Dr Tim Grasby left a lucrative career as an academic and consultant to form Heligan Group, a highly specialised, intelligence-driven financial services provider. Now, with the business celebrating its 10th birthday, he reflects on his unique career path with Henry Carpenter
Tim Grasby will always look at Waterstones in the city centre differently from the rest of us.
For the best part of six months the book shop – or more specifically its cafe – served as Grasby’s de facto office while he took an enormous leap of faith in his career.
It wasn’t so long ago that this electronics expert and advanced scientist – whose knowledge and expertise were much sought after in the worlds of both academia and commerce – had been sitting pretty with a lucrative career, a hugely supportive wife and a first baby on the way.
We’ll come to the reasons why later, but Grasby resolved to flip his career by forming an investment bank – over several months and many hundred cups of tea at the Waterstones coffee shop.
Heligan Group, is celebrating its 10th birthday this month, and is one of the most specialised and respected financial institutions in the region, standing out in its expertise in fields such as national security, crime prevention and public safety. As the oft-used saying goes, if you know you know.
The work at Heligan is based on intelligence and insight, gained through a combination of intelligence collection through a range of channels, research and experience, very much in the mould of its quietly spoken and unassuming founder.
We meet in the Heligan offices in St Philip’s House, overlooking the cathedral in the city centre, and Grasby has taken time out to reflect on a career path which took him from a quantum physicist to heading a boutique investment bank which looks to be on the verge of significant expansion.
It can be argued that his success, and the position in which he finds himself now, all stems from a fascination with electronics.
Born in Kingswinford in the West Midlands, and having left school at the age of 16 to join the family metal-bashing business with a view to eventually taking it over, it dawned on the young Grasby that this was not the career for him.
“I always had a passion for electronics and I just found it fascinating,” he remembers.
“From a very early age I was always messing with electronics, be they remote control cars, TVs or video machines, and fixing everything that I possibly could as a youngster.”
The die was cast. This interest led him to focus on the sciences, particularly maths, physics and chemistry. He went back to school to complete his A-levels, a gruelling period as he attended night school, but nonetheless he achieved the grades to gain him entry to University of Warwick to study electronics. Three years later he emerged with a first-class degree.
“I was always very interested in the next generation and what made things go faster. So I went on to do a PhD at Warwick in semiconductor quantum physics – essentially manipulating materials to make electricity go faster through its carriers.
“You can’t find these materials in nature, they don’t occur. So, you have to change the materials at the atomic level, which is what we did at Warwick, and we had large contracts with all of the big labs globally. I was also a visiting research fellow at Stuttgart University as well on the same subject.”
This was in the early noughties, so where and how did he cross the bridge from academia to the financial services sphere?
While he was an academic at Warwick, he had his own consultancy working for both trade and private equity firms, advising on technical due diligence. He also helped a lot of students to commercialise their ideas and was on a government peer review panel for commercialisation of research into the UK market.
“I found all of it fascinating. But what I did find, especially with the private equity firms, was that they were looking for me to concentrate on technical due diligence.
“Does it do what it says on the tin? Can the patent be circumvented? These were the questions I was being asked – or at least thought I was.
“But it suddenly dawned on me that this wasn’t the question. The question was, can you help us to circumvent patents? That made me very uncomfortable. I wasn’t going to do that.
“But it did make me think, well, actually there’s a better way of doing this. You know, in finance you can make an awful lot of money and still do the right thing.
“In all walks of life, whether in business, research or academia, success is all about the people. And if you don’t get on with the people, if you don’t trust the people, your reputation is gone very quickly.
“I thought I would really like to set something up which would be doing the right thing by all parties – the staff, the company that you’re buying from and the company you’re selling to.
“It is perfectly possible to have an ecosystem where you can do the right thing . . . and that’s when the idea to start Heligan kicked in.”
Aware that his credentials were hitherto very much academic, Grasby trained and worked at PwC, finishing his time there working in restructuring, followed by a stint at KPMG concentrating on corporate finance.
A directorship at a small regional investment firm followed, and the foundations were in place to launch Heligan, firstly as a one-man band in his lounge at home, before deciding he needed to be in the city for networking and more scope for meeting people.
“I started with a pretty much blank piece of paper at Waterstones coffee shop in Birmingham . . . and it was fantastic,” he says.
