best hotels and realised most of the world lives on less than two dollars a day.”
“But I also got to work with global leading politicians. I got to sit alongside the president of the World Bank. I got to go to Harvard. I won a place on the executive development programme whilst I was there which was a tremendous experience.”
Today she acts in an advisory capacity to a team within the World Bank that undertakes foreign investment. Last year she delivered a seminar at the International Monetary Fund in Washington.
After her time with the World Bank she came back to a brand new role at SE as senior director of customer relations. “That was all part of Robert Crawford’s quest to get SE the ethos of customer and the closeness to customer. It was about seeing ourselves much more as a service-orientated business like a big-five consulting firm as well as an economic development agency.
“It was transformational and I got the chance to actually work on significant transformation projects which were tremendous for me in my career. It was change management. It was a blank sheet of paper.”
When Jack Perry succeeded Crawford he appointed Wilson as chief operating officer of SE. “That was all about much better integration of the organisation. I think we had become quite fragmented with 12 different local enterprise companies and it was to bring a stronger sense of one Scottish Enterprise. There was quite honestly duplication and so a lot of the work there was leading us towards the reforms John Swinney was brave enough to make in 2007. We had actually wanted him to do some of this before but the political will just wasn’t there to do it.
“It was making it much more efficient and much more effective. Scotland is too small a country to have such fragmentation. So bringing one approach and making sure our leverage was much higher. Making sure there was a much stronger focus on results. We did quite a lot of organisational change and streamlined the organisation very significantly.”
Finally in 2009 she was appointed as chief executive. “It certainly wasn’t an ambition on the first day I joined,” she says. “But when I came back in 2000 I was quite clear that I would only rejoin if I had a seat at that top table. I was willing to be very flexible on what it was and didn’t think it would be customer relations but I took that on.
“For the five years before being appointed I had done everything I could to be appointable - and by that I mean taking on every challenge and every responsibility, delivering success, delivering results, making sure I was connected and relevant to the business community in Scotland. I took on SDI for nearly two years as well as being chief operating officer. I just wanted to show my commitment and passion.”
However she reveals that if she hadn’t got the job she wouldn’t have stayed. “I wanted to be the chief executive of this organisation. I was so passionate about Scotland and the economy and the difference that SE can make. I think my passion has got stronger and stronger and stronger. I have done business in over 40 countries now. It is realising what you have got and the potential of what we have.
“When you realise how much Scotland is admired outside and how much we bicker with each other inside Scotland, I really wanted to be part of doing something about that. I am far too ambitious and optimistic for the country to be dragged down by that.”