Graeme Thompson

Providing funding solutions to businesses throughout the UK

Area Sales Manager at Close Brothers Asset Finance, able to assist businesses through both asset finance and refinance solutions tailored to meet individual customer specific needs. Our solutions cover a variety of assets including vehicles, plant, machinery, coaches and renewable energy projects such as Biomass and small to medium Wind Turbine projects. Funding is made available through our products such as Hire Purchase, Lease, Sale and HP Back and Refinance. With the backing of Close Brothers Group plc, a leading UK merchant banking group, our facilities have helped thousands of customers put their assets straight to work whilst keeping working capital intact.

My role in Close Brothers involves working with accountants, solicitors and renewable energy firms. I focus on business development and sales which involves working with intermediary parties to assist their clients in achieving necessary funding for asset based projects. I have been involved in the sourcing of potential new contacts, relationship building, assisting in the production and distribution of newsletters, establishing our events/ marketing plan, and organising networking events throughout Scotland. On top of this I contribute to planning new strategies for taking the business forward (locally) through my additional roles as the Glasgow representative for both the innovation team and cross selling initiative.

As the marketing intern at Nucoco I was provided an opportunity to undertake a variety of business activities. The company was still in it's infancy when I worked for them and therefore I was able to gain a vastly diverse working experience and one which I believe I would have struggled to find within many other opportunities. My roles with Nucoco involved dealing with the social media marketing campaigns, creative marketing strategies, liaising with clients, data collation and sales. I was able to benefit greatly from the incredibly unique working environment provided by Entrepreneurial Spark, this environment gave me a greater insight into the inner operations of a business and allowed me the opportunity to work alongside some of Scotland's best budding entrepreneurs. My role within Nucoco was very diverse and always evolving, meaning that it was crucial that I was able to react and adapt quickly to new roles and working environments.

I worked at a local Scotmid store for over 5 and a half years as a customer sales assistant, my tasks included the handling of money, communicating with and assisting customers as well as up selling promotional products. The time I spent here allowed me to experience a lot of basic business and marketing tasks such as dealing with promotions and upselling, these experiences gave me a better understanding of marketing at this level.

I started my University career studying Business Management where my interest in marketing steered me towards undertaking more courses in this field and enabled me to specialise in Business with Marketing. My course covered a variety of subjects from business law and economics to Human Resources, International business and marketing communications. As marketing was my main intrigue at University the focus of my dissertation was to look at the relationship between consumers and brands (emotional v rational) and how organisations can use these relationships to create brand loyalty.