“You could get a pot of tea which would last for several hours. I was there pretty much all day, every day for the first six months, before deciding that I needed an office.”
It’s one thing to have the knowledge from both a formidable academic and practical background, but it’s quite another to take your knowledge-based service to market.
In the 18 months or so it took Grasby to gain regulatory approvals (many hours were spent in Waterstones filling in forms), he was forced to work on a pro bono basis.
It says something that many of those clients became paying customers and have remained loyal over the last 10 years.
“We’ve just sold a business for one of those clients and made him an awful lot of money,” says Grasby.
Heligan has grown steadily since the firm’s inception, with revenue now in the millions, a constantly growing headcount and offices in Mayfair and Dubai to add to the HQ in Birmingham.
But the sense is that while the stats are impressive, what gives Grasby particular pleasure as the firm celebrates its 10th anniversary is the composition of its people, and the specialist niches it occupies when it comes to investment.
The two, as Grasby explains, go very much hand in hand.
“We’ve got a fantastic partner group, and on the investment side we are massively focused on national security, crime prevention and public safety.
“We always wanted a sector that was aligned to our personalities but also subject to fantastic market dynamics and high barriers to entry.”
It’s now that Grasby name-checks Keith Bristow, Heligan’s executive chairman, whose roles prior to joining the group indicate breadth of experience which must be unsurpassed in the UK.
Bristow enjoyed a 32-year career in law enforcement with roles including chair and director general of the UK’s National Crime Agency, chair of what was the G8 – now G7 – Law Enforcement Group, head of crime for the UK’s police chiefs, and director of the UK’s National Criminal Intelligence Service.
Heligan has been set up around the broadly termed security sector, and it is one in which the group is more than comfortable investing. It also commands the high barriers to entry which Grasby enjoys.
As he points out, the partners at Heligan have to go through various levels of security clearance – with Keith Bristow needing the highest possible.
“It’s not just security clearance. It’s knowledge and networks and understanding. We don’t do anything involving men with guns or bombs. It’s all defensive technologies.
“For instance, we look at digital forensics, we look at secure communications and we look at anti-jamming technologies.
“We are interested in technologies that offer counter countermeasures, as well as countermeasures. It is all about keeping people safe.”
Talent attraction is clearly a key focus for Grasby and the partners.
“How we set up Heligan is very different from the norm. We have got scientists, we’ve got accountants, we’ve got private equity practitioners, we’ve got ex-operational people – and we’ve got sector experts who are recognised globally.
“We also decided in the early days that we wanted a full holistic offering for clients. So, for example, we go and help a client with a value creation plan.
“We advise on where they might take it from where it is today, to where they want to get it to from a value perspective in five years’ time. We work with them not only on that journey, but also post the sale of the business.
“That’s why we bought a wealth management firm, Hay Hill, and set up Heligan Wealth Management.
“The client might well want to invest as well, so we’ve created this fluid ecosystem which also includes private equity.
“It’s good to have these pillars, but if you haven’t got more intelligence or more understanding than everybody else, your results and your returns will only be up to the average standard. So we’ve set up a business intelligence department operated by ex-security professionals.”
Grasby believes the firm is at an inflection point whereby it has the most solid of foundations – but the time is ripe for it to ‘push on’. After all, there are few more dynamic sectors to have cornered than national security, what with Ukraine, Gaza and seemingly endless cyber security breaches.
With this is mind, he anticipates adding to its current offices with one in North America, to serve both the US and Canada, and perhaps one in Ireland as well. Staff levels will inevitably increase to operate these offices.
He’s proud, too, of the firm’s graduate programme – “it makes us feel quite grown up!” – with four accountants taken on each year from an application list of more than 1,500 this year.
M&A is another cause of Grasby’s good mood, with the group seeing a “big uptick” this year with five deals completed already and several more in the pipeline.
Identifying key sectors is a priority at Heligan, but on the proviso that it has expertise to support them.
“So on the M&A side, for example, we’ve taken on Ramesh Jassal from a competitor, who is a healthcare specialist and will look after life sciences M&A.
“We always want to become the experts and then branch out on that discipline from a position of strength. So we might start looking at healthcare as a route for investment.
“Our motto is ‘we see things differently’ and that’s because we’ve got very good insight. We’ve also got a lot of intelligence which is not really out there in the public domain.”
Insight, intelligence – and you can add integrity . . . it all comes from the top at Heligan.
