GUEST COMMENT: My journey from banking to laundrette owner

By the time I put my hand up for voluntary redundancy last year, I had 23 years under my belt working for Bank of Scotland, which later became HBOS and finally Lloyds Banking Group.

I started in 1987 straight from college working in an administrative role for the Bank of Scotland branch network and after five years I moved on to a job in HR, looking after equality and diversity at the bank.

Looking back, this was my happiest time working in banking. Over my 12 years in the role I became known as one of the UK's foremost authorities in diversity issues and if I ever went back to finance it would be in a similar position.

This is never going to happen, however. I spent the latter part of my career working in communications at HBOS and this role was earmarked for redundancy after the Lloyds takeover.

If I had served the mandatory three-month notice period I would have left Lloyds in December last year, but I needed to get out sooner. After some negotiation I managed to convince the bank to let me leave in September. This was important - I had something lined up.

My best friend Alan Pollock (who had worked for five years as a fund accountant at JP Morgan in Edinburgh) and I had bought an local laundrette called Suds R Us. The redundancy package had come in handy for the purchase, and we'd lined up a takeover date of 1st October.

I never had any over-riding ambition to run a laundrette, but I knew that I wanted to get out of finance and this looked like a good business opportunity.

After HBOS was taken over by Lloyds, the working environment was never the same. The bank seemed to excel in creating committees and various levels of bureaucracy and it took an age to get anything done. I knew that if I applied for voluntary redundancy, I would get it, so I stuck my hand up.

The best thing about running the launderette is that we're our own bosses. If we make a decision, it gets done; we don't have to go through six different managers, all having meetings about meetings, which is what drove me round the bend in banking.

The other good thing is dealing with normal members of the public. Banking is a dog eat dog world, where people will step over you to get ahead. There are too many big egos all vying for attention.

A lot of people we speak to in the shop assume that because we worked in finance we both retired after years of accepting huge bonuses. In reality, it's only the management that receive anything significant.

The majority of people working at Lloyds would have received between 0-10% of their salary as a bonus, and base pay for most wouldn't have been particularly high.

Now that I've left the corporate world of finance, I'd doubt I'd ever consider going back.

Michael Scobie is the co-owner of Suds R Us on Polworth Gardens in Edinburgh