Business Eye March/April 2015

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Issue 149 March/April 2015 ÂŁ2.50 Voted best Business Magazine in Ireland 2005 and Magazine of the Year for Northern Ireland

Rooted In The Community....

Shortlisted Magazines Ireland Awards 2011 Business To Business Magazine of the Year

Michael McKinstry and Phoenix Natural Gas Features:

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Deadline Looms For Small Business Awards

STRAIGHT TO BUSINESS Up to 40 flights a day around the UK from Belfast City. flybe.com

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Lidl Northern Ireland ‌ A Passion For Retailing

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Contents

titanicbelfast.com March/Apr 2015 ISSUE 149

Business Awards

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Deadline Looming For Small Business Awards

Specials Food To Go Sam Butler catches up with Brian Reid, Managing Director of Deli Lites Ireland in Warrenpoint, a local sandwich maker that has evolved into an Irish leader in the ‘food to go’ marketplace.

The Business Eye First Trust Bank Small Business Awards are an exciting new addition to the awards calendar here in Northern Ireland. The new awards were launched at a reception in the La Mon House Hotel & Country Club recently, and the trophies will be handed out at the same venue on June 11th this year. And the closing date for entries, Friday, 15th May, is fast approaching...

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Accounting For Change

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Cover Story Community Focus... Michael McKinstry & Phoenix Natural Gas

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Roy Creelman, formerly with Goldblatt McGuigan and MB McGrady, is settling into his new role as a Partner with Belfast-based accountants McIlveen Howard. He talks about a new way of helping small business owners.

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Business Eye Fleet Awards 2015

The final countdown is very definitely on to the 2015 Business Eye Fleet Industry Awards and Titanic Motor Show, taking place at Titanic Belfast and the Titanic Slipways, on the 24th and 25th of April.

Michael McKinstry might be relatively new in the CEO’s seat at Phoenix Natural Gas, following in the footsteps of Peter Dixon. But the former CFO, who has been with the gas company since its inception here, retains the leadership team’s high-profile commitment to corporate social responsibility, something that Phoenix has bought into right from the very start of its operations here.

Charles Hurst Lexus Budget Breakfast The Budget 2015 might not have been the most eventul of recent years, but that didn’t stop an influential group of business leaders from enjoying the early morning hospitality of Charles Hurst Lexus for a budget breakfast briefing event.

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Supermarket Retailing Lidl Northern Ireland... A Passion For Retailing One thing comes across loud and clear when you meet Lidl’s Northern Ireland leadership team at the company’s impressive Regional Distribution Centre at Nutt’s Corner... and that’s a passion for the business of delivering lower prices and top quality to customers throughout Northern Ireland. We take a look behind the scenes at the retailer’s operations hub.

Henderson Group... Committed To CSR Henderson Group Managing Director Martin Agnew talks to Business Eye about the retail and distribution giant’s commitment to effective corporate social responsibility as well as the company’s comprehensive environmental management credentials.

Peter McVerry of U105, the UTV Media-owned radio station covering the Greater Belfast area, talks about the importance to him of philanthropy and corporate social responsibility.

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Keys Commercial Finance & The Art Of Customer Care

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Eye on Giving

Corporate Finance

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Oiling The Kitchens Business Eye talks to Leona Kane of Broighter Gold Rapeseed Oil in Limavady following her success in a competition run by one of the world’s leading hospitality businesses.

The Operations Team at Keys Commercial Finance is the engine room of an organisation that continues to shake the status quo of Northern Ireland’s business finance sector. KCF’s headline figures paint a vivid picture... in the past 12 months it collected debts of £55 million owed to its client companies and it paid out £58 million in advances to those clients.

Regulars

ABC average circulation Jan-June 2010, 7,610 copies Yearly Subscription £35 UK and NI or £37.50 outside the UK

Eye on Communications

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Eye on Events

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Moving On

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Eye on Technology

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Eye on Education

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Eye on Competition

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Eye on Banking

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Eye on Internet

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Eye on Motoring

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Buckley Publications 20 Kings Road Belfast, BT5 6JJ Tel: (028) 9047 4490 Fax: (028) 9047 4495 www.businesseye.co.uk

Editor Richard Buckley Commercial Director Brenda Buckley Sales Manager Claire Dickson

Features & Promotions Manager Ciara Donnelly

Design Hexagon Tel: (028) 9047 2210 www.hexagondesign.com

Photography Press Eye 45 Stockmans Way Belfast, BT9 7ET Tel: (028) 9066 9229 www.presseye.com

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The public sector here in Northern Ireland has been going through a period of change in recent weeks and, of course, even more change could be just around the corner.

Comment

“The recent changes saw the advent of 11 so-called Super Councils replacing the old 26 local councils. This can only be a good thing and what’s been even more welcome is the fact that the transition seems to have been taking place with a minimum of fuss.”

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Irish Magazine Editor of the Year 2005

he upside of this is that we can presumably look forward to a spot of cost cutting and a streamlining of services in areas governed by local councils and in education. The downside, going forward, is that the looming threat of more public sector cutbacks is acting as a drag on full-scale economic recovery.

Our over reliance on a large and bloated public sector has long been identified as a major economic negative here. Now, it’s the likelihood that we’re tackling the problem that is being identified as an economic negative. Hard to win, isn’t it?

The recent changes saw the advent of 11 so-called Super Councils replacing the old 26 local councils.

This can only be a good thing and what’s been even more welcome is the fact that the transition seems to have been taking place with a minimum of fuss.

There was a spot of sentimentality in the air as councillors and aldermen in some areas said goodbye to their old councils. Even the Belfast representatives took some time out to remember the good old days under the City Hall dome.

There have certainly been some memorable moments, not least when brawls have broken out in the council chamber. As someone said recently, that was back in the days when Loyalists and Nationalists couldn’t have conceived the notion of working together.

It would have been considered a ridiculous thought, and it’s one which shows once again just how far we have come.

At the same time as the 26 local councils were being replaced by 11 bigger ones (think that one through for a moment......), Northern Ireland’s five Education Boards were being replaced by one really big one – the new Education Authority.

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Led by Gavin Boyd as Chief Executive and by Sharon O’Connor (the former Derry City Council chief) as Chairperson, the new Authority is the net result of some seven or eight years of arguing, negotiating and consultancy spending.

It was originally meant to be the new Education & Skills Authority for Northern Ireland, but that was judged as being a bit too expensive and the new scaled down organisation takes over.

But, when we say ‘scaled down’, what do we mean?

The new Authority will have a total headcount of some 37,000 and a budget of £1.5 billion.

And it will also have 20 Board members from just about every conceivable background, all of them on a fee just short of £9,000 for their trouble.

Cutbacks? They ain’t here yet......

Meanwhile, staying with the public sector, but in a very different area, the appointment of one of our most able supporters of all things business as the new Chairman of Tourism Northern Ireland is to be commended.

Terence Brannigan is a no nonsense operator who seems well cut out for the role. He won’t have much patience with the bureaucracy around tourism in an all-Ireland sense. He’s a capable and pragmatic operator at board level. And he’s well able to stand up for himself and for Northern Ireland.

But, perhaps best of all, he’s a man with a passion for this part of the world. And that’s what counts most.

He replaces Howard Hastings, a man who has given his heart and soul to the job over the past number of years and another man with an unyielding commitment to Northern Ireland. We’ve been lucky to have him... and we’re lucky to have Terence Brannigan stepping into the role.

Eye on News

Nicobrand win “Made in Northern Ireland Award” ...a celebration of the most innovative and impressive manufacturers of the past year.

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he Coleraine based company specialises in the manufacture of pharmaceutical grade nicotine and other nicotinebased active pharmaceutical ingredients for inclusion in smoking cessation products such as chewing gum, transdermal patches and inhalers. Nicobrand has also developed a range of high quality products for supply into the burgeoning electronic cigarette market. “The award is a testimony to all the hard

working individuals who have contributed to the company’s success for over 30 years” said Mark McQuillan, Managing Director.” In nicotine we have a very unique resource, which combined with our strong regulatory pedigree from the US FDA and UK MHRA, leaves us well positioned to serve our customers.

We are delighted to have won this award and we look forward to the continued development of the nicotine business here in Coleraine.”

Mark McQuillan (Managing Director) and Helen Boyd (Director of Business Administration) receiving the “Made in Northern Ireland Award” in the Medical & Life Sciences Category, from John-George Willis, Partner & Head of Corporate Department at Tughans. Nicobrand will go forward to compete in the national “Made in the UK Awards” in July 2015.

The company, which is part of the multi-national pharmaceutical company Actavis, is known as a pioneer in the global nicotine business

and employs 25 people from its base just outside Coleraine. The award was presented by Insider Media, in association with Tughans.

Flybe 2015 Summer Schedule Begins With A Ten Year Birthday F

lybe, Europe’s largest regional airline, has started operating its summer schedule with 289 flights per week across a choice of 15 routes from George Best Belfast City Airport. This includes its daily service to Aberdeen which today (30th March) celebrates 10 years in operation. It also sees the return of the weekly holiday flights to Newquay and up to seven rotations per day to Flybe’s Manchester hub offering onward connectivity to a wide range of European destinations. Three daily flights to Southampton not only offer easy access to Southern England but a convenient connection for cruise travellers.

Paul Simmons, Flybe’s Chief Commercial officer,

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comments: “We are delighted to be offering passengers in Northern Ireland the choice of 15 routes this summer and to providing affordable quality flights to the widest possible range of attractive destinations. Our popular service to Aberdeen now joins Edinburgh and Glasgow in having reached the ten year milestone and together with Inverness which turns ten next year and our franchise operations with Loganair Flybe is providing unrivalled connections throughout Scotland from Belfast. This month also marks our first summer services for new routes to Liverpool and London City. From the start London City proved a particularly popular route and due to the

demand we increased flights on this route to four a day.”

Philip Smith, VisitScotland’s Regional Director for Aberdeen City and Shire, said: “This is a very special occasion, as it gives us a chance to celebrate the crucial 10-year relationship between Flybe and Aberdeen Airport, and the importance of such routes to the continued success of Scottish tourism.

“The daily flights from Belfast into Aberdeen enhance the opportunities for fast and easy travel from Northern Ireland to business conferences, leisure tourism and short breaks in the Granite City.

“This is a fantastic direct route to Aberdeen and we look forward to welcoming more visitors during 2015, Scotland’s Year of Food and Drink.”

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Eye on News

IT’S A KNOCKOUT Belfast’s only independent one-man microbrewery, Knockout Brewing, is toasting a lucrative first month following its launch to the Northern Ireland market. In only 30 days, Knockout has sold an impressive 80% of its initial supply and has ramped up production in the microbrewery’s Belfast brew house to meet increasing demand for the new local label.

