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Growing up on a council estate in Perth, Sir Brian Souter and his sister Dame Ann Gloag could never have imagined that Stagecoach, which they founded in 1980 with two second-hand buses running express services from Scotland to London, would blossom into one of the world’s largest, most innovative and highly respected transport groups.

The foundations for Brian’s business success were set long before Stagecoach took to the road. Childhood days listening to his dad’s stories of his life as a bus driver were instrumental in setting alight Brian’s passion for that particular form of passenger transport.

Brian with his original stagecoach, which he still owns to this day

A life “on the buses” was not what Brian’s parents – Iain and Cathy – had in mind for their young son. While they urged him to focus on his studies, his early days at school weren’t exactly a roaring success and at one point his poor performance led to him being warned he would be thrown out if he didn’t agree to repeat the year.

A stern warning from his father and a shift in subject choices soon had him back on track.

“Changing my timetable from science and maths to include economics and accounts was one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Brian said.

He soon rose to become a top performer, passing his exams and winning the dux prize in economics and accounts.

“I’m walking proof that you don’t have to be an academic genius to win school prizes. We all have different talents and with a bit of hard work and application, even rebellious pupils like me can succeed,” he reflected.

On leaving school, Brian studied to become a commerce teacher at Dundee College of Technology, whilst also joining his dad at Alexanders Bus Company in Perth as a student bus conductor, time that would provide a tremendous grounding in the industry.

Soon after he changed tack to pursue a career as a chartered accountant. Enrolling at Strathclyde University, he completed a joint accountancy and economics degree in two years. Many years later Sir Brian would become President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (“ICAS”), not something he would have foreseen in those early years at school.  

The bus industry was never far from his mind, though, and Brian helped fund his studies by working full-time on the buses with Central SMT in Glasgow. Working early morning split shifts, Brian finishing just in time to sprint into university – still wearing his bus conductor uniform – to attend lectures, before resuming his conducting duties in the afternoon.

Brian working his way through university

On graduating from Strathclyde, Brian joined Arthur Andersen, then one of the world’s leading chartered accountancy firms.

Based in their Glasgow office, Brian was reluctant to hang up his conductor’s hat so, breaking the firm’s rules which outlawed moonlighting, he continued to work secretly on the buses at weekends.

But he was not to get away with his double life forever. Greatly embarrassed, Brian had to admit that he had a dual career when, one Monday morning, he appeared at Arthur Andersen with cuts and bruises all over his face and a bloody nose. He explained to his bosses that he had been attacked by a drunken passenger for insisting the man pay his fare on a late-night bus journey.

Colleagues at Arthur Andersen would speculate it was diesel, not blood, that flowed through Brian’s veins, so none of them were surprised when he left the firm set up his own bus business, though many counselled him against it. He would later recruit four former Arthur Andersen colleagues to assist him in growing Stagecoach.

Brian and his father working on the buses in Perth

The idea of cheap and efficient transport which also served food on services to London was a revolutionary concept in the 1980s.

In those days, there were no intercity coach services operating in Scotland, so opportunities to provide new, affordable bus services were thick on the ground.

Aberdeen in particular was wide open. On his many trips to the city to visit Arthur Andersen’s clients, the would-be entrepreneur spotted untapped demand for intercity bus services with the oil industry expanding rapidly.

By this time, Brian had made up his mind that his future lay in transport. Using his father’s redundancy money, a mortgage on Ann’s house, and his own savings, Brian and Ann bought two coaches and Stagecoach was born.

The new services immediately grabbed the imagination of the travelling public.  While the distinctive orange, red and blue livery was anything but subtle, it enabled their buses to stand out from the crowd and ensured the brand made an immediate impact. Their “passenger-first” approach, a novel idea at the time, differentiated the business and generated enormous customer loyalty and Stagecoach grew rapidly.

“Its amazing how grateful people were to you for simply answering their phone call with a timetable query or lost property enquiry. Simple stuff really”, Brian recalls.

Brian with the open top bus used on the Perth city tour

The early 1980s ushered in a period of dramatic expansion for Stagecoach. In those days, bus services across Britain were very much part of the public sector, a mix of local authority and state-owned transport authorities. Some services were good, but many left a lot to be desired. Brian knew things would have to change.

He was right. In 1985, the UK government announced plans to deregulate all bus services outside London and this presented Brian and Ann with the opportunity to revolutionise Britain’s transport sector.

A master strategist, Brian was the architect of the growth blueprint that would lead to Stagecoach expanding across the UK and around the world.

One of the early services he launched was Magicbus, which redeployed old London Routemaster buses in Glasgow, offering passengers incredibly cheap fares.

