A man who gave up climbing the corporate ladder to fill his life with purpose will speak at Entrepreneurial Scotland’s annual conference tomorrow.
Gib Bulloch, from the Isle of Bute, will join the illustrious line-up of keynote speakers including record-breaking adventurer Mark Beaumont and Angus Macdonald, chairman of distance learning group ICS Learn.
Mr Bulloch is an award-winning social “intrapreneur” who will address the conference on the role of business in society.
After an early career in BP and Mars, Mr Bulloch’s “epiphany” came from a year as a business volunteer with VSO in the Balkans in 2000.
The next 15 years were spent founding and scaling Accenture’s global “not-for-loss” consulting business, ADP. He left Accenture in 2016 to explore new ways of supporting purpose-driven insurgencies within the corporate world.
Speaking ahead of the conference he said: “I went into the big bad world of business in the London rat race. After doing that for a few years the story changed for me in around 2000.
“After having a successful career with money, cars and a jet-set lifestyle it was all going well from that perspective but I felt there was something missing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on and it was this sense of purpose.
“For me I felt ‘Is this all there is to life, making money and getting up the career ladder?’ At that time I was reading an article about VSO looking for business folk and I found myself, within a year, in the Balkans just
after the Kosovo crisis. That’s where my career epiphany took place.
“At the time I intended to do some good for a while then climb back up the corporate ladder but together with a team of people, we created a social enterprise within this large consultancy called Accenture.
“What made it unusual is we would take people from Accenture offices around the world and they would give up half their salary, the firm would give up profits and the charity would pay for services at half the normal rate. My job was to ensure the whole thing would break even.”
The conference, which is being supported by headline partner Cazenove Capital and The Courier, the Press and Journal and Energy Voice as co-media partners, takes place at the five-star Gleneagles resort in Perthshire tomorrow.