Wealth Adviser: Stuart MacDonald - 'We have limited ourselves to ensure we get the best'

For someone who normally avoids the media glare, Balmoral Asset Management founder Stuart MacDonald is surprisingly forthright and straight-talking.

The Scot has quietly built up a highly successful Edinburgh-based wealth advisory boutique, which now runs around £500 million for a fairly concentrated list of 650 clients.

But after purely focusing on organic growth, MacDonald is now looking to expand more aggressively by bringing in an experienced team.

‘Over the next couple of years we are planning to expand our headcount by bringing in up to six experienced private client managers with portable client banks.’

Now in its twelfth year, the business was originally set up in 1999 as a joint venture between MacDonald and Corporate Insurance Broker to provide wealth management and pension advice to the executives of the companies it advised.

From the off, he was adamant that it would be a fee-only business and effectively the very antithesis of his first role in the industry.

After leaving university with an economics degree, he had joined Commercial Union, spending four years in direct sales at the insurer before moving on to Save & Invest. MacDonald describes his year at the Scottish IFA firm during the mid-1990s as a fantastic grounding but his decision to jump ship and join Corporate Insurance Broker was clearly vindicated when he launched Balmoral shortly afterwards.

He bought out his partners in 2001 to take sole control of the company and moved the business out of what he admits were somewhat shabby offices in Leith to the more prestigious Rutland Square in the heart of Edinburgh.

Over the years, Balmoral’s headcount has risen from 15 to 25 and MacDonald is aiming to grow this to 35 over the next year or so, which he deems is the optimal size for a wealth management boutique in the Scottish capital. ‘I have always said that we will only have one Edinburgh office and given that we have a five-storey town house that only holds 30 to 40, we have to be very careful about who we hire,’ he says.