Family business takes on the midge and the multinationals

Scotmas hopes to boost turnover by 25 per cent this year to approach £4million and add five more staff, as part of an ambitious strategy for its Pyramid Travel Products arm.

Heading up the company is managing director Alistair Cameron, whose father was a self-employed agricultural consultant working across the world in the 1980s when he came across a new form of water treatment that improved livestock health. He negotiated a licence to develop it in Europe and the Middle East and the company began.

"We have always been a well-travelled family," says Mr Cameron, 37. "I grew up around the business, answering telexes from my dad from far-flung places in west Africa, and had the ambition to come into the business."

He graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in microbiology, then spent two years working for a stockbrokerage in Bermuda. "I didn't want to come straight out of university and go into the family business. I saw the other side, and didn't like it. Within the brokerage environment I saw a lot of people advising clients without the foggiest idea of what they were talking about."

Mr Cameron, one of three brothers involved in the business, says ownership and management are separate, his father having learned the lesson of one notorious empire where "22 members of the family were all directors and all sought to draw a director's salary".

Founded in Kelso in 1999 with five people, Scotmas now has five of its employees in Turkey and runs joint ventures in Chile and India. Its core skill set is in water treatment, combating salmonella and listeria in food processing plants.

Mr Cameron says: "Our technology is a more effective treatment and doesn't cause some of the nastier and less environmentally friendly effects of chlorination. We originally licensed a patented technology from the States, and subsequently developed our own IP with it." It has expanded into municipal and industrial water treatment, including providing safe drinking water on oil platforms, and safe tap water in the Middle East.

"Although we are a small business we serve seven quite distinct markets," the MD says." We are able to share technical research and development and administrative resources while providing quite different services."

The Borders base carries out chemical manufacture and engineering - a treatment plant can be shipped overseas in 40-foot containers.

"Our treatment systems have recently been installed in Qatar, treating about a quarter of the country's water on a system developed and built in Kelso," Mr Cameron says. "We have also done projects for BP in Iraq and throughout the Middle East and Asia. We are competing with the likes of Siemens and GE, we are highly specialised in what we do, and by necessity have to go out to the world market. So we have a global outlook, it's in the DNA of the company from Dad's initial work as a consultant."

That has triggered support from Scottish Enterprise. "Over the past four years SE has moved to picking winners, and we are fortunate enough to be picked," says Mr Cameron, who has recently been appointed to the advisory board of Chemical Sciences Scotland.

The key moment in the group's evolution was when it picked up Pyramid eight years ago. "The opportunity came up to buy a retail brand, which we did with very little retail experience," Mr Cameron says.

"We thought we could take the technologies we had developed for healthcare and some of the more challenging industrial markets, and put it into a bottle for consumers."

He says competition is fierce, and the focus must be laser-like. "When we put out an insect repellent, we have to know it is a cut above anything else in the market. We wouldn't survive if we had 'me too' products."

Its range, sold in outdoor travel outlets, includes mosquito nets, hygiene products, and water treatment tablets "designed to kill the toughest micro-organisms" thus preventing the all-too-common traveller's diarrhoea.

It has meant bringing in an extra layer of management, and looking for funding. Scotmas has recent rebanked with HSBC, who Mr Cameron describes as "an incredibly good partner to expand the business overseas", having initially found support from social lender Funding Circle, becoming one of its first clients.

Theat backing enabled the company to develop its consumer travel products , though tighter regulation has acted as a brake.

A highly effective repellent against the infamous Scottish midge, based on extract of bog myrtle and developed with Edinburgh University, had two years of rapid growth until falling foul of EU regulation of biocidal products. "It means you have to do a million euros worth of testing and approvals and about a four-year process to get that product through. That is being rolled out over the next five years, it's very frightening, and causing a lot of innovation to be stifled. On the upside for us, it's causing a lot of our competitors to leave the market."

Mr Cameron admits the EU's aims are laudable. "In the past it was perhaps too easy to get a product from lab bench to market." But he adds: "Unfortunately, as is typical of European regulation, it is platinum-plated to such an extent that you can only really develop a new active agent if you are one of the big six chemicals and agrofarming companies."

Scotmas has always put a high value on collaboration, working closely with the Interface knowledge exchange between academia and SMEs, and currently has two projects running with Heriot-Watt. The MD says: "In competing with the multinationals, being able to tap into the knowledge base of Scottish universities is absolutely critical for us."

Pyramid plays well into the burgeoning market for more exotic travel,Mr Cameron says. "People are taking much more ownership of where they are going and what they doing, that has worked really well for us." Its website has a travel planner, pulling together advice on kit and conditions. "It helps us to demonstrate to retailers we are serious about travel hygiene, not just having insect repellent as one line in a list of 200 products. We are prepared to invest in R & D and consumer education."

The consumer range is now 50per cent of the business, and the next target is mainstream retailers. "The magic bullet would be listings in three or four major grocery or pharmacy chains," Mr Cameron says. "There is a big market out there, for people simply going on a family holiday."