DSP - David Burrows

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David Burrows Partner

David Burrows - Partner

I was educated at Dame Alice Owens School in Potters Bar and left in 1995 at 18 to pursue a dream of working in the City. For this reason, I didn’t go to University, instead preferring the cut and thrust of City life.

Initially, I went to work for Barclays, working in and around their City offices getting a grounding in general banking, client facing and back office work. After a couple of years, I moved on to a job in Eurobonds at JP Morgan in Blackfrairs. Our work involved middle office processing on Certificates of Deposit, Medium Term Notes and Bonds. This was where I first met Keith Watson who works with us now. After a few years, our department was bought out by Citigroup and I continued with them for a while before moving to Bank of New York.

Around this time, I was starting to realise that I wanted to see some sort of end product for the work that I was doing and left Bank of New York on a whim. I had a general interest in property and a few speculative letters and CV’s soon saw me working within the Christie Group in their Finance Brokerage, RCC. I spent five sometimes happy years there, seeing the company change it’s branding to Christie First (it is now Christie Finance) and eventually rising to look after the Corporate Healthcare side of the finance business.

It was at Christies that I met Stephen Crisp (my now business partner) who I used to refer life assurance business to.
At Christies, the targets kept rising and the salary did not and this prompted a complete rethink about the whole concept of working for someone else. For years, I was certain that managers above me were taking the wrong decisions and that I thought I could do a better job myself. I decided that what I needed was a rethink and a complete break. I took a 4-month travel break to the USA, Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. This was great and the first time I had done something like this since starting work from school. It gave me a chance to think about what I wanted to do.

Upon return, I had a job offer from Chandler & Co. which I took. This opened my eyes to a really different way of working and I still look back fondly on my short time there but I realised that this was still working for someone else. Eventually, I decided to set up a finance brokerage with Stephen Crisp who was also feeling similarly disillusioned. This is how David Stephen Partners came about and the subsequent companies that spun off of it.

Starting our own company has been the best thing we ever did and allows us to do things the way we always thought was the best way to do them. DS Partners is going great guns and we’ve never looked back.

From a personal perspective, when I’m not working my hobbies include travel, cricket, skiing and countryside walks exercising my 5-year old Border Collie, Ollie. I’m getting married in the summer to my fiancée and long-time girlfriend Terri.