AS opening pitches go, telling your prospective employer that you're going to make them a million is one to get you noticed.

And it obviously worked for Alan Jeffrey who is still with Dunfermline chartered surveyors, DM Hall, 20 years later.

He reckons that spotting the potential of a lucrative niche market is easy – once someone has pointed it out to you – and that the skill lies with the person who has the knowledge, expertise and vision to identify it in the first place.

An experienced property professional, he was at a "crossroads" in his life when he walked into DM Hall's boardroom in 2000 to persuade a "daunting" panel of senior partners that he was the man they needed to carry out a complete change in the way property transactions were carried out.

“I said I would make them a million,” he recalled.

And they bought it. Today he's an associate in the firm and part of the unique and hugely successful property services department.

It not only provides a full architectural service, but helps with retrospective permissions and drawings, land registration issues, boundary disputes and a range of matters up to and including full Standard Assessment Procedures (SAP) calculations for new build houses.

For Alan, the decision to throw in his lot with DM Hall was momentous. He had been with the building control department of Fife Council for 15 years and had been working from 1990 to 2000 providing the above services only to local surveyors and solicitors.

“I was planning to establish my own enterprise, Jeffrey & Company, and I still had children going through school,” he said. “It was a crossroads in my life and I was undecided which path I was going to take.

"I had secured office premises in Dunfermline and my wife, Jane, was also going to be involved helping with the administration.

However, Dunfermline partner Alasdair Seaton intercepted these proposals and suggested that DM Hall, which at that time had a network of 30 offices across Scotland, would be a more rewarding home for Alan’s unique skillsets.

“At that time,” Alan said, “local authorities dealt with building warrants, retrospective applications and property enquiry certificates (PEC).

"The provision of this service was not high on their agenda. They could take up to six weeks to get back to solicitors and house sales could be held up for that length of time.

"But the clincher was that all the information we needed was in the public domain and it was all free.

"If we had the information we could provide the same results in a day. There was no way we could fail."

The department was designed as a bolt-on to DM Hall’s existing offering and it soon began to grow.

His most recent initiative has been to help establish a dedicated energy service, dealing with all energy-related matters and driven by general climate change consciousness as well as the statutory energy requirements in home reports.

Having helped build, from scratch, a department which now contributes some eight per cent of DM Hall’s revenues, Alan, at 62, has succession planning in mind and has built a team that can take the job on.

But he has no immediate plans to retire.

“I can’t remember a day when I have not enjoyed my work,” he said, “and I hope to continue to do so for some time yet.”