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rawing on both the rich boxing heritage in Belfast and the final step in the brewing process, Knockout Brewing prides itself on moving beyond quirky branding and unique names and delivers on flavour and closelycontrolled quality monitored by brew master and owner Joseph McMullan.

Knockout is currently stocked by 15 bars and off-licences locally and distributed in Northern Ireland by Ballycastle’s Anzac Wines & Spirits.

To make the fledgling brand’s early

success even sweeter, Knockout is also in the final stages of an export deal which would usher the brand’s Middleweight IPA and IPA Red Ale in to the Irish market in the coming months, doubling sales initially with a view to further growth in Knockout’s production and consumption figures. Ireland is just the first stepping stone in Knockout’s plan for expansion, with additional growth into the European and American markets in the sights for the coming year.

Joseph McMullan discovered a passion for creating unique brews which grew out of a home brewing hobby. “Getting my start in home brewing, I became interested in making unique brews using high quality ingredients, which soon gained popularity among my friends and family. I realised that this could be more than a hobby, and began work

on Knockout Brewing in November 2013. Installation of the brew house was complete in August 2014, and I soon began to brew my first batches of Knockout,” McMullan said. “It’s been a lengthy process from installation and licensing to brewing my first batch and refining the flavours from there, but I am very proud of the premium quality beers Knockout is producing.”

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AWARD CATEGORIES & CRITERIA

There are twelve categories for the awards this year...

SMALL BUSINESS OF THE YEAR AWARD The small business enterprise with 50 employees or less which, in the opinion of the judges, exemplifies best practice and achievement across the board.

Entries for this premier award category can be made directly and winning entries in all other categories will also be considered.

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CUSTOMER FOCUS AWARD Our judging panel will single out the local small business which most effectively brings to life best practice in customer service across all of its operations. The judges will look for clear evidence of customer satisfaction..

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START-UP BUSINESS OF THE YEAR AWARD

Despite smaller budgets, corporate responsibility plays an important role for small businesses in Northern Ireland. This special award will recognise the best example of how small businesses here can help to make a difference in the communities they serve.

Aimed at Northern Ireland’s most promising start-up enterprise, the award will go to a young company of one year old or less which, in the view of the judging panel, best illustrates what can be achieved by startup businesses across any sector here in Northern Ireland.

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For further information please contact Ciara Donnelly at Business Eye on 028 9047 4490 or ciara@businesseye.co.uk

enter online at www.businesseyeawards.co.uk MANUFACTURING BUSINESS OF THE YEAR AWARD

TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS OF THE YEAR AWARD

EXPORTER OF THE YEAR

A category open to all companies with 50 employees or less engaged directly in the manufacture of products for sale in Northern Ireland and in export markets. The judges will look for evidence of research and development as well as innovation in manufacturing.

This award is open to all small businesses based in Northern Ireland who provide products and/ or services in the wider technology field, including IT services, software development, technology product innovation and consultancy.

An award which will recognise the top achieving exporting company from Northern Ireland’s small business community, recognising sales achievement in all markets outside of Northern Ireland itself, including both the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain.

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SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING AWARD

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INNOVATIVE BUSINESS OF THE YEAR AWARD

Another specialist category, aimed at small business enterprises in the healthcare field here in Northern Ireland.

This category is open to all business-led healthcare related organisations including opticians, dental practices and enterprises such as care homes for the elderly.

Open to companies in all sectors of the local business community, this award sets out to recognise and showcase the organisation which best uses marketing – including advertising, PR or the strategic use of digital platforms and social media - to enhance business performance across the board.

Northern Ireland’s leading small business operating in the agrifood sector, to include food and drink producers, farm-based enterprises and companies providing products and services to the agri-food industry here.

Open to companies operating in any business sector, this award will go to the organisation which best illustrates the most effective use of innovation through investment in innovative practices, leading edge products and/or services to contribute to overall business success.

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Eye on AgriFood

New Director of Corporate Services for Fane Valley Fane Valley is pleased to announce the appointment of Director for Corporate Services to their senior management.

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lare Guinness will join the team as Director of Corporate Services for Fane Valley Group and will be responsible for the M&A activity, Corporate Governance, Board Administration, Human Resources, Health & Safety and Marketing/Communications across the Fane Valley Group.

Prior to joining Fane Valley Clare was Regional Business Manager in Bank of Ireland. She had a successful career in Corporate and Business Banking, which spanned 17 years, over which time Clare was based in both London and Dublin.

A graduate of Banking and Finance, from Loughborough University, Clare also earned a degree scholarship from Nat West Bank. A career in the banking world gave Clare a great opportunity to establish a deep understanding

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of businesses, while developing a sound assessment capability and managerial leadership skills.

Commenting on her new role Clare Guinness said: “Fane Valley has an excellent reputation in the market, and I see the preservation of that reputation as core to my role, be that through corporate governance, health and safety or HR. Ensuring that each of the 14 businesses in the Group will be adequately and professionally supported is critical. I hope to bring many years experience in corporate and business banking to the fore as Fane Valley continues to successfully acquire businesses and engage in corporate activity.

With over half a billion pound of sales and over 2100 staff, Fane Valley has significant financial strength and is a substantial contributor to the NI economy.”

Trevor Lockhart – Chief Executive Fane Valley commented: “We are delighted to finally welcome Clare to Fane Valley. It has been an extensive and very

rigorous process recruiting for the role. Clare’s managerial experience and vast array of acumen in the business-banking world along with leadership and multi-departmental qualities made her standout.

Within Fane Valley we believe strongly on the continuous improvement of our products, processes and people, which has led to many significant achievements.

The announcement is another indicative demonstration of the growing nature of the group.”

“ I hope to bring many years experience in corporate and business banking to the fore as Fane Valley continues to successfully acquire businesses and engage in corporate activity.”

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Eye on Business Tourism

Realising Northern Ireland’s Business Tourism Potential

By Michael Williamson, ASM Chartered Accountants

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ichael Williamson, director at ASM Chartered Accountants, specialises in hotels, tourism and leisure consulting. He has more than 25 years’ experience in the industry, having held senior financial and general management posts in Northern Ireland’s two largest hotels. He has been an industry advisor for the past 16 years. Speaking about business tourism, he said: Business tourism falls into 2 broad categories. Firstly, there is the independent business (or “corporate”) traveller, a non-discretionary visitor that travels to a destination because that is where they conduct business.

Second are the meetings, incentives, conferencing and exhibitions markets (or “MICE”) in which large groups are brought together for some particular purpose. This

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is a discretionary market which can be encouraged to visit a destination because of a specific business, academic or specialist connection or advantage, or because of reputation, facilities, price and so on.

Both markets are important to the tourism industry because business users generally demand upmarket hotel facilities and service, pay higher prices, they typically travel outside the key summer season (although the recession has had some impact on these general features) and in the case of the MICE market, the average length of stay can be longer than is the case for other visitor types.

Unsurprisingly, Belfast is the key business tourism destination in Northern Ireland and our own extensive research into the performance of the hotel sector shows that in 2007, business tourism accounted for an estimated 54% of all bedrooms demanded in the City (equating to around 300,000 business related room nights including 30,000 from the MICE markets).

The recession of 2008 led to a decline in visitor numbers from these markets (to 240,000 room nights in total and around 45% of all bedroom sales), but this was mitigated by the very sharp increase in leisure visitors to Belfast. This market has also helped to fill the 1,000 new bedrooms added to the supply side in the City since 2009.

In 2013, we estimate that business tourism visitors accounted for around 35% of all hotel rooms occupied in the City, which although some way short of the 2007 ratio, translates into the same number of room nights such has been the growth in room stock over that period. During this time, the room rates paid by visitors on business remained the highest of all customer segments.

While the demand for overnight accommodation from the corporate market will be dictated by general economic activity and cannot be influenced by the tourism development or promotional bodies, this is not the case with MICE tourists. And while the City was successfully breaking into this

market pre-recession, it has found it difficult to capitalise on that initial momentum as recessionary fears have eased. In part, this is a function of Belfast not having integrated conference and exhibition facilities.

The current extension to the Waterfront Hall is designed specifically to address this deficiency and will open up new opportunities for the City in the conference and exhibitions markets especially. From mid-2016 onwards, Belfast will be capable of hosting larger European or global events. This will deliver an economic boost for Northern Ireland and add to the City’s already impressive reputation.

The extent of this opportunity is such that we estimate a trebling in the demand for hotel bedrooms from the MICE markets by 2020 (to around 120,000 room nights or 10% of all rooms occupied). Indeed, our biggest challenge may be meeting the demand from all of the visitors to the City that require accommodation.

This is a particular issue that we have looked at in some detail and taking the bedroom supply in 2013 as a baseline, we have calculated that even with relatively modest growth in demand from other markets there is a need for around 1,500 additional hotel bedrooms by the end of the current decade. If the City Council’s aspirations of doubling tourism by 2020 are achieved, then the shortfall in bedrooms could be greater than this estimate.

The potential success of the extended Waterfront Hall is not only good news for the City Council, it is also good for the Northern Ireland tourism supply chain including local hoteliers. The emerging under supply in room stock will also present opportunities for hotel investors, for operators, for the construction industry and for those seeking to develop a career in the tourism industry.

Belfast City Council has listened to the concerns of the industry and is investing heavily in the business tourism infrastructure.

The private sector must now do likewise if the opportunities presented by the extended Waterfront Hall are to be fully realised.

ASM Chartered Accountants has six offices, Belfast, Dublin, Dundalk, Dungannon, Magherafelt and Newry. The 120 strong team specialises in a range of accountancy disciplines including, corporate finance, Insolvency services, forensic accounting, Audit & accounting, consultancy services, internal audit, tax, hotel, tourism and leisure.

To contact Michael, email michael.williamson@asmbelfast.com or call 028 9024 9222 at the Belfast office. www.asmaccountants.com

Eye on Communications

Have you got the Right Connection for your Business?

Network Connectivity Options Explained It’s easy to take data networking for granted but every IT investment you make has to earn its keep. With the volume of digital business data more than doubling every 2 years, according to IDC, businesses are becoming increasing reliant on information flows and being connected – to other sites, to the internet, to cloud hosted services - at all times. So how can you be sure your connectivity is optimised for you?

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ata connectivity is generally based on three kinds of technology: copper, wireless or fibre. Each option can determine how fast and reliable your connection will be. Let’s look at your choices.

FTTC can be a good, relatively reliable, option for smaller office and branch locations but not for a head office to which other branch sites need to connect.

It is also a good choice if you are looking for back-up and resilience to a fibre connection.

