Alan Ryder, 59, is the founder and chief executive of RSK, the UK’s largest privately owned environmental consultancy. He set up the business in 1989 to advise Shell on a pipeline, and has since grown it to 6,000 people, completing 47 acquisitions in the past three years, and forecasting sales this year of £500 million. It is targeting a £2 billion turnover and profits of £200 million in five years’ time.
Thirty years ago 100 per cent of our revenue was from the oil and gas sector
My PhD at Aberdeen University was all about how to route pipelines without environmental damage. After selling my Ford Escort and setting up the business our first job was to advise Shell, which was building a 400-mile pipeline to get ethylene distributed from the North Sea to Stanlow oil refinery near Ellesmere Port.
It ran across the Lake District and RSK’s job was to ensure there was a minimal environmental footprint. This led to RSK writing the UK government guidelines on how to implement new environmental regulations for cross-country pipelines.
We then started working offshore on projects in the North Sea and also at refineries, depots and petrol filling stations. But we all know that the oil industry is cyclic. Oil prices can be high at which time there is a lot of work for many, and then when the oil price falls, the work for firms like us can rapidly diminish. I wanted to be sure that when the oil price was low that we could keep our people busy.
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After five years working exclusively for the oil and gas industry we started to win work from housing developers, local authorities and government departments. Over the past ten to 15 years the shift has accelerated and we have worked hard to balance our income streams to avoid over-reliance on any one market.
There is also a desire for us as a business to do less in fossil fuels. I think it meets the aspirations of our employees and our shareholders to be less involved. Today the oil industry accounts for just a few per cent of our revenue.
Two examples of the projects we now undertake include peatland restoration works at Lake Vyrnwy, helping to improve the condition of the upland blanket bog habitat, and our Nature Positive business supporting FTSE 100 company Spirax Sarco Engineering to assess the baseline biodiversity impacts of its global manufacturing operations.
Our acquisition strategy has been key to us achieving diversification
Every time we make an acquisition it is to expand our client base, bring in new skills, or take us into a new geography — ideally a combination of these. I explain this to the owners by saying, if you bring your company under the RSK umbrella, then you can talk to the 10,000 clients we already have, and all we ask is that you work collaboratively with our other businesses and see if they can provide services to your clients.
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Our first acquisition was Radian UK in 1994. At that time RSK was just 15 people, and Radian in the UK were five people — but we worked for oil industry clients, and they worked for some manufacturing clients and government departments. Our skills were in environmental impact assessment, whereas their skills were in contaminated land and air quality. We were based in Scotland and Cheshire, whereas they were based south of London.
Radian had an American parent company and that first deal meant that Radian would own 26 per cent of RSK and it gave me access to 2,000 professional engineers and scientists in America. It took RSK from being a small and fairly isolated business, to being one that was part of a network.
We bought back our shares from Radian in 1999, but what was of huge importance to me was learning the power of being part of a larger organisation. While we were independent, there were a whole bunch of other businesses in Radian that we could collaborate with.
I guess, looking back, that seeing huge benefits can come from collaboration taught me some lessons which I have sought to learn from and apply.
We have made around 75 acquisitions
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There were 28 between 1994 and 2018 and 47 over the past three years. My plan is that we continue on our current path and welcome at least 20 more businesses into the group in the next two years.
However, it is not just about acquisitions. We create new businesses in response to market opportunities, or in response to requests from our employees. If I have an enthusiast who wants to set up a new business I am really keen to provide support, and over the years we have set up 40 new businesses.
It’s really important to me that we retain the culture the business has been built on
Over the next five years I expect to see our growth accelerate, but I don’t want RSK to become a big, ugly cold corporate entity where risk-taking is difficult and the business becomes stifled by bureaucracy and internal politics.
For example, many of our big competitors would not consider working in Iraq for reasons of risk. We were one of the first British companies to work in Iraq after the war and I strongly believe that if you are to succeed, you have to be bold and willing to venture into new markets. I was happy to lead from the front and lived in Basra for a year to set up our operations there so we could help our clients implement clean-up projects where legacy oil production had resulted in large areas of oil pollution. We have worked with the Iraqi government and oil company clients, hired local staff and trained them, and implemented remediation strategies to clean-up large areas of the desert.
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I think I’ve managed to stay true to who I am as a leader. I try to set a good example, listen to feedback and above all, empower people at every level of the business. I believe in taking risks, listening to clients and changing the shape of our business to meet their ever-changing needs.
Alan Ryder was talking to Richard Tyler, editor of The Times Enterprise Network
