Entrepreneurial spirit is a way of life on Isle of Gigha

From there he runs a business growing orchids and exporting their essences for therapeutic use around the world in addition to going into ice-cream production with his wife, a dairy farmer who has a multi-generational lease on a Gigha farm. Until recently the pair also ran an 11-bedroom B&B at Achamore House, the baronial mansion Mr Dennis bought from the island community when he was looking to expand International Flower Essence Repertoire over a decade ago.

“Flower essence is a subject that the public are fairly ignorant about - a lot of women will have used Rescue Remedy but that’s about as far as the knowledge goes for 60 per cent of the female population,” Mr Dennis said.

“The worldwide market is many millions of pounds, though. There are shops in the UK that carry our product but we tend to sell to therapists, distributors around the world and direct to the public. Each of the last three years we’ve added net sales of just over £200,000. It’s a micro business but it suits our island location very well.”

As is common in island communities, where employment opportunities are limited, the business has created jobs for five people including Mr Dennis, with half of them, like him, having other business interests.

“The old view of the island is that you don’t just have one job, you have many hats,” he said.

“We employ five people. One does our bottling but she and her husband also run a business hiring out kayaks. We have two full-time employees and a part-time book keeper - she has a bunch of children and also sometimes fills in at the Post Office.”

While Mr Dennis said that Gigha has “enough diversity of population” to mean that finding employees has not been difficult, he noted that for many islanders the best way to gain employment remains to create it themselves.

“There’s a young couple on the island who were working in Edinburgh and came here five years ago with the intention of setting up an oyster farm and that’s what they did,” he said. “They weren’t looking to be employed by anyone, they were creating a business.”

Yet it is this aspect of island life that Mr Dennis believes could be under threat from the well-documented difficulties small business have had in securing bank finance since the credit crunch of a decade ago.

“Between 2008 and 2014 the banks were kind of like Mr Potter in the film It’s a Wonderful Life - all the banks became owned by Mr Potters for a good six years,” he said. They were basically punishing all their customers for the idiocy of their own management in the years prior to 2008.

“When I moved here in 2003 I took an account with a bank in Campbeltown because people said they had a manager who came to see you. He understood business - if you asked him for something he thought not appropriate he would tell you straight away. He never operated with the idiocy of the top brass yet when they caused the problems of 2008 the top brass got rid of people like him.”

With no real banking relationship after that, Mr Dennis turned to peer-to-peer lender Funding Circle when, in 2013, he wanted to borrow £18,000 for the flower essence business, returning for a further £20,000 in 2015.

“If I had even tried to go to a bank to get that it would have been like talking to Mr Potter,” he said. “Funding Circle came along and it looked like a more interesting idea.

“Their business model was based on lots of people with excess money who wanted to put it in something like that. I watched online as lots of different people said they would lend X amount at X per cent and it gradually built up to the amount I needed.”

However, while the initial loan was spread across 266 separate lenders, Mr Dennis said that on the second occasion it appeared that the banks had moved in to take advantage of the due diligence businesses like Funding Circle do on their investors’ behalf.

“Within minutes of my application going public, corporate investors had grabbed it up,” he said. “It was a big corporate bank and it was a steady rate of seven per cent. The fun was taken out of it.”

Not that that has eroded his entrepreneurial spirit. Having begun producing ice-cream at the Wee Isle Dairy two years ago, Mr Dennis and his wife Emma Rennie are about to begin a batch of commercial production that will see their product carried initially on the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry that connects the mainland with neighbouring Islay.

Do not expect to see him mix his business interests by flavouring any ice-creams with exotic orchid essences, though. While he did once supply Mackie’s of Scotland with an essence for a now-discontinued sorbet, Mr Dennis said that to add it to his own ice-cream “raises issues I’m not happy with”.

“We’d be giving orchid essence to people who are not looking for it. I thought long and hard about doing it but it’s just too complex,” he said.