In Person: Ian Donaldson, CEO of Atlanta Group

Great Expectations: The self-made broker talks about his billion pound ambitions, lifts the lid on the Swinton deal and considers his Ardonagh bosses.

Donaldson explains that he wanted to be his own boss, partly because he’d experienced a “tyrannical” manager in the past but also because he has a natural entrepreneurial streak.

This became apparent when he organised a deal with Hastings for call leads.

He explains: “With Hastings they were spending millions on advertising in the Yellow Pages. I said rather than pay me to train your trainers I will take the excess calls from you. That was 1999. We were transferring calls before anyone else had thought about call transferring.

“That spring-boarded us forward and that was how we got into the bike and van business. Hastings wanted the car business so we took the other and we soon realised it wasn’t as price sensitive. We then tailored our marketing to that.

“But when we first started we would have taken any business.”

Despite being called Autonet the emphasis was very much on auto rather than net when Donaldson and Keeling first struck out.

“We were auto-not-on-the-net,” Donaldson jokes, explaining that most business was still done via Yellow Pages. The name Autonet was chosen in anticipation of the internet’s popularity growing further.

“We then got on to the price comparison sites. It was a journey that we saw and it was a journey we understood. Our competitors started to do it and the writing was on the wall for Yellow Pages advertising.”

The broker soon built up and grew to between 30-40 staff. They had moved into an office next to a nightclub and then bought a second building.

We were being looked at by a number of acquirers and we were careful to ask who we wanted to sell to. We had to do many beauty parades when people wanted to buy us but I would also do a lot of due diligence on the people who are buying you

All the way through they avoided getting into debt. Something that Donaldson says amazed Ardonagh-investor Highbridge when it bought Autonet for a figure believed to be around £100m.

“They thought it was too good to be true”, he adds of the business’ lack of debt.

Highbridge entered the scene in 2016. At that time Autonet had £130m of GWP in 2015 and employed over 700 people. Its history with Towergate is long and Autonet was soon rolled in to Ardonagh Group, which was created in summer 2017 from the Towergate holding company. Donaldson jests that they should have called it “Our Donno” group.

After selling Donaldson admits it was “weird” to have bosses again.

“We were being looked at by a number of acquirers and we were careful to ask who we wanted to sell to.

“We had to do many beauty parades when people wanted to buy us but I would also do a lot of due diligence on the people who are buying you. We’ve all seen people get their world turned upside down.”

Highbridge as an investor was an attraction partly due to the opportunity to work with David Ross, Janice Deakin and Adrian Brown who Donaldson describes as “industry giants”.

“They kept ticking the boxes for me.”

And he enjoys working with other entrepreneurial characters but admits working for a larger business means “there are more hoops to jump through but we’re still very fleet of foot”.

He suggests he has learned to be braver and understood more about how to leverage things like debt. “They asked me for a wishlist of what I would buy… They have taught me how to do deals, structure them and spot deals.”

Mainly, that wishlist included smaller local brokers but he adds: “Carole Nash was at the top but I can tell you who wasn’t, it was Swinton.”

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