Dr Alasdair Allan and Michelle Thomson are joining Drew Hendry as Strategic Advisers with Growth for Good, a Scottish advisory practice supporting responsible growth and helping organisations prepare for public-sector engagement in the Highlands and across Scotland.
The question behind Growth for Good has always been straightforward: how can we help businesses and organisations succeed in ways that leave the places around them stronger?
My experience in business and public life has convinced me that commercial success and wider benefit can support each other. But making that happen takes more than good intentions. It requires an understanding of the business, the place and the people affected by its decisions.
That thinking has shaped Growth for Good through advisory work and conversations with founders, business leaders, and community builders on the podcast. Those conversations keep bringing me back to the same point: a decision’s quality depends partly on whose experience shapes it.
That is why I am pleased to welcome Dr Alasdair Allan and Michelle Thomson as Strategic Advisers with Growth for Good.
They bring distinct perspectives to a shared purpose. Both understand the weight of decisions that affect businesses and communities, and both bring experience that will strengthen the advice we can offer.
The experience we bring together
Alasdair brings deep knowledge of rural and island communities, alongside his experience in the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government. Originally from the Borders, he has spent many years living and working in the Western Isles. His understanding of language, culture and place matters because a proposal that looks convincing on paper can still misunderstand the community it is intended to serve.
Michelle brings substantial commercial and transformation experience alongside her parliamentary work. She understands the demands facing people who must commit investment, manage risk and make change work in practice. She is willing to examine assumptions closely and ask whether an argument stands up to the realities of running a business.
My own contribution remains rooted in business, regional development and the Highlands. Working together gives us more scope to examine a problem from different directions, challenge one another’s thinking and offer advice suited to the circumstances.
How Growth for Good will help
We will help organisations prepare for public-sector engagement and develop growth plans that are commercially credible and useful to the places where they operate. That might involve testing a proposal before a major commitment, strengthening its evidence or working through what community benefit should mean in practice.
Our role is clear. We advise clients and help them prepare. They make their own decisions and present their own case. We do not lobby or make representations on their behalf.
The conversation continues
The Growth for Good podcast continues too. Listening to people building businesses and doing useful work in their communities remains central to Growth for Good. Their experience keeps the wider conversation grounded.
I am looking forward to the work we can do together, and to the questions that work will ask of us.
If you are developing a project or facing a decision where our experience could help, find out more about Growth for Good.
