Jim Fairweather

Jim received his first taste of working in Economic Development at the age of 20 via a posting in the Civil Service to develop a business start programme. Specifically, he was tasked with providing a business support infrastructure to the government initiative called the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Jim is now the Director of Harmonia Premier Care.

This involved the recruitment and management of a network of business advisers. One of the key tasks was to ensure a consistent level of advice throughout the network, which was applied through a series of seminars that he developed in conjunction with Durham Business School. These seminars were adopted nationally and were still in use over two decades later.

Throughout Jim’s career within the Civil Service and, laterally, Scottish Enterprise, which included secondments to the EU, he had various tasks bestowed on him. In the early 1990s, he was chosen to head up a task group to work within Eastern Europe post-perestroika to create an enterprise culture. This had never existed under the Communist regime, and Jim was asked to advise on the setting up of business parks and the associated infrastructure required to support fledgling businesses.

In Scotland, Jim developed a start-up programme designed for rapid-growth SME’s to support them with advice and access to finance, which involved setting up a network of specialist advisors and financial institutions to assist the group.

Running in tandem with his career, Jim always had a passion for property development and had bought, refurbished, and sold his first two properties by the age of 21. Throughout his professional career, he has always had property development schemes in the background until the early 2000s when he decided to commit full-time to the sector. This involvement took many guises: from developing properties for rental to being involved with small developments to be sold on the open market. Over the last ten years, this has gravitated to the repurposing of commercial buildings to bring them back to life for use in social or supported living housing. Jim is passionate about taking tired and unloved properties and transforming them into sustainable quality housing for vulnerable individuals.

Jim is also the Managing Director of Safe As Houses. Safe As Houses (SAH) was specifically designed from the outset to safely scale and become the Market Leader in the enormous and continuously growing UK specialised housing market, which delivers social and care housing within the community. SAH has several demonstrable unique aspects, which are all required to deliver a the sustainable solution in the highly fragmented sector and close the vast gap between delivering dignity to users by moving more towards smaller self-contained units rather than large institutional blocks.