1 Copper technologies ADSL: an entry-level product, ADSL2+ offers download speeds up to 24 Mb. But the upload and download speeds aren’t the same – they’re what we call Asymmetric – so ADSL isn’t ideal if you communicate with hosted applications or are sending files to other office locations.

Bandwidth isn’t guaranteed as ADSL is distance-dependent - the farther you are from your local phone exchange, the slower the speeds you’ll get. What’s more, your bandwidth is shared so your speeds suffer during busy periods.

Fibre to the cabinet (FTTC): With FTTC, you get fibre from the exchange to the street cabinet and the ‘last mile’ to your premises is copper. It’s one step up from ADSL, offering cost-effective bandwidth up to 80Mbps download and 20Mb upload. But like ADSL, the upload and download speeds aren’t the same. Whilst inherently a contended technology, meaning your bandwidth is shared, FTTC can be offered as an Ethernet-based solution with fully uncontended bandwidth.

Ethernet in the first mile (EFM): Here, you’re connecting your premises directly to your local exchange with multiple pairs of copper. Although speeds are lower than FTTC, with 2Mb to 20Mb available, the bandwidth is dedicated and is available both ways. If you don’t want to share your bandwidth and you want guarantees over the availability and quality of service, EFM is a step closer to fibre.

2 Wireless access Licensed wireless services are delivered over radio spectrum that’s licensed with OFCOM. Offering quality guarantees and symmetric speeds ranging from 10 Mbps to 1Gbps, wireless is a good option for hard-to-reach locations, or as a backup link for resilience and peace of mind.

The supplier must verify your premises has line of sight to nearby microwave equipment.

3 Fibre access Fibre access uses fibre-optic light cables to transmit your data at phenomenal speeds.

A fibre connection creates virtually limitless bandwidth capacity into your organisation – capacity is only limited by the termination equipment, not the connection. This makes it the most future-proof option of all.

Fibre is ideal for connecting business-critical locations or for providing super-fast Internet access. Your connection isn’t shared with anyone else and with quality guarantees and a managed services capability, fibre access also offers maximum security and business assurance.

According to Cisco, we’re already entering the Zettabyte Age. Businesses are becoming increasingly digital and increasingly reliant on information flows. Ultimately, a data connection is about ensuring your business can operate at optimum levels at all times and is primed for growth.

That’s why choosing your data connection isn’t just about top-line bandwidth speeds but, more importantly, ensuring that your connection is dedicated

to you, is two-way, secure and assured to enterprise levels.

Outside of small office & home office sites, fibre is the future and - with costs coming down - is more accessible than ever.

Jim Montgomery is Solutions Architect with eircom Business Solutions NI. To discuss what connectivity options are best for your business, contact Jim at uk.linkedin.com/in/ jimmontgomery76 Forsyth House, Cromac Square, Belfast, BT2 8LA Tel: 0800 039 2000 www.eircom.co.uk twitter.com/eircomUK linkedin.com/company/eircom-ni

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Eye on Agri Food

Measuring Up In A Fast Moving Business Sam Butler talked to Brian Reid, managing director of Deli Lites Ireland in Warrenpoint has grown into an Irish leader in ‘food to go’ innovation.

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rian Reid admits to being surprised when a potential client whipped out a tape measure to judge the size of the king prawns in a gourmet sandwich he was bidding to sell as part of Deli Lites Ireland’s portfolio of ‘food to go’ products for cafes, canteens and retailers.

“We had been asked if we could produce a gourmet sandwich with king prawns, then an ingredient not readily available in Northern Ireland. We decided to import king prawns to win the business.

It was amazed to see the buyer open the sandwich to measure the size o f the prawns,” he says.

The prawns clearly measured up well and Deli LItes was awarded what turned out to be very substantial business from a very discerning client for the Warrenpoint company’s entire range of ‘food to go’.

What the story demonstrates clearly in the company’s gritty determination to secure business and to do so by investing in customer-focused innovation that has seen it grow business beyond the fiercely competitive sandwich sector. It now offers clients throughout Ireland a complete fresh food solution. Among other major investments in innovation is the company’s in-house bakery.

This enabled it to become the first to launch freshly baked French breads. It has also moved into traditional Irish breads and sweets such as much loved traybakes.

Another excellent example of this focus is the company’s recent deal with Boots Ireland that

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has led to its products, gourmet sandwiches, flatbreads, wraps, filled rolls, packaged salads and fresh fruit pots to stores in the Republic. It’s a deal which should see Deli Lites supplying many of the 80 stores run by Boots there.

“The contract with Boots is a marvellous endorsement of both the quality of our products and of the customer-led service that has become our hallmark over 20 years in business.

“What’s also important is the boost for our sales outside Northern Ireland. The Republic of Ireland, for instance, now contributes over 60 per cent of our business. It’s hugely important and offers significant growth potential. We’d also be keen to develop business in Britain.

Based at Milltown Industrial Estate, where it employs almost 200 people, Deli Lites secured the business with Boots, according to Mr Reid, because of “our established and successful track

record in the Republic for the supply of consistently high quality products, our sharp focus on developing innovative food with our customers and the efficiency of our delivery services using our 35-strong vehicle fleet”.

The fleet enables the company, which also has depots in Dublin and Cork, to deliver fresh food every morning to clients in centres as distant as Tralee. An impressive client base also includes leading coffee houses in both Northern Ireland and the Republic.

A native of Armagh, Mr Reid started in a cafe business in Newry in 1991, What happened next was that Mr Reid and wife Jackie saw an opportunity to produce food for this cafe and others across Northern Ireland. They set up a small production operation in Warrenpoint.

Success led the couple to move to bigger premises and then, in 2007, to the current

and purpose-built base in Milltown Industrial Estate Strong growth continues to be a feature of the business, clients are expanding rapidly and the product range increasing steadily.

Over the past five years, Deli Lites has been setting the pace within the industry with year-on-year growth in excess of 30 per cent.

Mr Reid puts the impressive growth down to the “closest possible relationship with clients that enables us to respond to their requirements and our attention to trends within our market”. “We are operating in a fast moving industry driven by customers who are continually searching for new ideas and different taste experiences. Our business is focused on our clients and, of course, their customers. We’ve structured the business to ensure a fast response and also to be able to come up with innovative ideas for them. We stay ahead by being innovative and nimble,” he says.

Eye on News

City Auction Group’s Second Auction Is Another Huge Success

City Auction Group’s second auction at Rockingham was another huge success, with the firm selling 300 vehicles, with a total value of £2 million and all in excess of 96% of CAP.

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ity Auction Group’s data shows that the city and small vehicle segments performed well at auction this month, with the Mazda 3 Hatchback achieving the highest CAP value (124.1%), followed by the Ford Focus (123.8%) and the Mini Cooper (112.3%).

There was strong demand for the

Peugeot 107 and 207 models, with sensible mileage and aged around 3 years. These models achieved average returns of up to 111.8%.

The Citroen C1 of a similar age achieved in excess of 105.2%, whilst the BMW 1 achieved 104.3%.

Michael Tomalin, Managing Director of City Auction Group comments: “Over 300 vehicles were sold on behalf of 25 corporate vendors including TrustFord, Lex Autolease, Semalease, Peugeot & Citroen Financial Services, Avis and Budget and many more.

“We had excellent feedback from attendees and our vendors were delighted with prices we achieved. The current low volume of vehicles in the marketplace assisted with energetic bidding both physically and online.

“From April 16, our auctions will move to fortnightly and we look

forward to supplying dealers with a wide range of vehicles at our worldclass facility at Rockingham.”

David Cole, National Group Disposals Manager at TrustFord commented: “We had a trial event with City Auction Group at Rockingham earlier this month. The auction was very successful and we were highly impressed with the firm’s customer service and the returns on the day were excellent.

We look forward working with City Auction Group in the future. ” The next auction event is at 10am Thursday 16th April 2015.

Full listings for the next auction on 16thApril can be viewed at Cityautiongroup.com. For further information, please call Michael Tomalin on 07808 791210 or email fleet@ cityauctiongroup.com to register a motor trade account and receive updates.

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Eye on Cover Story

MICHAEL McKINSTRY AT PHOENIX NATURAL GAS Setting The Agenda For The Development Of The Natural Gas Industry Describing something as being in the ‘corporate DNA’ has become something of a cliché these days, but with apologies, it’s hard to avoid using the term DNA when linking corporate responsibility or CR with Phoenix Natural Gas.

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ometimes when I reflect how the company has evolved I think we were probably practising CR before we put a spade in the ground”, Michael McKinstry is a few months into the Group CEO’s role at Phoenix but a man who’s been with the energy company since it opened its doors here in Northern Ireland.

“The strategy for our company was to gain a good reputation from day one. This made good business sense for a number of reasons.

Our construction activities were viewed more positively, we were able to recruit staff and develop independent companies who wanted to work in the natural gas industry more easily and we were able to engage positively with prospective customers.

“Whilst this was a significant investment to make as a young business I think that what we did back then was just good, common

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sense business. We just didn’t label it corporate responsibility!”

Phoenix Natural Gas had to start from scratch in the mid-1990’s.

There was no mains gas industry here and there was no supply chain around it. Its first job, as most will remember, was to dig up the roads and establish the gas network.

“We forged close links with companies that operated in the downstream market (providing appliances and equipment in homes and businesses) and established the Northern Ireland Natural Gas Association (NINGA), to coordinate the objectives of the many companies and organisations that wished to see the natural gas industry develop in Northern Ireland.

“Our job is to encourage as many customers as possible to connect to the natural gas network, but we rely on a large number of specialists to supply and fit the latest highly efficient appliances and heating equipment within customers premises in an efficient and cost effective manner. Customer recommendation is one of the key sources of future connections and it is important that as many customers as possible get to enjoy the many benefits of the fuel.”

But the company’s commitment to CR has developed and widened beyond recognition from the early days and the company has continued

to invest time and effort as Michael McKinstry says “We’re here for the long haul, as a company, we invested a lot of money in the natural gas network here in Northern Ireland, and it will be 40 years or more before we get that money back.

So we’re not going anywhere.

“Natural gas needs to deliver real benefits to our homes and businesses and to do that we need to actively engage in the communities we serve. Of course, an investment in CR helps to maintain our reputation as an ethical company and it also helps to establish our brand values, but it also allows us to make a real difference. It’s something that has always made sense to us as a company.”

In many corporate scenarios, CR starts out in an ad hoc fashion and at Phoenix I guess that is how it started for our company, however very quickly it became integral to our business strategy and the company continues to take a strategic approach to its CR management and operations. Michael McKinstry has plenty of examples of how it permeates throughout the company.

“All of our new employees learn about our CR programmes as part of their wider induction, and they’re encouraged to get involved,” he says.

