Scottish Entrepreneur Brian Williamson Gambled Two Homes on a £930,000 Contract

Brian Williamson once put two family homes on the line for a single oil and gas contract worth £930,000 — a deal that nearly wiped him out. He now calls that the biggest risk of his career, and the lesson still shapes how he runs businesses today.

The chairman of FWB, who is also involved in AI company Kreoh, has sold two companies — Brightwork and Jumpstart — and collected an Entrepreneur of the Year accolade that, far from signalling retirement, left him energised for what he agrees with his wife will be their "last rodeo".

"If I had to go back, I would go faster and bigger," Williamson told The Herald. "Even though I thought I was going fast at the time, there's always an opportunity to say: could I really think outside the box? Could I go a bit faster?"

How a £50-a-day margin nearly cost everything

The trouble started in an oil and gas business turning over roughly £1 million a year. It won a £930,000 time-and-materials contract to deliver work in West Africa.

The model looked simple. Workers would be hired at about £150 a day and charged to the client at £200, leaving a £50 daily margin per head. But every additional worker assigned to the contract increased the working-capital requirement. Williamson poured in his savings and guaranteed his own house.

When the bank asked about other assets, the only one left was the house he had built for his mother and father. He thought about it overnight, then went back and put it up — without telling his parents.

"There's no way I can tell my mum to put her house up and gamble it all so I can become a millionaire. So I'm just not going to tell her. I'm going to put her house up," he said.

Then the arrangement unravelled. Responsibility for the contract moved from Scotland to Paris, its validity was challenged, and further payment was withheld even though the work had to be completed. For about two weeks, Williamson believed he could lose both properties and still owe the mortgages. The danger passed when £565,000 landed in the company's account as a first tranche.

"I knew I was safe," he says. "That was: I'm never going to do that again."

His verdict on the mistake: "I didn't de-risk my position at all. I just went ahead, gung-ho, and thought: 'That'll be all right.' And it was, but it could not have been."

What does this change for founders weighing an exit?

Williamson rejects the argument that Scottish entrepreneurs sell their companies too soon. A founder who sells for £2m may transform life for their family, he notes, and asking them to keep scaling means telling them to leave the entire sum "on the casino table".

"I don't think there's anything at all wrong with" founders reducing their personal exposure, he says. The better answer, in his view, is letting entrepreneurs realise part of their wealth while keeping a stake, backed by investment, coaching and mentoring. Scotland, he adds, doesn't have the funding dynamics of the US west coast, and founders aren't always the right leaders for every growth stage.

Selling is still emotional. "You almost build a family," he says. "You want to make sure you're passing the family on to a greater opportunity." At Brightwork, the buyer could offer staff bigger roles in a national organisation; Jumpstart's purchaser opened international doors. He'd have balked at an asset-stripper.

From 27 redundancies to AI strategy

His leadership philosophy formed at 22, on a graduate training programme at Weir Pumps, where he ran 200 welders and handled 27 redundancies. His father told him to stop relying on rules and get to know the workers instead. Williamson now frames it through psychologist Carl Rogers' "unconditional positive regard" — start positive, but let actions revise your view.

"It doesn't mean you have to be soft with people," he says. "It means you've got a positive regard."

Today he sees most boards stuck at the earliest stage of AI adoption — individuals using ChatGPT or buying point products rather than building an integrated strategy. "If I was starting my career now, I would be into AI strategy," he says, warning that companies "use a wee bit of a sticking plaster: let's stick that over there."

He worries about AI's capacity for harm at scale and doubts governments can regulate at the technology's pace. The tension doesn't bother him. "You can't surf on a flat calm," he says. "Entrepreneurs need waves."

The personal cost was real: missed time with his children — "You can't go back and get that time" — and a later cancer diagnosis that made him question, without claiming causation, the stress he'd carried. Still, he'd choose the same life. "We're all a fingerprint of our past," he says. For practitioners, the takeaway is blunt: de-risk before you scale, and treat exits as risk management, not failure.