The city temp who turned £6,000 into a billion-pound business

In January 2026, news broke that an offer from British private equity firm Oakley Capital to acquire a majority stake in Global Loan Agency Services Limited (GLAS) had been accepted. The deal values the company at over £1bn.

Most billion-pound founders don't start their careers as city temps with few qualifications. Mia Drennan did. Speaking to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast, she explains how she spotted an opportunity in the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis, disrupted bank-led loan administration and built GLAS into a unicorn that handles assets worth more than $850bn across 14 countries.

In our interview, Drennan shares:

• How executive coaching helped her build the confidence to keep scaling
• How to expand internationally by following your clients into new markets
• How to bring outside investors in without losing the culture that built the business
• The biggest hiring mistake founders make when scaling fast and how to avoid it

Drennan's path to GLAS wasn't planned. Working for a large American bank, she was passed over for a promotion at the last minute in favour of someone flown in from the US. She quit. A client asking for help opening a London office led to her first business, representing that company in the market. When the people who'd hired her quit unexpectedly, she pivoted to headhunting instead, working the same industry contacts for seven years before deciding she'd had enough.

"That's really where GLAS was born," she says.

She sold that first business to one of her own employees, which is still running today more than 20 years on. The proceeds from the sale was used as seed capital for her new venture.

With her experience working in The City, she saw a gap in the market for a third party in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. It took nearly 400 meetings to convince people it was a viable idea, she recalls.

"We were sort of allergic to getting into any debt," she says. The first six-figure fee was reinvested straight back into the business.

Drennan is quick to correct the framing of all those early meetings. "They didn't say no," she says. "I can be quite persuasive." One conversation with Goldman Sachs' leverage finance team nearly came unstuck when the firm said it would need to send someone round to check GLAS's own operations were fit for purpose.

"All we had was a good idea and the resilience to knock on doors," she says. "I didn't have a system. I didn't have procedures." She fixed that fast.

An early turning point was in 2013 when Glas won a bid to take over as the facility and security agent on the £2.4bn debt pile owed by the owner of Yellow Pages. It involved 600 lenders from across the world on the register.

This generated a seven-figure fee for the company. "It was a bit like David and Goliath," Drennan says, recalling how the CFO of Yellow Pages explained the choice: he wanted somebody hungry, prepared to do a great job. "We smashed it and that was when I knew that we had something."

International expansion

Global growth wasn't planned in advance either. "We didn't have a plan to go into America or Australia, but we could see the business opportunities," Drennan says. Australia, she found, moved fast, with a deal secured on the very first marketing trip.

America was a much slower burn, complicated by regulation and, she believes, a cultural preference for buying from Americans. Her lesson for founders following the same path is to think hard about culture before headcount.

"You really need to figure out whether somebody from head office can go and start building and training a team and keeping that company culture, until such time as you've got the right people in place."

Later expansion into France, Germany, Dubai, Spain and Italy followed the same client-led logic, with an acquisition in Italy bringing GLAS a 30-person Milan and Rome operation. Drennan had resisted M&A for years, wary of the industry's failure rate, until the right opportunity in France changed her mind.

Founders who sell to GLAS are folded into what she describes as a flat, culture-heavy structure rather than absorbed and stripped out. "There's a home for people to come and be part of a bigger team," she says.

Leadership lessons from Mia Drennan

Her advice for other founders, and female founders in particular, centres on how much equity to give away and when. "A lot of female entrepreneurs I've met recently, fellow founders, they've taken angel or venture cap early on and given up," she says, often without fully understanding the terms, because being asked to invest at all felt like validation enough.

Her own approach was to bootstrap for as long as possible, take a de-risking event only once the business no longer needed the cash and bring in a larger investor once ready to scale hard.

"You need to be honest about what your journey is," she says.

Culture, she adds, is the thing she'd protect above all else as the company grows towards its next target, a £5bn valuation. "Humility, low ego, the ability to collaborate," is what she looks for, alongside a simple rule that applies from the board to the front line: "Everybody in the company is a salesperson".

Mia Drennan spoke to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast. Listen to the full episode for more, including her plans to bring GLAS's technology development in-house and why her success has been supercharged through coaching.