“We certainly don’t push anyone into volunteering for something they don’t want to do, but take up is very

high amongst our people and there’s no doubt that they get equally as much out of getting involved.”

The company does more than its fair share of charitable work and has raised almost half a million pounds for the charity that it founded on behalf of the gas industry, The Energy for Children Charitable Trust. The Trust has been very well supported by the wider natural gas industry who not only fund raise but are also instrumental in identifying the causes the Trust supports. As far as we are aware we are the only utility in the UK that has established such a charity.

The practical side of corporate responsibility runs right through the company, a current example being its involvement with the Business in the Community’s ‘Time to Read’ and ‘Time to Count’ initiatives, ground-breaking literacy and numeracy programmes through which volunteers visit primary schools to work with pupils on reading and numeracy skills.

At a different level on the education front, Phoenix has helped to facilitate closer engagement between representatives of Northern Ireland’s companies and head teachers from a variety of local schools in an effort to improve the understanding of the requirements by businesses for employees of the future and help schools with

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Eye on Cover Story

a range of initiatives that help them achieve their objectives.

Phoenix’s wide ranging and integrated corporate responsibility programme is called LIFE and encompasses Leadership in the marketplace, Investing in its people, Fostering its community and Environmental responsibility.

Breaking this down, Phoenix Natural Gas operates its CR activities via the LIFE Committee which is made up of representatives from across the company but chaired by the Group CEO. They design and implement programs across four main areas:Health & Wellbeing – embedding initiatives into the culture in a sustainable way helps to improve, as the name suggests,

the wellbeing of employees with examples of successful schemes such as Bike 2 Work, annual health checks and driver awareness training that have made an impact.

the Ulster GAA Phoenix Elite Academy, Ulster Rugby, the Grand Opera House, Cinemagic, the Lyric Theatre and the Energy for Children Charitable Trust.

Education – working with local schools, universities and in-house training as well as Business in the Community initiatives as outlined above.

The company has long been seen as an ambassador for CR amongst Northern Ireland companies, which probably helps to explain why it will sponsor the Best Community Contribution category at the inaugural Business Eye First Trust Bank Small Business Awards this summer.

“Of course we’re happy to encourage other organisations to do their bit,” says Michael McKinstry. “If we are seen as a role model, we’re delighted about that and we’re happy to pass on any advice we can based on our own experiences.

Environment – Phoenix has worked hard to set the benchmark for environmental credentials and has consistently achieved the highest status in the annual ARENA survey, leading the utility sector.

Local Community – a diverse range of partnerships are in place from the arts to sport including

Pupils from Holywood Primary School visit the offices of their Phoenix Time to Count volunteers.

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“As far as Phoenix is concerned our message is very simple. CR makes very good business sense, at whatever level, and it also makes a real difference to people who get involved in it from all levels within the company. If you embrace it and integrate it into your business practices it becomes common place for those within the business and is less likely to be seen as an overhead.”

Phoenix has managed to achieve high impact in the community despite its own relatively small size.

“People tend to think that we’re some kind of vast organisation, but we employ around 180 people here, so we don’t count among the bigger employers even in Northern Ireland terms,” adds McKinstry.

At least, the Phoenix CEO knows that he has the backing of the company’s institutional owners when it comes to community involvement.

The company was sold by private equity group Terra Firma in 2013 to Hastings Fund Management acting for major shareholders The Utilities Trust of Australia and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Pension Fund.

“Both Hastings and the Utilities Trust of Australia in particular have a strong commitment to investing in companies with a track record in CR,” Michael McKinstry points out. However I think even they recognise the integrated nature of CR in Phoenix has taken this to another level. Indeed in a recent visit to Australia to meet with investors and other CEO’s of portfolio companies, he was asked to talk about Phoenix Natural Gas’ CR strategy.

It’s something he’s very comfortable talking about...

Corporate responsibility features right from the start with an induction for new Phoenix employees.

EyeonAccountancy

ROY CREELMAN...

BIG PLANS FOR BELFAST FIRM If experience counts for anything in the world of accountancy, then Roy Creelman has it in abundance.

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n economics graduate from Queen’s University, he trained as a Chartered Accountant with an international firm before moving to a smaller boutique firm of accountants in Belfast. He went on to be Audit Manager with Goldblatt McGuigan in the city before joining Downpatrickbased MB McGrady where he was responsible for helping to develop the firm’s Belfast operations.

He is also Chairman of the Belfast Chartered Accountants Network and sits on the Education Committee of the Institute of Directors Northern Ireland.

Roy recently joined McIlveen Howard as a Partner and he has some clear aims in mind for the Belfast-based firm.

“The first target is to develop our client base,” he says. “And we want to develop the range of both products and services we can offer new and existing clients. Thirdly, we’ll also be on the lookout for growth opportunities through the acquisition of other practices.”

McIlveen Howard has a firm focus on SME clients, and Roy Creelman has already been responsible for introducing innovative new products to the firm, including the proven Sellability Score system..... an easy to use interface by which business owners can take a 30-minute online questionnaire and then receive a follow-up report advising on the potential worth of their business as well as the priority areas for improvement.

“The name Sellability is a bit misleading,” adds Roy Creelman.

“The product is much more useful as an aid to looking at the positives and negatives of any business, and learning where improvements can be made.

“The clients that have taken it up so far have been very impressed by how much they’ve been able to learn, and potentially change, within a very short period of time and, perhaps more importantly, with very little time or effort involved on their part.”

Contact Roy on roy@mhlca.co.uk for a free consultation on any aspect of your business and to idenfify your firm’s Sellability Score.

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SITE MAP SUNFLOWER FESTIVAL STAGE

ELECTRIC/HYBRID CAR DISPLAY

VINTAGE CARS & VANS WAKEBOARDING

SMALL LIGHT COMMERCIAL DISPLAY

URBAN STREET FOOD EDDIE IRVINE SPORTS & FAMILY FUN ZONE

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24 T H A P R I L OVER 20 MANUFACTURERS EXHIBITING THEIR LATEST VEHICLES FOR BUSINESS & DOMESTIC USERS

LIVE CAR AUCTION from 12noon selling 200 cars per day HOSTED BY

FLEET SPECIFIC SEMINARS AND EXHIBITORS GALA AWARDS DINNER LEASING & INSURANCE CLINIC

ELECTRIC VEHICLES & VANS

SUPPORTING

www.titanicmotorshow.com

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AWARD CATEGORIES & CRITERIA

THERE ARE 15 CATEGORIES FOR THE AWARDS THIS YEAR...

FLEET CAR OF THE YEAR

ELECTRIC/HYBRID VEHICLE OF THE YEAR

BEST SHORT TERM RENTAL COMPANY

INNOVATIVE COMPANY OF THE YEAR

The judging panel will select the winners against key criteria AND that fleets consider when adding cars to their choice lists.

They are: Running costs, CO2 emissions, Safety (technology and Euro NCAP rating), Reliability, Manufacturer support and aftersales/dealer support, Driver appeal (P11D pricing/BIK, badge image, performance), Range consideration.

Buying an electric car is now a real possibility as a number of major manufacturers launch high quality, fully electric and hybrid models onto the UK market.

Key considerations during the judging process are - Green car rating, Range, MPG, CO2, Cost and Charging Points..

This award recognises the best short-term rental company.

The judges will be looking for innovation, new services, a clear understanding of customers’ needs and case studies which show evidence of your company’s impact on a fleet operator.

This award will be presented to the organisation best demonstrating innovation in business producing tangible results. The category is open to all companies and organisations who feel they can show innovation and transformation of their brand and corporate identity.

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GREEN FLEET OF THE YEAR Environmental concerns are high on the agenda. Cutting CO2 emissions enables fleets to meet corporate responsibilities.

This award will reward forward looking companies that have introduced initiatives to reduce their CO2 emissions year-onyear, delivering financial and environmental benefits.

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SPONSORED BY

PRESENTED BY

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD The judges will be looking for the person who, during their career, has made the greatest contribution to the fleet industry as a whole and at how their hard work and dedication has had a positive impact on the sector.

SPONSORED BY

SPONSORED BY

For further information please contact Donna Hosking on 07892 406262 or donna@businesseye.co.uk

enter online at www.titanicmotorshow.com 26

FLEET MANUFACTURER OF THE YEAR

BEST SMALL/LIGHT COMMERCIAL

RISK MANAGEMENT PROJECT OF THE YEAR

SERVICE MAINTENANCE DEALER OF THE YEAR

This category is designed to honour those manufacturers that have made the biggest strides forward in terms of their relationships with fleets over the past 12 months. It gives the manufacturer’s fleet operation deserved recognition for new initiatives, improved service or simply a new approach towards fleet.

With fleets looking to improve their environmental credentials, their ability to source small light commercials that help them to lower carbon emissions along with range consideration, cost efficiency, load capacity, reliability, residual value, equipment and styling. This award recognises the efforts of manufacturers that are developing small light commercials which are greener and more economical.

This category provides a platform to publicly recognise the importance of road safety and indeed reward outstanding driver training and risk management programmes implemented by local companies in Northern Ireland. In addition to the individual benefits of enhanced safety, many companies will have seen a reduction in their overall fuel costs, vehicle accident rates, down time and insurance premiums thanks to a proactive approach to driver training and risk management.

Companies that can demonstrate the following initiatives 1. Evidence of excellent customer care that correlates to an understanding of the requirements of Fleet Drivers.

2. A highly trained proactive and innovative support team, offering answers and support to the Fleet User Industry. 3.

Work carried out to the highest standards in a good time span and at a cost effective level.

SPONSORED BY

SPONSORED BY

SPONSORED BY

BEST LOCAL FLEET PROVIDER OF THE YEAR This award is open to service companies that have proved over the year that they are investing in their commitment to fleet. Entrants might range from software companies, to leasing firms, rental companies, fast-fit organisations, remarketing companies and other servicefocused organisations

FLEET MANAGER OF THE YEAR Key to the success of any fleet operation is a dedicated fleet manager. The judges will be looking for detailed understanding of all aspects of fleet management.

There should be clear awareness of current and future legislation and a commitment to training, innovation and cost control.

Examples of best practice (including gaining support within the company) will be advantageous SPONSORED BY

MOST IMPROVED COMPANY/DRIVER A company that differentiates itself from its competition by aligning itself with Quality brands and by being local to its Northern Ireland Customer base and providing that personal touch to ensure customers are meeting their fleet objectives. It is open to all companies that provide competitive fleet management, consistent high level of service and efficient vehicle management solutions

LEASING COMPANY OF THE YEAR This award recognises the best contract hire and leasing company.

The judges will be looking for companies who provide a benefit to fleet and business decisionmakers, focusing on services, cost reduction, environmental initiatives, safety and risk management.

