Scott Kitson believes in keeping business small and personal - and that includes doing yoga two mornings a week with his staff at the Kitson Group of Companies.

Mr. Kitson recently stepped into the group's top post, assuming the positions of president and CEO after his father Kirkham Kitson retired.

But you would be forgiven if you were not quite sure what business interests Mr. Kitson was taking charge of. Although the Kitson name is well-recognised, not all may know how diverse are the range of interests that the family controls under the Kitson Group.

Primarily the businesses are real estate and insurance-related - including a number of subsidiaries; Kitson & Company, Kitson Insurance Services Ltd., Kitson Brokerage Services Ltd. and Kitson Marine & General Insurance Company Ltd., and Kitson Benefit Services which administers life, health and benefit programmes for companies.

But then there is also the landmark Pitts Bay Road hotel, Rosedon and they also hold a controlling interest in hardware store Gorham's.

There are no apologies from Mr. Kitson, however, on there being no loud bells and whistles to announce who the company is, or what they do. He says it is their way, to quietly go about business. They have never advertised much, he said, adding that most of their new business comes through word of mouth.

Although the group is owned by the Kitson family, Mr. Kitson said staff also felt like they were part of that. He added that not many staff left the company, and although he could not compete with the Island's international companies dollar for dollar, staff stayed because they genuinely felt a part of the Kitson Group community.

The Kitson Group - with 35 staff members, and no work permit holders - is organised, Mr. Kitson said, in such a way that not only are managers able to make their own decisions, but to see the impact those choices make on each department.

Mr. Kitson added that if a manager wanted to, for example, spend a certain amount on a project he would counsel them to weigh the expense against how it would bear on their overall results. But that is something that would be clear, he said, from the Profit & Loss statements generated for each area of the group.

“We give employees the information - and that is not just for financials, but other areas too. This empowers them so they can see how they can make decisions that will best effect growth in their areas.”

Fostering a sense of community seems to be something that Mr. Kitson puts a premium on, and that goes for his personal life as well. There is not always a lot of time, but the business leader - who, with his wife, Susan, has three boys; Matthew, 8, Quincy, 6, and James, 3 - said he tries to give back to the community, on top of his business and family responsibilities.

Currently, he sits on the Warwick Academy board (where two of his sons attend) - he runs their annual fundraising Christmas Fair - and he also spent five years as president of Keep Bermuda Beautiful and two years as the president of the Young Members Association of the Bermuda Insurance Institute.

But some things have had to go for the busy man - including week-end rounds of golf, with that time now being kept for family. With a smile though, he says that he still tries to get out on the links once a week - just now he tries to make it mix of business and pleasure, by playing with a work contact on average one morning a week.

Family role:

In his new role, Mr. Kitson said he intends to carry on in the same vein as his forefathers. That includes upholding longstanding business fundamentals which he broke down as firstly, to conduct business ethically and also, to provide the best service possible.

“I explain to my staff that it takes a long time to build an ethical reputation, but just two seconds to lose it. That (principle) goes back to my grand-father really. The other is service, and we believe in being small enough to deliver on that promise.

“We are the quiet guys, we do not do a lot of advertising, except on the real estate side side. With the philosophy of being small, I try to ensure that all managers are enabled to make decisions, so that we keep up with our tag line which is ‘prompt personal service'.”

As for attracting new business, Mr. Kitson said, “we do not want to grow so fast, we want to be the niche players and in a position to consistently provide a certain level of service. We want customers who want to do business with us, and who know our level of integrity and our ability to do business,” he said.

Mr. Kitson, who was an executive vice-president of the company prior to his promotion, follows not only in the footsteps of his father, but also his grandfather. The late Commander Geoffrey Kitson set up the family business in 1947, which along with Kitson's real estate and insurance interests then included Bermuda Island Cruises.

In the 1950s Rosedon Hotel was set up by his grandmother and with the exception of BIC, which was sold off to management, the company continues to operate in those same areas to this day.

But being charged with responsibility for the family's stable of insurance and real estate businesses was not what Mr. Kitson first envisioned doing with his life.

Having spent much of his adolescent and early adult years in the US - he left the Island at 13 to attend boarding school in Concord, Massachusetts and then went on to university at Northeastern in Boston where he graduated with a B.S. degree in interpersonal and organisational communications - Mr. Kitson opted to stay in New England when his first job interview out of university got him an offer for an entry level post in the area.

In an ironic twist, the offer came from an insurance brokerage.

Mr. Kitson laughs when asked what his first position was, he names his title as accounts assistant or “bottom of the totem pole”.

He stayed on with the company for three years, but one slushy February morning on his way to work he stepped into a puddle of freezing water and thought to himself: “What am I doing? It is time to go home.”

