So Who Are The Most Influential Company Directors?
Companies House data can be really helpful but it is just a vast list of information about individual companies and directors. We believe amazing insights can surface when this flagship Open Data ‘list’ is transformed into an Open Data ‘network’.
As a reminder mnai is leading the way in transforming unmanageable company datasets into meaningful data networks to uncover high-value insights. For instance, we have connected all UK companies, company officers and shareholders- a network of close to 100m relationships — to identify fraud and sales opportunities (among lots of other use cases).
So that brings us to the topic of this post, how do you identify the most influential company directors? Ask your business contacts for some names, trawl the local business press, or Google it?
No, you are going to need a scientific approach to get anything more than a casual opinion.
So, armed with our connected data set and network analysis tools, we show below how we approached the challenge. And for this example, we zoomed in on Scottish cities specifically but the target could just as easily been selected by other criteria: most influential directors by industry or business activity, size of company, age of director, age of company, by postcode, etc.
Number Of Companies In Each Scottish Town & City
To get a handle on the numbers, we wanted to know where directors of currently active Scottish companies live (n.b. we’ve excluded other legal structures such as LLPs). No surprises for the first few but perhaps this is: nearly 7,000 Scottish companies have at least one director who lives in London. We then focussed on directors from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen in the next steps.
Counting The Number Of Co-Directors
The simplest indicator of influence is to count the number of active co-directors a director has, those with the most can be viewed as the most influential. We ran a basic algorithm to count co-directors for each director living in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. To illustrate, here are the most connected directors in Aberdeen, Elaine Black comes out top with 138.
There’s Elaine, right in the middle of her network.
And we’ll repeat the process for the most connected director in Edinburgh, Alistair Campbell with 121 co-directors.
And for Glasgow, it’s Richard Smith with 119 co-directors
Conclusion
The real insight here is that all of the most connected directors in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen are also directors of Brodies & Co (Trustees) Limited, a Brodies Law firm company. Brodies is a ‘super-connector’ for Scottish company officers.
Mike Oaten, Head of Connected Data, mnAI