SPONSORED BY

SPONSORED BY

CUSTOMER SERVICE AWARD This award will recognise the most successful attempts to improve customer service from any fleet supplier. It might be personal account handling by designated staff; faster response times driven by technology or human endeavour or by doing what you say you’ll do and providing evidence that it was done on time and to the highest possible standard.

SPONSORED BY

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Eye on News

SPAR & MAXOL RENEW £200M CONTRACT Leading forecourt convenience retailer Maxol has announced the renewal of its £200 million deal with the Henderson Group, the company that owns the SPAR franchise in Northern Ireland.

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he two family-owned businesses first announced their partnership in 2009 and the renewal of their arrangement will be effective for a further five years.

The collaboration will see 25 Maxol service stations display an exclusive co-branded Maxol SPAR shop fascia to complement Maxol’s recently launched brand identity and new brand mark, known as the ‘Brio’. In addition, facilities in each of these stores will be upgraded representing a combined investment of £500,000 and a valuable contract to the local signage providers.

A total of 20 SPAR service stations owned by the Henderson Group are contracted to Maxol for supplies of all petroleum fuels – six sites have already been re-branded with Maxol’s new forecourt signage as part of the deal, with plans to reimage the remaining 14 service stations by the end of March 2015 with a contract value of £450,000.

The continued partnership will see the launch of ‘Moreish’

in Northern Ireland, Maxol’s new fresh food brand, which boasts a deli and fresh ground coffee offering. Moreish will be available in select service stations which include Eglinton in Londonderry, Townparks in Antrim, Glenabbey in Newtownabbey and Scarva Road in Banbridge.

Brian Donaldson, Group General Manager, The Maxol Group, said: “We are delighted to continue our partnership with the Henderson Group. At Maxol we are committed to leading the way in the forecourt convenience sector and our alliance with the Henderson Group has been instrumental in developing our convenience offering and in working closely with our independent retailers.

“We recognise the changing shopping habits of consumers who are moving away from the bigger weekly shop in large supermarkets and are now ‘topping up’ in smaller, local outlets. Today’s consumer demands choice, value and quality as well as convenience and we’re confident that, with SPAR as our partner, our combined offering

Pictured at newly opened Maxol service station in Eglinton are Brian Donaldson, Group General Manager, The Maxol Group with Paddy Doody, Sales and Marketing Director, Henderson Wholesale.

ticks all these boxes and more.

Our company service stations are operated by independent retailers, providing a family approach to the offer, employing local people and positioning the station as a key destination point at the heart of the community.

We want to continue to serve local communities across Northern Ireland and believe this partnership will lay down a strong platform for future growth.”

Paddy Doody, Sales and Marketing Director, Henderson Wholesale, said: “The renewal of our long term partnership is an

excellent strategic fit for both family owned businesses. Both companies share the same long term values as we continue to support local communities, invest with our retail partners and foster enduring partnerships with local suppliers. SPAR continues to perform exceptionally well in what is a highly competitive and challenging market. Our focus on fresh foods, delivered locally, while providing fantastic value for cost-conscious shoppers will help to ensure this Maxol SPAR alliance continues to deliver effective results for all.”

Planning permission will be sought for a 120m long facility with a 50m internal span. Made out of double skinned, tensioned fabric, these temporary but robust

structures are widely used for big events such as the Derry/ Londonderry City of Culture Event Space in 2013. It will include catering and WC facilities.

MAJOR TITANIC EXHIBITION CENTRE PLANNED

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itanic Quarter has revealed plans to develop a new Titanic Exhibition Centre (TEC) which will be Belfast’s largest dedicated exhibition venue.

A planning proposal for a 6,000 square metre, temporary building on the Queen’s Road, opposite the Titanic Studios, will be lodged later this month. Subject to planning permission, it is expected that

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the facility will be available to stage major public exhibitions and trade shows by autumn 2015.

The longer-term plan is to develop a purpose-built, permanent TEC that will be on a par with facilities such as Glasgow’s Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC) and Dublin’s RDS and Conference Centre which regularly host major international events.

Eye on News

AUTOLINE ON TARGET FOR FORTIETH ANNIVERSARY

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utoline Insurance Group, headquartered in Newry with branches across Northern Ireland has launched a yearlong celebration of their fortieth anniversary year.

Throughout 2015 they will be celebrating forty years in the insurance and financial services sector as an independent broker with a number of corporate

and consumer initiatives.

Autoline has also set an ambitious target of raising a total of £40,000 for 40 Northern Ireland based charities across the year with information on the selected charities available at autoline.co.uk.

Pictured launching the activity is Michael Blaney, Managing Director, Autoline Insurance Group.

BARCLAY COMMUNICATIONS TOP MOBILE AWARDS Barclay Communications has beaten off UK wide competition to win Business to Business (B2B) Dealer at the Mobile News Awards in London, the industry’s most prestigious event.

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orthern Ireland’s only O2 Centre of Excellence and local mobile, landline, IT and web specialists originally won the B2B award in 2009 and are the only Northern Ireland company to collect the accolade.

Britt Megahey, MD of Barclay Communications comments, “It’s a thrill and honour to once again pick up this award. I am extremely proud of the entire Barclay team and that we were able to represent Northern Ireland businesses among the best in the UK.” At the biggest event in the mobile industry and in front of 800 manufactures, networks,

dealers and distributors the Belfast based company lifted their second Mobile News Award trophy alongside fellow winners HTC, Samsung and Mazuma Mobile.

To win Barclay Communications had to place their customer service, product portfolio, value-added extras, local campaigns and mobile network relationships up for critical evaluation within the fiercely competitive B2B Dealer category, but their hard work paid off.

Judges praised them for their investment in innovative customer service, staff and value-added extras such as local account management, in-house technical

experts, an advanced bill review system, protection plans, affinity deals and multi-buy discounts.

Barclay Communications also impressed judges with their commitment to the local community, which they

demonstrated in Northern Ireland campaigns targeting the agriculture industry, the charity sector with Think Local’s non-for profit deals and the public sector with their accreditation as O2’s first public sector representatives.

GLYN TAKES ON COLLEGES ROLE

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olleges Northern Ireland, the umbrella body for further education colleges here, has a new Chairman. He is Glyn Roberts, Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Independent Retail Trade Association (NIIRTA) and he will servie for an initial period of two years.

The key responsibility of the Chair of Colleges NI is to provide support, direction and leadership to

the Board and the Chief Executive of Colleges Northern Ireland, to ensure that the Board is effective in its task of overseeing both conformance and performance.

Glyn has been the Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Independent Retail Trade Association (NIIRTA) since January 2008. Previously he acted as Head of Press and Parliamentary Affairs with the Federation of Small

Businesses in Northern Ireland for seven years. Glyn was also Vice-Chairman of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Business Trust (2011-2012). He is campaign coordinator of Small Business Saturday Northern Ireland. He was recently made a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations and was previously a member of the Governing Board of the South Eastern Regional College.

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Eye on Retail

LIDL NORTHERN IRELAND...

A PASSION FOR RETAILING 30

Eye on Retail A visit to Lidl Northern Ireland’s regional distribution centre at Nutt’s Corner is something of an eye-opener.

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es, the place is vast, despite the fact that it’s virtually invisible from the busy road beside it. Yes, it’s a model of calm efficiency, with trucks delivering at one side of the building and at one end of the day, and different trucks heading off to 38 stores at the other side of the building and the other end of the day.

But settle down in the unassuming offices upstairs and what impresses more than anything is the passion among Lidl’s small leadership team – Glen Cinnamon, Regional Director of Lidl NI, and his colleagues Paul Gibson (Regional Sales Operations Executive), Dermot McGirr (Regional Logistics Executive) and Paul Moore (Regional Administration Executive).

Regional Supply Chain Executive David Condon is due to leave the team shortly on sabbatical prior to taking up a post with Lidl outside of Northern Ireland.

The stats, to kick off with, are impressive. There’s the 38-store network Lidl has built up from a standing start 16 years ago

(Cookstown and Banbridge were the first). There’s the fact that £16 million is being spent on further improvements to the Nutt’s Corner nerve centre this year alone. Or there’s the fact that the centre operates at five different closelymonitored temperature control zones....from frozen through to three different levels of chilled and into ambient to handle everything from frozen foods to meat and poultry, vegetables and even fresh flowers.

It’s an operations hub that Glen Cinnamon is clearly proud of, and he’s quick to point out all of the details......down to the fact that the Warehouse Operatives pick goods by voice control commands based on orders placed by palm top computer out at the stores.

“One of our Managers or Deputy Managers keys in an order and it’s all managed electronically here at the centre,” says Cinnamon, explaining the system of daily deliveries seven days a week to each of the stores in the region.

Logistics chief Dermot McGirr emphasises that Lidl is unique among the big retailers locally in that every product is channelled through the Regional Distribution Centre, with no exceptions. Most rival retailers operate systems whereby some deliveries – milk and bread, for example – go straight to stores from suppliers.

“Our inbound deliveries are timed to come in between 6.00 am and 12 noon, and our deliveries out to stores take place in the afternoon,” he says. “Between inbound and outbound, we carry out a range of stringent quality checks on everything that comes through the centre. That’s a crucial part of what we do.”

In practice, it means that every vegetable, every bunch of flowers and every package of meat is quality checked before it is allowed out to the stores.

“That’s what we stand for here at Lidl. Quality is paramount, and we follow that up with the best value we can offer and customer service,” says Glen Cinnamon.

While some trucks – carrying fruit and fresh flowers, for example – might make their way to the Nutt’s Corner Regional Distribution Centre from outside of Northern

Ireland, the Lidl management team stresses that the majority of their deliveries come from local suppliers. That is our commitment to Northern Ireland.

“We don’t just talk about using local suppliers, we use them where we possibly can,” adds Dermot McGirr.

So a healthy proportion of vegetables along with bread, dairy products and meat and poultry are all sourced locally.

Some of those local suppliers, in fact, have gone on to develop an even more fruitful relationship with Lidl. Fivemiletown Creamery and meat producers Linden Foods are among those now supplying Lidl stores in GB and Europe as well as the island of Ireland.

Other major suppliers include Willowbrook Farms for prepacked vegetables and salads and Co. Tyrone’s Strathroy Dairies....a supplier since day one for Lidl in Northern Ireland.

The centre works to a simple system. Once the various goods are delivered and shelved, they’re lifted back off the shelves by a team of pickers travelling around the centre in mini lift trucks and organised in a series of lanes for afternoon loading onto the vehicles heading out to the retail stores.

By late afternoon, most of those trucks should have left, although each of them returns later the same evening carrying any returns and waste from the stores.

“We pride ourselves on our waste management,” says Glen Cinnamon. “We lift all of the packaging from the 38 stores, bring it back here, sort it and send everything we can to recycling.”