That was 1990, and Mr. Kitson has been with the Kitson Group ever since. But in coming back to Bermuda Mr. Kitson said he was not sure at first what direction he should go with his career. Should he join his father in the family business, or try and get into one of the international insurance businesses that had set up in the 1980's - like ACE or XL?

In the end he went with family and joined the Kitson General Insurance Company, again, as an accounts assistant.

But because he choice to join the family firm does not mean that Scott Kitson ever intended to keep everything the same within the Kitson Group of Companies.

In the years since he joined the group, he has made his mark with the proudly self-confessed ‘computer geek' transitioning the company from typewriters to computers, and he has implemented certain perks for employees, like hiring a yoga instructor to come in on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to lead classes from the company's penthouse office balcony.

Looking back on his early days with the group, Mr. Kitson remembered his return to Bermuda as being a bit of a shock- especially on the technology front. Having grown accustomed to using a computer in university and in his first job, Mr. Kitson, all of a sudden, found himself typing up policies on a typewriter.

Atlhough Mr. Kitson said he tried to convince his father of the merits of upgrading the company's information technology systems, his father was not having it, seeing no reason to change the way the company had always done business.

Along the way, Mr. Kitson got himself a computer and started building databases for the company. He later set up an e-mail account and started to slowly introduce technology throughout office. But his father was still reticent to make changes on any scale, finding the cost of outfitting the office with computerised platforms, daunting.

The turning point came when the two attended a course at Harvard together which was designed specifically for the participation of different generations of management from family owned businesses - the Harvard Business School's Families in Business programme.

The intensive two-week course brought together family management from more than 50 companies around the world.

Mr. Kitson said: “We were probably the smallest company participating, and each family company had to have two generations represented. So there we were in a theatre in the round setting with the juniors and seniors from each family divided for case studies. I would give my views, and the professor would say ‘great idea' and my Dad would be shaking his head, saying I was ‘absolutely wrong'. And then later the professor would also say his views were also great.

“What we learned that there is no absolute right answer, but different approaches,” Mr. Kitson said, adding that what it did, for both father and son, was validate the other's business style.

“After that we started to transition the company - once my father realised that I was not a looney just because I wanted computers and e-mail,” Mr. Kitson said, adding that most of the company's databases and programmes had been built in-house and that the group relied predominately on Mac systems.

Although Mr. Kitson started out supporting the company's initial I.T. infrastructure, they eventually hired a small team to manage this for the group.

“I remember saying to my Dad that he should think of I.T. as a wave, and that we could either get on the surfboard and ride it or fight and get crushed by it.”

Now Mr. Kitson heralds technology as helping the group's divisions prosper in recent years. A case in point would be a proprietary system used by Kitson's broking arm that, in effect, allows Bermuda-based insurers to deal directly with the US companies that are looking for capacity.

Kitson's brokerage division grew out of a captive management company that had been active years before. Although the company exited that business, it paved the way, at first, on a small scale, for a broking operation that Mr. Kitson said, is now seeing much demand. He added that being a privately-owned Bermuda firm had been an advantage, as some companies were not keen on dealing with a company that answered to a foreign parent. Many of the Island's larger brokers are owned by foreign corporations.

Another area of the Kitson group that is relatively new and prospering is their commercial property management division - with 700,000 square feet of office space under management.

The Kitson Group itself owns two of the commercial buildings it manages - the Kitson Building and Windsor Place - and takes care of maintenance and leasing for its own and at least eight other Hamilton office buildings including Cumberland House and the Chevron Building.

The idea to get into commercial property management came after Mr. Kitson realised there was a demand for maintenance and tenant services - which they were already doing for their own buildings - from other commercial building landlords.

All in all, it works out well for the family to have such a diverse range of businesses, with Mr. Kitson saying with a grin that they are more likely to in-source than out-source.

“Everything fits nicely into the group of operations, for example, the property management group will become known to a company for its level of service, and then we can introduce them to our insurance department. We make sure that we our consistent in the group with our level of service, and our clients become aware that they will get the same benefits from each of our departments.”

Besides commercial property management, the company's real estate division also handles commercial sales as well as residential rental and sales, and relocation services for executives.

On the residential real estate side of the business, Mr. Kitson said again, the company's aim is to stay small, to be a ‘niche' player'.

“We are not selling left, right and centre, but our focus is the higher end properties. We may not be big and aggressive in terms of the number of sales but they all tend to be high-end,” he said, adding that on the real estate end clients often came to them after having done business in another area with the group.

As a family that, it would seem, is always on the look out for opportunities, Mr. Kitson said they are also currently tapping into the Island's need for new executive properties. Although not a Kitson Group project per se, Mr. Kitson said that he and his father were currently developing luxury condominiums on South Shore Road, across from Coral Beach. And not surprisingly, project management for the building of the nine units has been “in-sourced” to professionals within the group.