We all know people who appear to have the Midas touch in business - everything they touch turns a profit. But how do they chose the companies they invest in?

We asked Kevin Amphlett who came to live on the island in 2017 after selling Chase Templeton, the company he and his wife, Julie, had started, which provided private medical insurance brokerage services. Since then, he has made a number of investments.

He says: ‘I like to make investments where I can have an influence and I still have some level of active control. So I tend not to take minority stakes or businesses that are very passive in my input.’

The first business he invested in following the sale of Chase Templeton was a chain of convenience stores in the UK.

He says: ‘I set my brother in law up in that business and over the last four years we’ve taken that to a £30 million turnover.’

He has since turned his attention to looking for other investment opportunities and his latest venture, the Body Hubb, came about almost by accident.

He says: ‘At the beginning of last year I had some treatment in the States for some arthritic pain I had in my feet. They used a cold laser which is medical grade and calibrated to treat arthritic pain.

‘It was really effective. I was over there a few weeks and I went every other day and had treatment and by the end of it the pain had really had subsided.’

The company who made the laser, Erchonia, is a world leader in low level laser technology.

Kevin says: ‘When I got back I looked at Erchonia and ended up buying one of these lasers.’

But what really caught his eye was the company’s Emerald laser which had just received FDA approval ‘for overall body circumference reduction’, in other words, for the treatment of excess weight and obesity.

Kevin goes on: ‘As part of the arthritic pain you receive a consultation with a doctor who’s based in Manhattan and I asked him about the Emerald laser for treating obesity and what he thought of it and he said he’d got one.

‘He showed it to me while we were on this consultation and he was really glowing about the results it was getting and the impact it had had on his business.

‘I then researched what level of penetration Emerald had made in the UK and they’d only got eight there so it was right at the front end of their expansion and that fired up a business idea. I ended up buying the Emerald laser, which was a significant investment, tested it and it works.’

And in case you’re wondering how a laser can get rid of excess fat, here’s the technical bit. It is calibrated to enter a fat cell and create a micropore (a tiny hole) which allows the fatty liquids to be emptied out. These liquids are then mopped up by the lymphatic system so it has the effect of reducing the size of the fat cells.

Given the current levels of people in the UK who are struggling with excess weight and obesity, you might have thought that Kevin had a viable business right there but he decided to go a stage further.

He explains: ‘I wanted to make a more rounded offering if we’re going to run a business from it so I brought in a piece of kit called Lipo Firm Pro which is a skin tightening radio frequency piece of apparatus that also uses Electro Muscular Stimulation (EMS).’

This is the same technology that was used in the old Slendertone passive exercise machines but it’s medical grade and a lot more sophisticated. He then added a Body Balancer Pro. This looks like a space suit so the client wears it while lying on a treatment bed and it provides a really deep tissue massage that assists the lymphatic drainage system in the body to mop up the fatty liquids that the other two machines have caused to be released.

He also bought a Styku scanning system which can perform a 3D body scan in seconds using just a simple turntable and 3D camera.

‘We wanted something a bit more sophisticated than a tape measure and a weighing scale,’ says Kevin.

And he goes on: ‘The Styku provides a very graphic 3D image of the patient and can track exactly where the weight is disappearing from through that image it also tracks various risk factors for health it produces your BMI it produces your weight and it produces a basal metabolic rate which allows you to control your calories – below that you will lose weight.’

All this equipment very much places Kevin’s new business into what is now termed ‘aesthetics’, in effect the space where science meets the beauty industry to provide more advanced treatments for people who are termed ‘patients’ rather than ‘clients’.

Taking stock of all this high tech equipment, the obvious element missing was dietary advice for these patients and, to provide this, Kevin has bought a formerly very low key company called Alavere.

He says: ‘I wanted to add a very effective nutrition element to the business and some years ago we came across Alavere, which is a medically supervised nutrition plan that focuses on the use of the highest quality proteins to help overweight patients to shed weight quickly but safely.

‘We now own all the intellectual property, stock and manufacturing rights for Alavere worldwide, along with six new clinics in the UK and 38 staff.’

All of these elements have been rolled together into one offering, under the name Body Hubb and Kevin has opened his first premises at the King Edward Bay Club where people can access all these treatments and the diet.

But this is only the beginning as he explains: ‘The Isle of Man was a test bed. We wanted a name that was more generic so we could roll that name out to our clinics in the UK.

‘We’ve got a number of distribution opportunities open to us now that we have this rounded offering.

‘Firstly the nutrition plan can be sold via partner clinics that already have skin-tightening equipment. That is the first phase of the expansion plan. We’re optimising the clinics, buying kit for the new Body Hubbs in the UK to upgrade all them with more training for the staff there. The second opportunity is that, within the Alavere range, there is a really tasty and nutritious range of snacks. We are going to brand those snacks Body Hubb and we will be selling them via gyms through their café outlets and also through vending machines.’

It seems as though Kevin is all set to see his latest venture expand and many people benefit from the treatments his new brand is offering.