Employee relations, training and development and all HR and administration issues are the domain of Paul Moore who, in common with most of his senior colleagues, has been with Lidl since it opened its doors in Northern Ireland.

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Eye on Retail

Lidl Northern Ireland’s headcount has grown steadily as more stores have opened and as the regional distribution centre has extended in scale. Building work is already underway to extend the centre’s frozen and chilled distribution area at one end of the vast building.

“Training and development is vital to what we do,” he says.

“All of our employees receive training in the Lidl ethos, our aims and objectives and how we work on a day to day basis.

That starts with a full induction process for every employee and moves on to a programme of training specific to their job along with the soft skills that they need to do those jobs.

“We work hard to offer our people a career rather than a job. The fact that it works is illustrated by the number of employees who’ve risen through the ranks with Lidl and are now in management positions.”

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The company recently launched a brand new development programme for Store Managers and Deputy Store Manager at Dublin’s Convention Centre.

And its commitment to people development was recognised at the Irish Institute of Training and Development’s National Training Awards held recently in Dublin, where Lidl picked up no less than three awards for work done in upskilling employees.

Lidl NI is no stranger to the awards stage, of course, having won the coveted Retailer of the Year category for two years on the trot at the UTV Business Eye Awards.

Lidl has its Irish headquarters at Newbridge in County Kildare and also operates three regional distribution centres, at Newbridge, Charleville in Cork and Mullingar in County Westmeath.....a centre which is one and a half times the size of the County Antrim one.

From his base at Nutt’s Corner, Paul Gibson is in charge of sales and operations at all of Lidl’s 38 stores in Northern Ireland. He has a team of nine Sales Operations Managers, each looking after a number of stores.....and he’s also responsible for all 38 Store Managers, 48 Deputy Store Managers and 550 employees out on the shop floors.

“I look after the KPI’s, I look after productivity and I look after every other aspect of how we operate our stores and how we interact with our customers in the retail network,” says Gibson, who splits his time between a desk at Nutt’s Corner and regular visits to Lidl stores.

The oldest of those stores has now been open for 16 years, and the company is already engaged in a major refurbishment programme to ensure that its stores are kept up to date.

The Lisnaskea store in Co. Fermanagh, for instance, will close

for four weeks for a complete £1 million refurbishment and re-fit programme, and others will follow suit....depending on their individual requirements.

New store openings have also continued, the latest being Lidl’s new outlet at High Street in Belfast city centre which opened last November.

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Eye on Banking

Bank of Ireland UK Boosts Support For Local Enterprise For any ambitious small business, managing money in the bank is vitally important. But, arguably more important, is the relationship you have with your bank.

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he idea of “a friendly bank manager” might seem old fashioned but it hasn’t gone away; it’s just been replaced by new terminology. Today it’s the local business advisers that form the key relationship for small business customers.

The Bank, which recently launched new packages for growing small businesses and start-ups, has made sure that it has experienced local business advisers in every single branch. They provide that vital link to the bank and to give their customers access to support and speedy local decision making as they plan to grow their enterprises.

One growth-oriented business supported by Bank of Ireland UK is Tyreway, a Belfast tyre dealership established by brothers Conor and Liam Magee. As importers and suppliers of new and nearly new, top brand tyres, the Lanark Way business has developed a customer base across Northern Ireland.

Having taken on two parttime staff and purchased their own business premises, the two brothers are about to invest in a wheel alignment machine, enabling them to expand their services.

Conor Magee said: “Our Bank of Ireland UK business adviser really understands our business. He’s there any time we want to discuss our ideas and new opportunities.

“Over the coming months we’re planning to bring

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together three dealerships under the Tyreway brand. By consolidating the business we can focus on development and growth and Bank of Ireland UK will continue to play a key role in helping us to achieve that.”

Sean Sheehan, Regional Director, NI Small Business and Consumer says: “We believe our economy will continue to grow in 2015. We’re seeing improved demand from the SME sector and that’s been backed up by our term lending increase of 50% with lending propositions approvals at 93%, in 2014”.

“As a result, we’re investing in products and business support services to help more local firms expand. And we’ve made a multi-million pound investment in our mobile, online and tablet services to make banking easier for them too”.

“Our local business advisers

are playing a vital role in helping ambitious businesses grow.

But whilst there are significant growth opportunities, we’re getting feedback that firms continue to face some challenges. Particularly around competition, pricing, profitability and cash flow”.

“A low inflation environment makes it hard to lift prices, so businesses need to renew their focus on costs and efficiency. And that’s where the investments we’re making to support business will help.”

The Bank’s Small Business packages consist of a threeyear deal for established growth businesses, which gives two years of free transactions followed by a third at a 50% discount, and a two-year deal for new startups offering a year’s fee-free banking followed by a year at

a 50% discount. Customers of any branch will have the support of an experienced local business adviser and a team of local experts. They also have access to the full range of business products and services, including the Bank’s online cash flow calculator.

For more details of Bank of Ireland UK’s support for small businesses, call into one of the36 branches nationwide to speak to an experienced local Business Adviser. www.bankofireland.co.uk/business

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*Transaction Fees as detailed in the Schedule of Charges for Business Customers. New Start Up: In year 1, no Transaction Fees will apply to your current account. In year 2, a 50% discount on these Transaction Fees will apply. During this 2 year fee deal, if cash lodged is more than £10,000 per quarter, a fee of 35p per £100 is charged on the excess amount over £10,000 per quarter. *Growth: In years 1 and 2, no Transaction Fees will apply to your current account. In year 3, a 50% discount on these Transaction Fees will apply. During this 3 year fee deal, if cash lodged is more than £10,000 per quarter, a fee of 35p per £100 is charged on the excess amount over £10,000 per quarter.

All other standard charges apply, including Electronic Banking/BACS charges as outlined in the Schedule of Charges for Business Customers.

Bank of Ireland UK is a trading name of Bank of Ireland (UK) plc which is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority. Registered in England and Wales (No. 7022885), Bow Bells House, 1 Bread Street, London EC4M 9BE.

9160150130a

Eye on Telecoms

Creative Hub All In The Line Of Duty For Atlas A year on, local telecoms and connectivity company celebrates its movie ‘debut’ In a discreet location near Belfast city centre, hidden among a maze of commercial buildings, there lies a little bit of Hollywood.

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he Creative Media Hub grew out of the burgeoning £329m per year Northern Ireland film industry and provides complete onsite telecoms and connectivity for productions drawn to our shores.

For the past year, the Hub has quietly been providing a ‘home from home’ for crews working on some very well-known international TV shows and film productions.

It’s the brainchild of Atlas Communications, one of Northern Ireland’s leading suppliers of data, internet and telephony communications solutions. After more than 30 years

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of providing telecoms and data for businesses across the island, moving into movies might seem a bit of a departure for Atlas.

“It was, in fact, a very logical step for us,” said Atlas Managing Director, Richard Simpson. “It’s the only facility in Northern Ireland where a production crew can move into and start working straight away.

“We started working with TV and film production companies, providing their data and telecoms services, around eight years ago. We made our debut with City of Ember and have since supplied a number of other productions, including

Game of Thrones and Dracula Untold.

“It became clear to us that TV and film production had very distinct needs and timelines for facilities and services that the traditional model of providing telecoms and internet simply didn’t fit.

“Each production required a workspace and office complete with their own telecoms and internet connectivity solutions for short term periods, and needed them fast. That’s when we came up with the idea of providing a Hub where all these capabilities were ready to go inside 48 hours.”

The Hub provides more than 6,000 sq feet of flexible office space, secure 24hr turnkey access and integrated workshop facility.

Cait Collins, Line Producer for the Line of Duty TV series, is a fan. She said: “The Media Hub offers exactly what

is required to facilitate a production base, and with the speed and flexibility that film and TV demands.”

The Atlas offering doesn’t just make it easier for production companies to set up in Northern Ireland, it boosts local employment and helps put our locations on the global stage.

“We are already seeing return business as a result of personal recommendations,” Richard added. “It’s exciting to be able to think differently about our core business and help contribute to a successful and growing area of the Northern Ireland economy.”

To find out more about the Creative Media Hub, contact Richard Simpson and the team on 028 9078 6868.

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Eye on News

UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OFFERED MAJOR BURSARY OPPORTUNITY Final year business students are being encouraged to reveal their entrepreneurial flair as the Ulster University Business School opens entries for this year’s Entrepreneurial Spirit Award in partnership with the Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

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he award is a Postgraduate Bursary up to the value of £9,000 which includes a mentoring programme, giving students the opportunity to boost their futures with a cutting edge Ulster University Business School Masters Programme, while also meeting with a mentor from a Northern Ireland business for six months. In addition, the winning student will gain essential business skills such as networking techniques, presentation skills and management styles, not to mention learning the responsibility of arranging and preparing their own mentor meetings while gaining an appreciation of entrepreneurial spirit.

Pauric McGowan, Professor of

Entrepreneurship, Ulster University Business School and Chair of the judging panel said, “Entrepreneurial spirit is that energy, determination, vision, belief and courage that people have in varying degrees to challenge the status-quo, to seek new ways to act that adds value to people’s lives; that makes a real difference in societies, economies or markets.

This award scheme aims to act as an incentive to our students to maximise their talents and nurture their entrepreneurial flair. The partnership with NI Chamber further enhances the scheme by providing our students with invaluable experience and a unique opportunity to acquire and develop the key skills required to succeed.”

Pauric McGowan, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Ulster University Business School, and Ann McGregor, Chief Executive, NI Chamber launch this year’s Entrepreneurial Spirit Award.

Ann McGregor, Chief Executive, Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said, “NI Chamber is delighted to be working in partnership with the Ulster University Business School in order to promote the vast array of business talent, entrepreneurial spirit and innovation that we have in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland’s entrepreneurs will sustain our economies, whether these are film makers, micro brewers, bus and coach manufacturers, or medical

technology specialists. We therefore must improve the business culture by creating the next generation of entrepreneurs who will take risks, start up new ventures, and create local jobs.”

Applications will comprise a 500 word essay outlining why the applicant deserves to win the Award and should be submitted by 30th April 2015. Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed in May and the winner will be announced in June with the selected course of study beginning in September 2015.

Invest Northern Ireland supported the creation of 28 of these jobs and provided support towards the costs of an Interim Manager to assist the company in identifying and implementing organisational efficiencies and best practices.

Mivan was established in 1975 and celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2015.

The company has worked on some of the world’s most prestigious fit outs in hotels, public buildings, cruise ships and private dwellings including One Hyde Park in London, Wembley Stadium, The Trafford Centre in Manchester, The Bulgari Hotel in London, The Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar and The Dome of the Rock Shrine in Jerusalem.

