“I love it when a plan comes together” – John “Hannibal” Smith, A-Team

While we would never pretend that much goes according to “plan” at Nevis (!), last year we closed our Annual Review with the following statement:

“As we start the year, we are in the rare position (for us) of having three new deals in exclusivity and we are hopeful that they will complete and will be a huge step towards making 2023 a good year.”

Much to my surprise, my elder son Charlie (age 10), has recently become interested in business and how it works. He’ll probably tell you it is because he is looking for ways to supplement his meagre pocket money (!) but it has led him (and me) to think about what he might like to do when he is older. I know that moving jobs and employers regularly over your career is now very common but given his age and stage, if he wants to spend his career with a single business, it will need to still be trading in 50 years’ time.

A new era of Hardie Polymers was born on 25th November 2021 as Hardie Polymers MBO backed by the partners at Nevis Capital went through. If we rewind 365 days we had just told the staff the news and were starting to put plans in place for the new Hardie Polymers Ltd. One year on and Nevis have asked if I could write a little about that first year journey.

Recently, we’ve enjoyed learning a bit about Hidden Champions – a moniker given by Professor Hermann Simon to group of globally successful but relatively small and unheralded companies.

As a child, my Grandad would often say to me that “patience is a virtue”. This was usually said as I moaned about the wait for dinner or for my birthday to come… but as an entrepreneur himself I’m sure he knew the value of patience in a business context too.

May you live in interesting times is thought to be an English translation of an ancient Chinese curse. Having lived through 2020, I can now understand why it is a curse rather than a blessing!

How do you write an interesting annual review when you can’t think of anything big that has happened in the previous year?! My Imposter Syndrome was working overdrive…

Not another review of 2018 – I’ve had my fill of Brexit, The Mexican Wall and doom & gloom, I hear you say. Well, fortunately none of these issues have impacted us much at Nevis and so I promise something a little different.

It’s hard to believe it is ten years since Nevis was set up to bring something different to the deals market. We celebrated it in style with one of our most interesting and eventful years yet.

A tumultuous year in global terms but a year of relative stability and progress at Nevis. So, what does progress look like?

We will do the “right thing” – making the choices we believe to be in the long term interests of the businesses we own a share in, even if this results in lower profits in the short term.