Profile - David Buckley: Ditch the desk and get out there to learn your business properly

He was certainly dressed for the occasion, wearing a survival suit that would prolong his life by up to five minutes should he end up in the freezing sea.

An hour's ride later, the aircraft hovered above the landing pad. It was a square of windswept metal, with nothing around the edges to prevent man or machine from falling into the ocean below.

"It was great fun, it was a great experience," recalled David Buckley, who was visiting the rig to work with Mobile on a project. "It underwrote the old cliche for any of us in support services of getting out and spending time with your clients."

Sitting in a sparse meeting room at E&Y's offices in Bridgewater Place, Leeds, he said: "It's the only real way you can even begin to understand the business. That's ever more vivid now in the computer age."

Now head of the firm's Yorkshire practice, Mr Buckley, talked about his formative years, the character-building time spent in South Africa and the growth of Leeds as a place to

do business.

After a childhood spent mostly on the east coast of Scotland, the Leeds-born son of an ambulance service director went to university in Glasgow, studying accountancy and law and enjoying the bohemian, laid-back caf culture of the city's west end.

He joined Pricewaterhouse's Scottish operation, marrying Claire from Glasgow along the way, before deciding to get some experience overseas. He looked at Hong King and the United States, but went for South Africa, lured by a large accountancy firm targeting prudent and reliable Scottish students.

"It was the early '80s, just as apartheid was breaking down. I was going from a UK recession to an economy that was booming. Gold price was very high. The mines were booming. There was full employment. Economic stability led to stability across the country. People generally were in a good frame of mind. There was also political change in a positive way. There was a feeling of an economy and society with momentum."

It was also a time of personal growth. "I got asked to join a technical training group and the first time I stood up in front of people I was mortified. Like most folk, I was petrified at the prospect of public speaking. But I thought the only way I am going to get better is by practising.

"The groups varied from accounting students who probably had less experience than I did to a group of the top managers from the gold mines who knew a lot more than I did and that was probably the most scary experience but also the most fun. They'd seen most things. You see how they were questioning each other. You start to learn the questions to ask; you start to see what it is like to run a business. On the journey of learning a little bit about business, that was hugely developmental for me."

The couple spent three and a half years in South Africa. The firm wanted him to stay and go for partnership. But if he stayed for five years, he might stay for life. In terms of career and society, they decided the UK was the place to be and so returned. He doesn't regret the decision.

Back in time to catch the wave of the Thatcher boom, he joined Ernst & Young as an audit manager, attracted by an eclectic portfolio of clients. Seduced into the complex challenges of dealmaking, he joined transaction services, becoming a partner in 1991. He moved to Yorkshire later that year.

"It was known I hail originally from this neck of the woods so I got a romantic hankering to come back to Yorkshire and I got the opportunity because we had not got a partner presence in Yorkshire. It was a time when the accountants had just started to invest in Yorkshire. The lawyers were just starting to consolidate. If you look at the non-magic circle lawyers that have prospered, most of them were the ones that were rising up in Leeds at that time; Addleshaw Goddard, Pinsent Masons, Eversheds, Hammonds, Walker Morris.

"You were entering a city where the banks were going through a phase of consolidating to regional headquarters and largely choosing Leeds as a financial centre. The lawyers were moving their regional headquarters to Leeds. You were catching a wave of legal professionals who had the ambition that took them well beyond Leeds and that's continued over the last couple of decades. That has helped form Leeds as a major financial centre in its own right, which it hadn't been. It felt like a privilege, just through happy accident, to come to a city that is one of the financial centres in the country."

Ernst & Young invested in Yorkshire in the same way, moving its chess pieces around in a strategic way to command a strong position in the region.

"That's taken us on a journey where Leeds is still very much recognised throughout Europe as a major financial centre. There is major development of the airport; an hour and three quarters on the train from York to London; there is a city skyline that has changed, not least latterly with Bridgewater Place.

"We are looking to invest further in Yorkshire. We will be announcing new partner appointments, some external, some internal. We're investing in partner and wider people numbers. Though there's been a period where a lot of public companies retreated from the regions, including Yorkshire, that is somewhat levelling off now and there are new companies growing up; looking to IPO and private equity.

"The prognosis for Yorkshire is pretty positive, not just for the old cliche that 'we're used to recession so we know how to batten things down'. I'm more positive than that. What I see in a lot of Yorkshire businesses is the realisation that, whatever market you are in, there is a danger of being in a commodity position. A commodity is a very simple offering that almost anyone can produce. If something isn't a commodity, where you are adding value and producing something that's more unique and more tailored then you would probably get a better price and much higher customer demand.

"Whether you're a private or a public company operating out of Yorkshire, or whether you're a professional services firm, taking a lead from that, recession or no recession, that's a way to do a bit more than survive."

Mr Buckley took over as Yorkshire senior partner last May, responsible for 15 partners and around 300 employees. He is enjoying the feeling of being backed by his masters at Ernst & Young in the form of new investment.

"I see something in the office here of what I saw when I first came to Leeds. We have a young partner group who are all quite ambitious and all having success with their clients in spite of a tough market. As I said at the start, we have a group of people who are not sitting in the office behind computer screens, but getting out in the market."

David Buckley

The CV

Title: Yorkshire senior partner

Date of birth: May 4, 1959

Education: University of Glasgow

First job: Assistant at Woodilee Hospital, near Glasgow

Favourite holiday destination: Scuba diving in the Maldives

Last book read: Neil Gaiman – Neverwhere

Car driven: Mercedes SL55 AMG