MIVAN BACK TRADING WITH MORE THAN 100 EMPLOYEES Junior Minister Jonathan Bell visited Antrim based construction firm Mivan recently, to see how the company has bounced back exactly one year after the construction firm was bought out of administration by local businessman Brian McConville.

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ith more than 100 staff now employed (many of them former Mivan employees) and a multi-million pound order book for 2015 onwards, things are really looking up for the interior fit out and specialist joinery company.

In January 2014 Mivan entered administration following a number of difficult trading years. The company closed with the loss of about 250 jobs when it could not be sold as

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a going concern. In February 2014 owner of global marine interior and fit-out specialist company MJM Group based in Newry began negotiations to acquire the premises, assets and trading name with the view to creating in the region of 40-50 jobs. The deal was complete in March 2014 and in the 10 months since Mivan began trading again this expectation has doubled with more than 100 people now employed by the company.

Eye on Events

WOMEN AT THE MAC

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A DEAL IS A DEAL

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aw firm A&L Goodbody scooped two of the top awards at the recent Insider Dealmaker Awards, hosted in unique fashion at the Europa Hotel by Colin Murray.

Corporate partner Alastair Keith was named overall Dealmaker of the Year

llvena Graham, Head of Ulster Bank Northern Ireland and Anne McReynolds, Chief Executive at the MAC co-hosted an event to mark International Women’s Week . Women from industries across Northern Ireland gathered at the MAC for a panel discussion with female business leaders and decision makers. The event was aimed at young professionals determined to succeed at the highest level in business, by hearing from a panel of some of Northern Ireland’s most successful female leaders.

and the firm was awarded the Deal of the Year award in recognition of its role in the acquisition of The Bushmills Old Distillery Company by Mexican tequila house, Casa Cuervo.... at £440 million the largest corporate transaction in Northern Ireland in 2014.

SMART THINKING...

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marts Communicate has been appointed by BT as its new public relations agency in Northern Ireland.

Smarts Communicate will deliver proactive media relations, public relations and public affairs counsel to the BT Communications Team including developing and executing business-to-business and consumer campaigns to support BT’s business, wholesale and corporate communication requirements.

Priscilla O’Regan, BT’s Head of communications for NI and ROI, is pictured (left) with Leontia Fetherston, joint managing director of Smarts.

SPORTING BOOST

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orthern Ireland’s sporting elite is set to benefit from the best advice following the launch of the Mary Peters Trust Podium Programme in association with George Best Belfast City Airport.

The Trust, with funding assistance from the airport’s Community Fund, will deliver a series of sporting master

classes for the region’s budding young athletes, with advice from industry professionals on health, nutrition, media, plus strength and conditioning.

Paralympic Gold Medallist Michael McKillop with the Chief Executive of George Best Belfast City Airport Brian Ambrose and Dame Mary Peters CH. DBE.

TITANIC TOPS THE EIFFEL TOWER

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itanic Belfast has seen off some pretty illustrious competition by beating the Eiffel Tower and London Eye to be named as Europe’s best group visitor attraction at the European Group Travel Awards in Berlin. Celebrating the win are

Titanic Belfast’s Paul Kinghan (Visitor Reception Manager), Tim Husbands MBE (CEO), Ally Hill (Out of State Sales & Marketing Executive),Patricia O’Hare (Accounts Administrator) and Ashton Montgomery (Tour Operator Booking Assistant).

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Eye on Public Relations

Claire Aiken...

21 Years On PR’s Front Line Ask people who’ve been around sectors of the business community for, let’s say, a little while whether they still enjoy their job and there are different types of response... from a roll of the eyes to a look of resignation and plenty of attempts at sincerity.

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laire Aiken responds quickly and convincingly.

“I love it,” she says quickly.

“In fact, I’m enjoying it even more now than I did ten years ago or so.”

She set up her own PR firm, Aiken PR, 21 years ago on the Lisburn Road, where the firm is still based. Initially a one-woman show, Claire was joined fairly quickly by Lyn Sheridan, who remains part of the four-strong senior team today, alongside Shane Finnegan and Louise Carson.

Before taking the plunge into selfemployment, she’d cut her public relations teeth under the guidance of one of the legends of the business here, Alan Burnside, at the Holywood firm that carried his name.

There’s one obvious topic on the agenda for a conversation with Claire Aiken, and that’s around just how much the PR business has changed over those 21 years.....and even more so in the last decade or thereabouts.

“When we started out in business PR was often an add-on now communications strategy is an integral part of the overall business plan. The range of skills is where the real added value is being offered by the top firms.

And of course technology was only starting to play a role, back then it was only really in word processing,” she says.

“So we’ve spent the years adapting to different technologies as they’ve come on stream....from desktops to the internet, email and now social media.

“Looking back, it’s amazing how much has changed over a relatively short period of time.

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“It really doesn’t seem like too long since we were printing out all of our press releases and sending out printed photographs with captions stuck on the back. These days we can achieve a phenomenal amount of work in the same period of time.”

To say that PR changed is something of an understatement, however, Claire notes that while trends and audience behaviour may have altered the underlying principles of PR, planning and strategy remain intact.

Today, of course, not only is all of the day to day PR done electronically and much more instantaneously, but technology advances have changed the world and the way it works; the rise of social media has turned the web into an open conversation.

“What we do and how we do it has changed beyond all recognition,” says Claire. “PR now is immediate, and that brings its own challenges. But it’s a whole lot more exciting, and a lot more rewarding, at the same time.”

What’s changed also is that a company like Aiken PR doesn’t just manage media relations strategies for its clients, and Aiken’s list includes names like Diageo, McDonald’s, Heathrow Airport, Electric Ireland, Progressive Building Society, the Dairy Council and a comprehensive list of others.

It manages public affairs policy, it offers a research resource and it gets involved in various other aspects of the wider marketing brief, applying a campaigning philosophy to all the client’s work whether for the smallest project or an international campaign delivered locally.

“What I’ve also found in more recent years is that, as PR professionals, we’re asked to sit at the top table when it comes to advising our client companies, we are there alongside the accountants and the lawyers.”

“We sat down as a senior team about eight years ago to redefine the development of our business,” she says simply. “We had to decide whether to stay small, get bigger, amalgamate or take a different direction. We decided to get better at what we did. Our strategy - to differentiate on quality and integration - has been effective.

Going forward if we carry on with both of those, through finding the best talent, growing reputation and client list we’ll be relevant and successful.”

Aiken PR has indeed, on this basis, retained its all-important client list. The agency acts as PR representatives in Ireland for a number of GB-based organisations (Heathrow Airport amongst them), at the same time developing and refining its public affairs offering.

“The whole area of public affairs, working positively with politicians, public representatives and government has become a lot more important here in Northern Ireland since devolution.

Knowing the context in which decisions are made, having a strong and deep rooted understanding of political and regulatory challenges and advising on how to diffuse them gives us a competitive advantage and a proven track record in delivery,” she adds.

“Clients are more aware of this than ever and they’re looking for advice on

effective public affairs strategies.”

Aiken PR even has its own fulltime researcher, able to carry out detailed research often against the clock on behalf of clients.

But the PR goal posts have shifted more on the social media front than in any other area.

“A story these days hits the public domain instantly so there is very little time to move or to plan....and that’s the big difference between now and then. There’s a lot of skill involved in knowing when to react, when not to react and how to react.”

Looking forward, how does she reckon the PR industry will change in the future?

“Increasingly, the role of a Chief Executive is not just to set his or her company’s vision but to narrate, and that involves good content and effective dissemination. Content is king. The power of communication has shifted to consumers. With this shift comes a real opportunity to engage in meaningful two-way conversations.

“As far as agencies are concerned, new technologies have presented us with the opportunity to be strategists in a “globalised” world, no matter where we are located. If we are properly skilled we can compete at an international level with the exciting prospect of working with global brands and issues.

Challenges going forward for the industry I reckon will be the increasing use of citizen journalism and advances in wearable technology - and I don’t mean a gadget on the wrist but how data on us or product will be analysed and used.”

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Smarter Living

Eye on Events

Charles Hurst & Goldblatt McGuigan join forces for Budget event K Charles Hurst Group, Northern Ireland’s largest car retailer, joined forces with leading accountancy firm Goldblatt McGuigan to present a review of George Osborne’s Budget for 2015. The event was hosted by Charles Hurst Lexus at Boucher Road, Belfast.

Charles Hurst Lexus Sales Manager Jonathon Lavery

Paul O’Connor, Senior Tax Manager at Goldblatt McGuigan

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ey points from the UK coalition government’s sixth – and final – budget were covered in a breakfast session delivered by Paul O’Connor, Senior Tax Manager at Goldblatt McGuigan, who outlined his firm’s assessment of how this year’s Budget Statement might impact upon businesses and individuals in Northern Ireland.

Respected Northern Ireland economist

John Simpson also presented his post-budget analysis and observations at the event, which was attended by more than 100 of Northern Ireland’s leading business minds.

And Philip Miley, Director of Northern Ireland’s leading contract hire and fleet management company, Fleet Financial, provided his expert assessment on how George Osborne’s budget changes would affect motorists in 2015.

Guests at Charles Hurst Lexus for Goldblatt McGuigan’s 2015 spring Budget breakfast briefing.

Philip Miley, Director of Fleet Financial

Leading economist John Simpson

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Eye on News

Local Agri-food Company Named Amongst the Top Rank Local agri-food business, Glens of Antrim Potatoes, has been named as one of the ‘1000 Companies to Inspire Britain’ in a report produced by the London Stock Exchange and financial technology firm DueDil.

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he report identifies the most exciting and dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which are having a positive impact on economic growth and job creation in the UK. The final list was compiled after rigorous analysis of the performance and profitability of SMEs registered in the UK. “We are delighted to be recognised as one of the top 1000 SMEs in the

A new state-of-the-art physiotherapy clinic in Belfast featuring the highest quality equipment and experienced specialist practitioners delivering therapy for • Sports injuries • Back and neck pain • Arthritis • Headaches • Sciatica • Neurological conditions including Brain injury & stroke, MS, MND Located in Castlereagh Business Park off the Castlereagh Road, we offer ample free parking and easy access to our 2000 square foot ground floor facility which includes large private treatment rooms and a purpose-built gym with the latest equipment to support your treatment and recovery.

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UK and are thrilled to take our place amongst such a remarkable list of businesses,” said Michael McKillop from Glens of Antrim Potatoes.

“Northern Ireland is known the world over for the strength of its agri-food sector and we take great pride in playing a role in raising the profile of our local industry. Despite a difficult economic and trading environment, we remain committed to investing in our business,

We want our clients to feel better and to lead healthy, active lives. Uniquely, all of our profits go directly to the charity Brain Injury Matters. We want to give something back to the community, to help those that need it most to rebuild their lives.

