The former drug addict who found God and built a successful business

By Julie Griffiths | BBC News |

At his lowest point, Ryan Longmuir took drugs every day “just to feel normal”.

He was also dealing them, and at one point faced a possible jail sentence.

Born in the Scottish new town of Cumbernauld, Ryan began experimenting with drugs when he was 12, initially because he was curious and had fallen in with likeminded friends.

“I tried everything – cocaine, Valium, ecstasy, speed, heroin… I’d go on benders for two or three days at a time, and I’d take five or 10 ecstasy tablets in one night,” he says.

“From the age of 15 to 20 I took drugs every single day.”

Thankfully for Ryan, everything changed when he was 20, and he has not touched drugs ever since. While the cynical may raise their eyebrows, Ryan, now 37, says he discovered God and quit overnight.

Without the drugs, he was able to get his life back, and aged 24 he launched a catering company called Regis Banqueting.

Today the 13-year-old business has blue-chip clients including mobile phone network O2, luxury carmaker Bentley, and investment bank JP Morgan.

To earn money he got a job working with drug and alcohol addicts, where he was able to draw on his own experience to try to help others to quit.

However, when the funding for his role ran out a few years later he found himself without work. It was then that the opportunity to start his own business came about.

His church wanted a catering company to run the cafe attached to their conference centre on an ad hoc basis, and the then-pastor suggested Ryan might fit the bill.

Despite having little to no catering experience he jumped at the chance and Regis Banqueting was formed. Ryan attended catering college alongside running the cafe and learned as he went along.

“I had to phone my mother-in-law to ask how you make steak pie,” he says.

“I was young and naive. If I knew what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have started it.”

To help Ryan expand the business into contract catering, the Princes Trust, the UK start-up support charity led by the Prince of Wales, gave him a £5,000 loan.

While Ryan says the first three years were tough, with him taking a salary of just £6,000 in year one, over time the clients and contracts got bigger.

Cumbernauld-based Regis Banqueting now has 65 staff – 20 full-time and 40 part-time, many of whom are seasonal – and annual turnover is £1.3m.

Meanwhile, Ryan and the company have won a number of awards including the Royal Bank of Scotland’s young business of the year crown, and director of the year from the Institute of Directors organisation.

Prof Eleanor Shaw, head of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde, says it is Ryan’s motivation and enthusiasm that helps make him such a success.

“Catering is a really difficult market to be competitive in, but he has such energy,” she says. “He’s very hardworking and is so motivated that it brushes off on everyone around him.”

Looking back on his troubled youth, Ryan says he knows that his life might have turned out very differently.

As a result he tries to help others who face addiction and poverty, for instance by employing former addicts and ex-offenders.

He is also in the process of starting another company, alongside Regis, that will focus on creating a brand of casual dining restaurants, the first to be launched in Glasgow next year. The plan is to expand across Scotland and the UK before going international.

“I say to my wife sometimes that it’s amazing how we’re making more money than a doctor or lawyer – and we’re making sandwiches,” says Ryan.