Williams Investment Management

The six-year-old firm in Victoria Avenue, Harrogate, manages about £100 million of client capital and its four partners use the old values of “managing other people’s money as they would their own” as a real advantage.

For instance, one of the partners, John Newsome, is critical of income- generation targets that most investment management firms set their employees.

“What will an individual do if, towards the end of the financial year, he or she is not on target? We know for a fact what too many do in that situation: they make it happen.

“How on earth can you truly be acting in clients’ best interests when, before the event, you are charged with achieving a certain target? That is just one example of what we mean about organisations putting their interests before their clients’.” Armed with that old-fashioned service ethos, Williams Investment Management, which has ten employees, is aiming for the Small Business Of The Year title in The Press Business Awards 2010.

It has three other partners, Robert Ash, Denis Kaye and Duncan Williams.

Denis is a chartered accountant and finance director while John, Robert and Duncan met more than 20 years ago at the respected Harrogate stockbroking firm of Cawood Smithie & Co, where they were partners.

John said they concentrated on absolute rather than relative returns. “You cannot spend relative returns. We only exchange your cash for an investment we perceive to be better and if we do not see much value, then we wait until we do; holding cash is no problem to us.” Stressing that they were not salesmen but advisers, John said: “It is our belief that the investment industry has forgotten its raison d’etre. To us, it all too often resembles a branch of marketing that is always required to deliver an upbeat message.

“Our duty is not to deliver a message we think you will want to hear; it is to do our level best to deliver pleasing long-term returns that have been garnered without assuming excessive degrees of risk.”