Robert is an experienced business leader, entrepreneur, investor, property developer and philanthropist, who is Chief Executive of Dow Investments Plc which he founded in May 1990.
Robert was born in Edinburgh, brought up in Fife and currently divides his time between London and Scotland.
His first major project after leaving University (where he ran a market stall selling jeans at the weekends) was the purchase, management and upgrading of a small hotel in the ‘New Town’ area of Edinburgh where he increased turnover by some 400% before selling it on.
From there, in 1989, Robert went on to start and then build up Four Seasons Health Care (care homes and home care) and he exited this business after initiating and seeing through the strategy that led to the public/private take-over of Crestacare Plc in the summer of 1999 – a deal involving Alchemy Partners which had an Enterprise Value of £127M .
Four Seasons was then operating 101 care homes throughout the UK (5th largest) and employing over 7,000 staff and it is still one of the UKs largest care home operators.
It was subsequently sold by Alchemy Partners through Goldman Sachs to Allianz Capital Partners for £775M in July 2004 and in September 2006 it was sold by Allianz Capital Partners for around £1.5Bn to a Qatari investment group.
Robert left Four Seasons Health Care in early 2000 and made his final financial exit from the company in 2004.
Yearning for the entrepreneurial again, he co-founded CamVista Ltd, a webcam business that led him being a Finalist in the E & Y Scottish Entrepreneur of the Year Competition in 2001 and that counted the world famous illusionist David Copperfield as a client along with many UK ‘Blue Chips’.
In 2004, Robert co-founded NW Security Group Limited and in the same year he founded Renaissance Care (Scotland) Ltd – which now operates 17 care homes throughout Scotland employing 1,300 part and full time staff – and he was also involved in the sourcing and completing of over $37m worth of property deals in New York, over £13m of the same in London, as well as providing care home consultancy services in Australia.
In the early 1990s, he opened an office in Siberia which arranged a number of sporting and business exchanges between Russia and Scotland including a 10 day tour by the ‘Barbarians’ Rugby Club.
Robert was Chairman of the Fife Macmillan Appeal (1993-95) a public appeal which raised £1.75M towards improving hospice provision in Fife in Scotland and included the organising of a business lecture from Sir John Harvey-Jones MBE attended by 500 local business men and women. In 2007 he personally donated £50,000 to help establish a Macmillan Cancer Information & Support Centre at a London hospital to mark his 50th birthday, the first of its kind in the UK.
On the 9th December 2009 Robert opened the Macmillan Cancer Information & Support Centre at the Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, the 25th such unit in the UK, which was partly funded by a £30,000 personal gift. There are now 171 such Macmillan centres throughout the UK, interacting with some 300,000 people a year.
Robert was Chairman and a founding shareholder of Kingdom FM Radio Ltd a Scottish local (Fife) radio station franchise holder, before he engineered its successful sale in 2019. And he has in the past served as a Non-Executive Director of a leading Scottish Architectural and QS practice.
He is also currently a Non-Executive Director of Morphose Ltd (international M&A advisory), Storii Global Inc. (software developer) and Borland Insurance Ltd (insurance brokers).
Robert served on the CBI Scottish Council, the CBI UK SME Council and the Scottish Growing Business Forum from 2000 – 03. He is a member of the Association of Project Managers and a Fellow of both the Institute of Directors and the Chartered Management Institute.
In 2006, Robert founded the Scottish online political think-tank, Think Scotland, which recently celebrated its 17th anniversary and in April 2017, he founded SBUK (www.scottish-business.uk) to campaign against a second Scottish independence referendum.
Robert was educated at Loretto School and the University of Stirling (where he was Treasurer of the Students Union) and he stood as a Conservative Westminster Parliamentary Candidate against Lord (George) Robertson (Ex-Secretary General of NATO) in the 1997 General Election in Hamilton South. He has also addressed the IOD Annual Convention at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
His current interests include travel, tennis, theatre and politics and he was appointed as the first Macmillan Cancer Support Ambassador in December 2018.
In June 2023, Robert was awarded an honorary doctorate by Stirling University – ‘for his outstanding contribution in the areas of entrepreneurship and philanthropy.’
Robert is married to his second wife, Jacqueline, a financial services lawyer and has four wonderful adult children from his first marriage – Anya, Andrea, Russell and Eve, as well as two grandchildren, Ruby and Ellis.
e: rdksw1@hotmail.com