Organic growth was impressive but, recognising the opportunity for market consolidation and economies of scale, Brian took Stagecoach on an acquisition trail, buying National Bus Company operations in Cumberland, Hampshire, East Midlands, Ribble in Lancashire, Southdown on the South Coast and the United Counties.

In the early 1990s, Stagecoach bought further bus operations in Scotland, Newcastle and London, with Manchester added to the roster a few years later.

He didn’t know it at the time, but the experience of raising private equity investment to fund Stagecoach acquisitions would prove formative as he set the strategy for his own family office Souter Investments when it was created years later.

Brian driving the bus he travelled on to pick berries as a child

By 1993, only 13 years after the formation of the company, Stagecoach was one of the UK’s leading bus companies. Brian calculated it was time to float the business on the London Stock Exchange giving access to more capital for fresh expansion opportunities – not just for buses, but trains as well. Stagecoach went public that year with an initial market cap of £134m.

Following privatisation of the rail network in 1995, Stagecoach eyed keenly the newly created franchises around the country. As ever, there were to be no half-measures and the company launched a bid for the biggest of them all, South West Trains. Stagecoach’s tender was successful, and it became the first private sector company to win a rail franchise.

The company continued to operate South West Trains for many years, adding East Midlands Trains and the East Coast Main Line to its rail portfolio. Stagecoach also had a 49% stake in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Rail Group, which operated the West Coast Main Line. New trains were introduced and passenger numbers trebled. Virgin Trains had the highest customer satisfaction of any franchised UK rail operator when its contract came to an end.

Launching the flotation of the company on the stock exchange at Scone Palace

Having grown into a market leader domestically in the UK, Brian felt the new millennium was the time for Stagecoach to develop its interests overseas. The company had soon extended its footprint, buying buses and ferries in New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Malawi and Hong Kong, as well as a train leasing company, Porterbrook.  This buy-and-build strategy was successful and the Stagecoach share price increased substantially.

In 1997, Brian decided to step back from the role of CEO and became chairman, appointing a professional manager to run the business day-to-day.

Soon after, in 1998, Stagecoach bought Coach USA the largest bus and coach operator in the USA and also a major player in Canada. Soon they discovered the company was riddled with problems, so much so that it jeopardised the future of the entire Stagecoach group. The company’s share price dived and its lenders started to exert pressure on it to restructure.

Brian returned as Chief Executive with a mandate to get a grip on the issues and soon began selling-off ailing parts of the Coach USA business alongside other businesses around the world, while reorganising the remainder. Stagecoach was soon returned to profitability, and with a significantly deleveraged balance sheet. Back in the UK, the company’s core bus and train businesses continued to go from strength-to-strength.

In 2003, Stagecoach launched MegaBus, a revolutionary new express intercity coach service, selling tickets online via its website and utilising “yield managed” pricing strategies. Demand variable pricing is well established now, particularly for air travel, but this was a hugely innovative move in the market at the time, and the first example of a bus company using dynamic pricing.

Launch of Megabus UK

Over the years Brian has been presented with many honours and awards, including the Scottish Business Achievement Award, the Scottish Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Ernst & Young UK Master Entrepreneur of the Year title and the Businessman of the Year Award.

As a team player, the awards he treasures most are those bestowed upon Stagecoach Group rather than him personally. There are too many to mention but they include numerous UK Bus operator awards.

He has also accepted honorary degrees from the University of Abertay and his alma mater, the University of Strathclyde.

In May 2017, he was appointed President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland. And his greatest honour came in 2011 when he was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honour’s List and later received his knighthood at Buckingham Palace, with his proud family looking on.  

Brian receives his EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards

The new decade ushered in an era of change and opportunity for the Souter family. In 2022, Brian, along with Dame Ann, took the decision to support the sale of Stagecoach to DWS Infrastructure, ending a journey that had spanned four and a half decades.

Since the sale, Brian has become more focused on the work of his two eponymous organisations, as co-founder of his family investment office Souter Investments, established in partnership with Andy Macfie 2006 primarily focussed on making private equity investments in private companies, and as a trustee of the Souter Charitable Trust (“SCT”), a charity set up with his wife, Lady Elizabeth, in 1992 to support the relief of human suffering in both the UK and abroad.

Since 2006, SCT has awarded more than 22,000 grants totalling over £150 million in funding, supporting a range of UK registered charities to make a difference, both in the UK and overseas. Funded exclusively by the Souter family and their interests, SCT supports both faith-based organisations, in line with Brian’s deeply held Christian values, and secular projects.

Brian is the father of four children who have become increasingly active as trustees in SCT. He also has five grandchildren, and he and Lady Elizabeth relish nothing more than spending quality time with their family.