Martin Gilbert looks out over the descending sprawl of the Royal Aberdeen golf course, host of this year’s Scottish Open, and out to sea.
The chief executive of the event’s headline sponsor, Aberdeen Asset Management (AAM), says now is the time for the north-east to set its focus on becoming a major golf destination.
“This may be the biggest sporting event ever in Aberdeen,” he notes.
He says it is no coincidence that since Trump International Golf Links opened its gates, the Marcliffe Hotel has doubled the number of bookings it takes from golfers on weekends.
“Aberdeen is a strange market. They never have any problems selling hotel rooms during the week. The issue with Aberdeen is hotel rooms over the weekend.
“I’ve heard that it has become the cheapest weekend destination in the UK on the weekend.
“The great thing about an event like this, and Donald Trump building his golf course, is there is a real opportunity for hoteliers here to make this a weekend golfing destination. With Royal Aberdeen, Trump, Mercar and Cruden Bay, you’ve got four world class courses here.”
This is the third year the firm has sponsored the Scottish Open, and with the likes of Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler, it is useful for developing AAM’s brand in the North American market.
“From our point of view it is exposure to the US that is important to us. It is the only tournament that is on terrestrial TV in the US,” he says.
“We are very proud of our Aberdeen roots, our Scottish roots. We use that a lot in our marketing.
“We position ourselves as a Scottish fund manager. It is very good for the American market that they see this sort of scenery,” he says, gesturing at the view from the window of the firm’s hospitality pavilion.
Mr Gilbert works from offices in Edinburgh and London, and his wife is now Head of Department of Radiology at the University of Cambridge. Meanwhile, is yacht is berthed in Barcelona. Yet Aberdeen is still where he keeps a home and seems to matter to him.
He’d like to see investors take advantage of tax breaks to turn the rooms above shops on Union Street into flats, for instance.
“You know what would be really great is if it could become residential again,” he says. “It would transform Union Street.”
Mr Gilbert has been associated with AAM from its early days when he and his partners bought out a small unit trust business in the 1980s. The company faced dire times in the early noughties during the split-cap trust scandal. But Mr Gilbert has weathered though and since its recent £550million acquisition of rival Scottish Widows Partnership (SWIP), the firm is now top ten in the world for funds under management, and now owns a 2% stake in most the UK’s biggest firms.
Next week is his 59th birthday, but he has no plans to relinquish AAM, either to spend more time at golf or pursue what is already a successful board director portfolio career.
He once went on record saying he’d retire when Sir Alex Ferguson did – only to be caught short when the legendary Aberdeen manager then announced his retirement from leading Manchester United at the tender age of 71.
Mr Gilbert has now changed his plans. He said: “We’ve built a good business here, we’ve got good people. I’d like to work until I’m 80.
“I’ll think about retiring when I reach the age when Alex Ferguson retired.”