In July 2022 we purchased the former Rolls-Royce Heritage Museum and are currently in the process of refurbishing it as a heritage vehicles centre featuring workshops for classic vehicle artisans, retail and office space, storage for over 100 cars and a training school to keep alive fast disappearing skills

We are an opportunistic investor in commercial property, particularly Offices, in the Midlands and the North. Recently we have started to look at Retail opportunities.

We are a group of East Midlands based business people who invest in early stage or start up high growth business and real estate opportunities. Recent investments include Work Wallet, a developer of health & safety software, Quensus who make equipment which detects water leaks and measures water use and Taraz who make equipment which operates alongside 3D printed products to measure their accuracy. We also invest in well designed small residential development schemes.

I had the huge privilege to be a partner in this Law firm, finally retiring in June 2023. I was a corporate lawyer with substantial experience in M&A work, private equity backed transactions; privatisations from local authorities and outsourcing contracts. I also used to handle Freeths AiM flotations from the Derby Office. The Derby office was the first to open outside of the Nottingham mothership. I was senior partner from when the office opened in 1995 to 2016 and was also managing partner for 10 years and a member of the Management Board

As High Sheriff my primary project was to raise aspirations and careers awareness of children at primary schools in the more deprived parts of Derbyshire. To do this I used a presentation prepared by Penguin PR of Derby which I showed to over 6500 pupils in Derbyshire. I prepared a report on my observations and put over 55 schools onto a careers portal administered by a charity called Education & Employers

DCHC has been providing holidays at our centre in Skegness for children from difficult home backgrounds for over 125 years and is one of the best known charities in Derbyshire. As well as contributing as a trustee to the general oversight of the Charity, I also tend to be involved when issues of a legal nature arise - such as governance and disciplinary issues. I also oversaw the succesful application for our Queens Award for Voluntary Service.

Too many of our local children are leaving school without the tools to take advanatge of the great opportunities available to them in this area. Our job is to help raise the aspirations of our local schoolchildren; to give them the ambition to take advantage of these opportunities and to help them to develop the soft skills they need to grab those opportunities. We have over 800 volunteers and last year we managed 14,000 interventions with schoolchildren through Mock Interviews, CV Writing, Careers Fairs and Talks, Enterprise Challenge Days and Mentoring.

I was one of the founders of Marketing Derby and its first Chair. The disdain in which cities like Derby, with great manufacturing bases, were regarded used to annoy me intensely. In Derby and its surrounding area we have some of the best advanced manufacturing in the UK and I decided that it was about time that we started to deliver that message loud and clear to the World. The result was Marketing Derby, which is now one of the best city marketing and inward investment agencies in the UK. A couple of years ago Marketing Derby won a Financial Times award for having the best strategic marketing plan in the World - ahead of New York and Hong Kong!

Predominantly large scale commercial property development work including large regeneration schemes at Snowhill Station Birmingham and the Saddlers Shopping Centre in Walsall; various substantial office schemes in Milton Keynes and industrial units in Andover Hampshire. Whilst there, I also started a corporate practice and handled a variety of M&A work.

A member of this firms Real Estate division specialising in insolvent real estate companies during the secondary banking collapse in the mid 1970s

I was one of the first Leeds University graduates to be accepted as a trainee solicitor at Macfarlanes