Jim McColl refuses to believe anything is impossible

Today the people involved are still recuperating.

They celebrated the completion of the acquisition by drinking law firm Dundas & Wilson's supply of champagne dry in early hours of Wednesday morning.

The paperwork was finished at about 2:30am, and they left closer to 5am.

According to Kenny Hughes, from one of the deal's banks, Barclays Structured Finance, McColl's team plus the bankers, and the inevitable lawyers and accountants, had been working on the agreement around the clock for months.

"The late nights, the hundreds of e-mails, the forests of paper," says Hughes. "I think the local pizza shop will be wondering where we are. It was a long deal this one."

The move astounded the doubters, who said it would be impossible to pull off a move of this scale and complexity in this wintery economic climate. Yet McColl not only rounded up a consortium of bankers – when just one bank would no longer do – he also raised more than 200m for a new Clyde Blowers private equity fund.

This is how he bought the fluid and power division of Textron, the Rhode Island-based multi-industrial company that makes Cessna aircraft.

The four new companies he has acquired bring thousands of new employees and locations in 18 countries to the Clyde Blowers stable.

So how did McColl, who in 1992 bought a 30 per cent stake in an obscure family business that cleaned industrial boilers, become one of Scotland's wealthiest self-made men whose status borders on that of folk hero?

Clyde Blowers is not a new success. McColl started to make waves when it he took the company's turnover from 2m to becoming the biggest player in its industry through a string of acquisitions in the 1990s.

Since last year, however, he has taken the business up a gear, seeing two of the group's companies listed on AIM and doubling the size of them.

Last year McColl dominated the headlines on the back of a much smaller deal than Textron, though one which had elements of high drama often lacking in mergers and acquisitions.

He successfully bought Weir Pumps, an old-fashioned engineering business with a long history, saving it from a sale to a multi-national company Sulzer that had plans to shut it down. Not only was McColl the saviour of 600 jobs, but he was the returning hero – having started his career as an apprentice in the very factory he bought.

Yet the drama hides some pertinent detail about McColl. At the time there were sceptics – if Weir didn't want the business what could McColl do that was better?

There was concerns he was following his heart, not his head. But the sceptics underestimated him. Although the City and Guilds claim him as one of the most successful former apprentices on their "vocational rich list", he is more than a just a former shop floor worker.

McColl went on from his apprenticeship to get chartered accountancy qualifications as well as an MBA.

It is his financial expertise and his understanding of the shop floor that has turned him into one of the few entrepreneurs in the UK now who could raise the near-1 billion to do the deal.

David Atterbury, vice-president of private equity fund-of-funds, Harbourinvest, believes what McColl has to offer is the model of the way high finance will recover from the global liquidity crisis.

That is, he has an insight into the industries he was buying and a vision for a global business that will only get bigger. Harbourinvest have given McColl 130m to do with as he likes: "It is his show," says Atterbury.

"Since the dreaded credit crunch term was coined, it is all about how private equity is going to make money. They made their money in the past through leverage.

"But now they really need to knuckle down and add some value to the companies they invest in. Well, that is why we are backing Jim," says Atterbury.

McColl still raises eyebrows when he says he has no plans to rationalise the businesses. What initially attracted him to the Textron deal was its Michigan-based Union Pumps division.

When two groups merge, redundancies usually follow. Not so, says McColl, who plans only to grow the business, exploiting the links he has forged to major joint ventures in India and China.

"This is a growth story," confirms Atterbury.

McColl's vision has been the same since the 1990s, but it is only recently the financiers seemed to be taking notice.

He restructured his business to make four new businesses, including Interbulk, Clyde Process Solutions and Clyde Bergemann.

They all do very useful but unsexy things – pumps, air filtration, "soot blowing" – but now they do them on an international level, especially in the far East and India. But what has turned the heads of the international financial community back to traditional industries is not what they do, but how much they make doing it.

"It is not about sexy," says Craig Anderson, head of KPMG in Scotland, who has worked with McColl since he took Clyde Blowers private in 1999.

"The question mark was over the future of engineering in the west faced with the competition from the higher-growth economies such as China, India and South American.

"People involved in these things don't give a toss whether it is dull or exciting, it is whether they can make money at it."

Anderson adds: "Jim is a very good strategic thinker. He is tenacious. They say for every action there is a reaction. I think Jim's philosophy is for every downside there is an upside and he tries to see an upside that is bigger than the downside.

"It is that positive mentality, coupled with strategic vision and tenacity, that has got him to do that deal where the odds were clearly stacked against him."

What McColl also seems to have won with this deal is credibility. Charisma is a word often used in describing him. The son of a butcher and raised in council house in Carmunnock, his wealth and education give authority to his easy patter.

"People haven't realised what a strength Jim is in the Scottish business community," says Graeme Bruce, partner with Dundas & Wilson, who has acted for Clyde Blowers on both recent deals. "I would say he is almost unique – he is able to talk with the bankers and talk with the guys on the shop floor.

"He is a natural motivator. It is difficult to go into a room with Jim and not feeling motivated. He is always positive and up for it.

"This is a deal many people said couldn't be done in the current climate and Jim has proved everybody wrong. I always had faith it would happen. It was just a question of when."

BACKGROUND

JAMES Allan McColl is 56. Although he now calls tax haven Monaco home, McColl was raised in a small village outside East Killbride. The Rich List estimates him to be worth 435m.

1992 – McColl bought a 29.9 per cent stake in listed firm Clyde Blowers then worth 2.2m .

1999 – The south-east Asian economic crisis drives the value of the company's shares down from 25m to 10m. McColl takes the group private.

2000 – The Entrepreneurial Exchange makes him entrepreneur of the year.

2001 – He receives an OBE and the Ernst & Young Master Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

2007 – Clyde Process Solutions and Interbulk Investments both do major reverse takeovers and are listed on AIM.

May 2007 – Acquires Weir Pumps for 45m.

March 2008 – McColl picks up an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow for outstanding contribution to business and industry.