FEATURE | APRIL 2017
Entrepreneurship Feature
A bright future after a glimpse of the abyss IN LINE with many thousands of people in Aberdeen city and shire, for Shaun Eardley 2016 was his annus horribilis and he hopes 2017 will be his annus mirabilis. After spending nearly three decades building a highly successful shipping company from scratch, buying and developing a recruitment company and growing a substantial property portfolio, in the space of just three weeks his current business suffered two life threatening blows. However, the entrepreneurial spirit which drove success for Shaun and his business partner and former wife Anna, has helped them through the tough times and 2017 looks like being as good as 2016 was bad. When he left school in Great Yarmouth in 1982 his dad encouraged the right work ethic by giving him the option of rent free accommodation if he found a job or £50 per week rent if he went on the dole. “I thought I had better go and get myself a job and applied for three – one in a photographic studio, one with a coach operator coordinating mystery tours and one with a shipping company called Halcyon Shipping. I was offered all three jobs and took the one with Halcyon and really enjoyed it.” He spent six years there and it was only when, after visiting him in his office as he worked late one evening, his wife Anna suggested “You could do this for yourself, you know.” “In January 1988, we set up Seletar Shipping and almost lost it all in the first year due to a horrendous bad debt of £30,000 which, to put it in perspective, was the then equivalent value of our first mortgage.” They survived and prospered and, on the advice of their ship-owner clients, opened an Aberdeen office in 1994. They continued to expand and, while looking for accommodation for Seletar in Peterhead, bought the recruitment company Genesis Personnel in 1998. Two years later, they also bought the first of the former warehouses which have become Waterloo Quay Properties from their landlord. Over the next
“In January 1988, we set up Seletar Shipping and almost lost it all in the first year” Shaun Eardley, director, Waterloo Quay Properties
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