North East Business Executive of the Year
Winner: Stewart Smith, executive chairman and owner, Ramsdens Financial, Middlesbrough
STEWART Smith has transformed Ramsdens Financial since taking over the 60-year-old business in 1994. The firm was opened by his father in 1950 as a cheque-trading business but has since grown into the UK’s largest independent pawnbroker.
The award caps an extraordinary year of growth for Middlesbrough-based Ramsdens which is on course to have 340 staff and 83 stores by the end of this year. Turnover has already jumped from £13m in 2008 to £27m last year and is forecast to hit £36m this year.
He plans to boost staff numbers to 470 within two and a half years and extend branch numbers to 103 across the North East, Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales.
Stewart, who for 20 years ran the business alongside his brother, has led a revamp of the company’s strategy making it focused, ambitious and very efficient.
Ramsdens is the 183rd largest North East company, according to The Journal’s Top 200 and its stores are currently in the North East, Yorkshire, Scotland and Wales.
Stewart made Ramsdens the first and biggest buyer of gold from the public, with rapid growth on the back of an advertising campaign with the tagline ‘got gold, get cash.’
The economic downturn has not hindered the company’s progress with even more people trying to find money in their assets. In 2003, the National Pawnbrokers’ Association showed 70% of customers borrowed for a luxury and 30% for a necessity but research by Bristol University now puts the figure at 50-50.
The rising gold price has also been an attraction for customers looking for a way of getting their hands on some cash for a holiday or some new clothes by pawning old jewellery.
The average loan is around the £165 mark over an average four or five-month pay-back period, which is an arrangement that most high street banks would not agree to. And of course the customer can retrieve their jewellery when they pay back their loan.
Ramsdens grew its then 41-strong store chain in 2009 with the acquisition of half of Scottish jewellery store group Symingtons, which had gone into administration, putting the jobs of its 27 staff at risk.
Ramsdens has been investing £1m revamping the Glasgow firm’s six stores.
The company’s biggest acquisition boosted its presence north of the border to 13 outlets.
The company’s growth seems unstoppable and it has had little trouble raising money to fuel its expansion. It had considered raising money in a stock market floatation but although the plans were shelved during the recession, the company said it may still become a listed company.