Not too many career catalysts involve a nip on the toe from a flying insect. But for Ian Gray CA, founder and Non-Executive Director of Edinburgh-based LiverScan, just such an irritating brush with nature proved a turning point in an already remarkable professional narrative.

“I was in the south of France in 2019 with a couple of pals and having a snooze, and I felt a bite on my foot,” he says. “Later I said to my friends, ‘I’m not feeling that great and I have some chest pains. I’m going to miss lunch.’ The boys said, ‘No, we’d better go find a doctor.’ But it was Ascension Day, so everywhere was closed – so we used the Scottish method and just drank gin for the rest of the day.”

The role played by distilled juniper berries in moments of clarity is debatable. But Gray experienced an epiphany that day, and decided it was time to address his state of health. “When I got home I visited a specialist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London, just to get my heart checked out. They said, ‘Your heart’s as strong as an ox, but we looked down at your liver and it looked a bit fatty.’ I was a wee bit concerned because, in my past, being a rugby player and so on…. So off I went to meet a liver specialist who took me through a Fibroscan test, which measures the stiffness and fat content of your liver.”

As it transpired, Gray – in common with one in five people in the UK, according to the British Liver Trust – had early-stage fatty liver disease. This is the earliest stage of damage to an organ tasked with more than 500 functions. The condition is reversible as long as it is not allowed to advance to the scarring (or cirrhosis) stage. But too often it does exactly that because the early stages of the condition are woefully under-diagnosed – partly because liver disease shows no obvious symptoms until the problem is medically advanced.

In the UK alone, there are more than 11,000 deaths due to liver disease annually – more than 30 each day – a fourfold increase over the past half a century. Having discovered all of this during a burst of research prompted by his health scare, Gray spotted a chance to make a difference.

Humble beginnings

By this stage of his career, Gray had already built up a significant accountancy background, for which he credits the industry of his parents during his formative years. “Without giving you a sob story, my dad was a railway man and my mum was working three jobs to get me to a good school,” he says. “And being at a fee-paying school, I was surrounded by guys whose dads were professionals – accountants, lawyers and so on – and all driving nice cars and living in nice houses. I realised then that I’d have to work hard to get onto that kind of route.”

Following a joint honours degree in business studies and law at Edinburgh University, Gray pursued what he describes as “the milk round for the accountancy firms”. Price Waterhouse, Coopers & Lybrand, Ernst & Young and Thomson McLintock (now PwC, EY and KPMG respectively) all came knocking once he’d completed his studies, but another company won his favour. “What swung it was Arthur Andersen were paying £200 more a year,” he laughs. “That was a big number back then.”

Gray moved into corporate recovery, then moved over to corporate banking. “I’d had great fun, running businesses and working on the technical side of insolvency, but I didn’t see a long-term future in it. While I was working at TSB, I was approached by the Bank of Scotland to join its leveraged buyout team,” he says. “We did the majority of the leveraged buyouts in the UK for private equity companies.”

A move with the bank to Paris in the mid-1990s followed, then a stint with the City-based private equity company Candover. “I was working with a lot of clever people,” he says. “It was a case of going out, finding transactions, winning those transactions, structuring them and doing the documentation. In those days of private equity you did everything.”

Gray’s proudest achievements during this period include a buyout of Inveresk Research in 1999 and an investment in Edinburgh-based energy and life sciences research firm Wood Mackenzie in 2005. “That was the kind of work I enjoyed; going in, winning over the management team, competing against other private equity companies,” he says.

“Candover made 10 times their equity on both of these transactions. We went into Inveresk Research at £60m, and it was listed on Nasdaq at, eventually, about £1.2bn. And Wood Mackenzie went from the £120m we bought it for to £1.8bn or so eventually. So these were good times. Then 2008 came along…”

Back for good

The worst global downturn since the 1929 Wall Street crash prompted another watershed moment in Gray’s career. “Some business pals and I decided to become a boy band, doing small deals, revenue generating.” The “boy band” founded 24Haymarket, named after the address of its London office. Another followed in Edinburgh’s Charlotte Square (at the same address where Gray trained with Arthur Andersen back in the 1980s), and then – triggered by that brush with a toe-nibbling miniature life form – a desire to operate in the health sphere. The angel investment firm now has 80 high-net-worth members.

Gray’s mission from here has been partly influenced, he says, by where he grew up. “Almost 50% of liver disease in the UK is alcohol related,” he points out, “but in Scotland, it’s 70%. And so about three years ago I thought, ‘I’m going to do something about this.’ So I contacted the manufacturer of Fibroscan, a French company, and asked them, could I buy one of their machines.”