Director, President, Chairman - just what job title would you give Sir Tom Farmer CBE? The answer is, well, all of them! In a career spanning fifty years and counting, Scotland's best-known businessman has pretty much done it all.

He's the owner of an SPL football club (his home team, Hibernian), he's the Chairman of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme, the honorary president of Young Enterprise Scotland, and he works tirelessly for charity. He's been described as entrepreneur and a philanthropist. He's been awarded a whole host of honours, including Scottish

Businessman of the Year - and he's even a Knight!

Amazingly, he still found the time to come and talk to us at the recent Dare event at St Stephen's High School, Port Glasgow!

So what inspired him to succeed in business? The youngest of seven children, he left school at 15 years old to become a Stores Boy for a local tyre firm in Edinburgh. But he already had the makings of an entrepreneur - as a young boy he would buy bikes, repair them and sell them on at a profit, then clean cookers in the evenings to make extra money.

And when the company he worked for as a salesman didn't pay him the commission he was owed, he vowed never to work for anyone else again. He's never looked back.
He set up his own tyre and car accessories firm, built it up into a chain, sold it to a rival company four years later and retired at the age of 30. End of story? Well, not quite…

Just a few months later, Sir Tom was back in the world of work to set up the company that would become Kwit Fit. It was an inspired idea - the company would specialise in fitting tyres, brakes and exhausts, training staff well and giving the customer great service.

And thanks to a clever marketing campaign, it became just as famous for its cheesy television adverts featuring staff dancing while they changed tyres (ask anyone over 25 and they'll sing you the theme tune!).

But, unlike his dancing tyre fitters, Sir Tom always kept his feet on the ground. He made it a company rule that all staff - no matter what job they did within the company - would have to spend one week every year fitting tyres and exhausts at a Kwik Fit branch. And he took his turn.

On one occasion, he took a call from Kwik-Fit's Dunfermline branch, asking him to fill in for someone who was sick. He did!

He sold the company to car-maker Ford in 1999, but still has a wide range of business and charity interests, including the Farmer Foundation, an organisation founded by him and which provides meals for over 300,000 school children in Malawi very day.