From Angry Young Man to financial pioneer - The Adam Tavener story

How Clifton Asset Management was created, and then sold

Hello Rainmakers

We all like a story of triumph over adversity - especially when it has a few twists and turns on the way to a happy ending.

And few business owners had more of a rollercoaster ride early in their working life than Adam Tavener, the founder of Clifton Asset Management.

Having slept rough as a teenager and been let go from his first job, he drew on his experiences to grow Clifton from a standing start to having assets under management of £2.5bn - before selling earlier this year to PE firm CBPE Capital.

As Adam settles into a well-earned retirement, our South West editor Rob Buckland caught up with him to look back at the highs and lows of his business life.

Adam Tavener isn’t your usual sort of business founder. But then he didn’t have a usual sort of start to his business life.

Having left school at 16 with only a handful of ‘O’ levels, he was suddenly forced to leave home and find work and somewhere to live following a family rift.

This being the late 1970s, the ‘work’ turned out to be on the misnamed Youth Opportunity Programme (YOP) scheme. It was with a firm of estate agents, paying £17 a week - £12 of which went on rent.

But as Adam recalls: “It turned out I was the world’s most inept estate agent. They let me go, unsurprisingly.”

With no job and no prospects - and so hard up that at one time he slept on a bench at Bristol Temple Meads railway station - Adam decided to sell his moped as a last resort, using the money to fund a six-month trip around Europe.

Following a stint as a deck hand on a yacht in the Mediterranean, he returned to his native Bristol, in his words, an “angry young man”.

Back looking for work again, he saw an advert in the Bristol Evening Post for a commission-only telesales sales job flogging savings and insurance products. He decided to give it a try.

“At that time financial services were unregulated. There was no training, they just sat you at a desk, gave you a phone and a telephone directory and told you to get on with it,“ he said.

“Not surprisingly, the staff turnover was 100%. But I realised I was good at selling. I’m as stubborn as old boots and I wouldn’t take no for an answer from the people I was calling.”

Thriving under the pressure, and with the commission starting to roll in, he was certain he could do better by starting his own business.