BIM Enterprises (NI) C.I.C Suite 5C, Castlereagh Business Park, 478 Castlereagh Road, Belfast, BT5 6BQ T: 028 9099 2444 www.reboundphysio.co.uk @reboundphysiocastlereagh1 reboundphysiocastlereagh NI Registration No. NI628165

improving our product offering and identifying opportunities to expand our reach into new markets. This has started to yield positive results and supplying high quality, locally-sourced produce will continue to be central to our long-term business strategy.”

The Cushendall-based company was one of 19 SMEs from Northern

Ireland recognised in the report.

“This report is a significant part of London Stock Exchange’s broader campaign to support UK high growth companies in their journeys from Start-up to Stardom and to create an entrepreneurship revolution,” said Xavier Rolet, Chief Executive, London Stock Exchange Group.

Ruan Pienaar’s BMW Role Bavarian BMW has announced Ulster Rugby star Ruan Pienaar as its Brand Ambassador.

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he partnership will see the award winning BMW retailer and the Springbok star work together on a range of marketing initiatives to promote Bavarian BMW and its latest range of BMW cars, including the brand new 4-series Coupe and X5 SUV. Joe Rogers, Managing Director at Bavarian BMW, said: “We are delighted to announce Ruan Pienaar as our official Brand Ambassador.

Ruan’s profile and charisma makes him an ideal fit for Bavarian BMW. “He is highly respected and enjoys an outstanding reputation for his performances in an Ulster Rugby jersey and we look forward to working with him to promote our latest range of BMW cars.”

This agreement with Ruan Pienaar extends Bavarian BMW’s commitment to Ulster Rugby. The retailer is the official car supplier to Ulster Rugby.

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Eye on Events

Keith Liggett, Justin Urquhart Stewart, Dermot Cleere and Gillian Rea.

Top Market Commentator & Media Personality Entertains At Belfast Event Locally owned financial planning experts, Legacy Wealth, recently unveiled their new corporate branding at a special evening held at Direct Wine Shipments in Belfast’s Corporation Square. Keen to mark and celebrate the event, Legacy shared the occasion with many personal and corporate clients as well as professional partners.

Keith Liggett, Managing Director of Legacy Wealth

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uests also enjoyed a wine tasting event hosted by trusted market commentator, Justin Urquhart Stewart, who is Head of Corporate Development at Seven Investment Management, alongside Kirsty Simpson A.I.W.S., Logistics Manager at Direct Wine Shipments.

The evening proved hugely successful, with guests sampling wines from around the world whilst enjoying Justin’s insights and viewpoints on economies across the globe.

Given the recent surge in the number of companies involved in financial services, Legacy Wealth quickly realised the importance of differentiating itself as a higher-level financial planning firm and identifying more closely with it’s client base. Following an in-depth consultation with their branding agency, Lisburn-based, Icon Creative, the team came up with a new slogan to convey their commitment to their clients, ‘A Lifetime of Trust’. This seems

perfectly in sync with the firms core values and reflects the pride it takes in delivering a highly valued and trusted service to it’s personal and corporate clients.

Keith Liggett, Managing Director of Legacy Wealth commented, “When you choose to work with us, you’ll benefit from a rich source of knowledge, experience, perspective and ideas. The company has developed a strong collaborative team culture, where everyone is focussed on the task at hand and is happy to go the extra mile, often exceeding client expectations.

Our approach is based on careful consideration of your personal needs and developing strategies that are as individual as you are. At Legacy Wealth we put you first and feel it is an honour to join you on your journey”.

If you would like further information on the services provided by Legacy Wealth, please contact them on 028 9045 4300 or email info@legacywealth.co.uk.

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(15) Andrew Donald, Richard Creane, Hayley Patterson. (16) RichardKennedy, Alan Thompson, Bridie Thompson. (17) Richard Kennedy, Jonathan Gillespie, Mike Berry, Paul Neely. (18) The evening held at Direct Wine Shipments in Belfast’s Corporation Square. (19) Kieth Liggett. (20) Jim Marley, Sally Marley, Justin Urquhart Stewart.

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Eye on Retail

Everyone has their own reading of what corporate social responsibility actually means.

Martin Agnew, Joint Managing Director of Henderson Group

HENDERSON GROUP & CSR A WIDE-RANGING COMMITMENT

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or some organisations, it’s a simple matter of making the odd charity donation or helping out where they can with a spot of sponsorship. For others, it’s a much more strategic commitment and one which produces benefits for the company, for its employees and for its community.

The Henderson Group, one of Northern Ireland’s largest employers and largest companies by any measure, takes its commitment to CSR very seriously indeed.....to the extent that it’s part of everyday working life for everyone from Managing Director, Martin Agnew, through to the Group’s warehouse operators as well as staff in the 400 or so SPAR, EUROSPAR, VIVO, VIVOXTRA and VIVO Essentials stores dotted all over the region.

The Group takes a wide view of CSR. “We have a very clear CSR strategy, it’s called Tomorrow Matters and it’s led by people and teams from right across

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the business,” says Martin Agnew.

“Within Tomorrow Matters, we work on three main strands: People, developing the skills of our team members; Place, playing an active role in our communities; and Planet, minimising our impact on the environment.

“So, for us, CSR means everything from charity and community initiatives at very local and much more national levels but it also means the wider area of the environment and what we can do to help protect it.

“And, for us at a Group level, it’s not just a strategy. We have reports on CSR coming into all of our operating company and holding company board meetings, and all of our senior management are involved in CSR in some shape or form,” he adds. “So it does permeate right through this organisation.’’

“For a company like this one, the community could hardly be more important. We employ a lot of people

from this community and we serve the community through our stores.

There can’t be too many people around Northern Ireland who aren’t or haven’t been shoppers or customers of ours.....!”

Martin Agnew emphasises the importance of community contribution first, but he goes on to add that strategic CSR can and does deliver tangible business benefits.

“There’s no doubt about that,” he says. “By bringing us closer to our communities, it does deliver real results across the board, not least in how we can get full potential from our employees.

“Our challenge as a retail brand is to differentiate ourselves from the big retail multiples. We do that, in part, by staying very close to the local communities we serve. SPAR might be an international brand name, but we are a Northern Ireland company and our stores are all either owned by us or by local independent operators.

So it is a very local network.”

Within the three headings of People, Place & Planet, Henderson Group works in a number of key areas on the CSR front. On People, for example, there are current initiatives in areas like the promotion of healthy eating choices among both employees and shoppers, through wellbeing initiatives on weight loss and fitness, to tackling employability by helping to get the long-term unemployed back into work.

Under the banner of Place, the company works with partner organisations to offer employees the chance to volunteer for community projects, with more than 100 employees active in 2014 alone. It also has links with a number of local schools, not least Monkstown Community School, not far from the Henderson Group’s HQ site at Mallusk. And it works through Business in the Community on a range of business/voluntary sector initiatives, benefitting more than 800 community initiatives in the last year.

Eye on Retail

Teams of employees frequently participate in Business In The Community volunteering projects.

On the charitable front, the Group support numerous charity organisations as well as having long standing partnerships for its brands.

Cancer Fund for Children has been in partnership with EUROSPAR and VIVOXTRA since May 2011 and to date has raised over £394,300 for the charity organisation. Similarly SPAR is partnered up with NSPCC, helping to raise funds for their Childline Schools Service in Northern Ireland, to date they have raised over £122,000. The Group’s Payroll Giving Scheme is also in place allowing employees to give regularly and on a tax free basis to the charities and good causes of their choice, with the promise that the company will double match their donations.

The Group will also provide help where it can to its SPAR and EUROSPAR retailers who wish to support local charity initiatives close to their home patch.

“All of the CSR activities we get involved in, however small and local, have a beneficial effect. And, taken together, they can add up

to a very significant contribution to the wider Northern Ireland community,” says Martin Agnew.

On the environmental management front, an organisation of the size and scale of the Henderson Group can make a significant impact.

It has spent a number of years developing programmes in areas like the reduction of water and energy consumption, the use of eco construction methods on new store sites and in recycling... a prime example of what can be achieved.

“Managing waste in a business like this one used to be a major challenge for us as well as a major cost,” says Agnew. “We’ve managed to take the recycling effort so far that we’ve turned waste into an income stream for the company. That’s something we’re very proud of.”

Henderson Group’s huge vehicle fleet has also been brought into the wider environmental effort, and the score is considerable.

The company’s familiar trucks and its other vehicles cover an

Martin Agnew, Joint Managing Director of Henderson Group, and Sam Davidson, HR Director, participated in the Cancer Fund for Children’s Cherrypicker Challenge.

This is one of the Group’s many fundraising initiatives for the charity organisation.

As active supporters of healthy lifestyles, the Group encouraged employees to participate in the first ever SPAR Craic 10K, which took place in Belfast on St Patricks Day. Team SPARtans consisted of employees from various departments of the Group.

estimated 3.2 million kilometres a year. That’s the equivalent of eight round trips the Moon, apparently!

If Martin Agnew is quick to emphasise the role people throughout the organisation play on CSR and the environment, he’s also quick to note that new people coming into the business can also make fresh contributions.

“We genuinely give everyone the chance to get involved in CSR. We don’t expect everyone to do so, of course, but we’ll always offer the opportunity... and we’re always ready to listen to new ideas on how we can engage even more closely with the wider community.

Agnew acknowledges that there is something of a twin track approach to CSR. At headquarters level, a strategic view is taken and a number of programmes can be supported and managed at any one time.

But, at SPAR, EUROSPAR, VIVO, VIVOXRA and VIVO Essentials stores in Northern Ireland’s towns and villages, CSR is a matter for the

managers and staff on the ground and will often include staff charity efforts and support for localised charities and sports teams.

The parent company owns 77 of the total SPAR and EUROSPAR network of some 400 stores, with the majority operated by independent owners.

At a UK and European level, the SPAR brand has long been a major sponsor of athletics. Here in Northern Ireland, SPAR gets involved in various sporting activities, recent sponsorships include that of the SPAR Craic 10K run in Belfast, which attracted 1,300 runners, Omagh Half Marathon which had over 3300 runners take part and also an annual Primary Schools Sports Day Sponsorship.

But it’s not all about Northern Ireland.

“Over the years, we’ve had groups raising money out in Burkina Faso for Tearfund, we’ve had people heading to Africa to build houses for Habitat for Humanity and we’ve had many, many other initiatives going on. It is something of a way of life in this company.”

(L-R) Helen Crilly, Compliance Officer, Marian McGreevy, Compliance Manager and Rory Hamill, Facilities Co-ordinator at the Henderson Group are part of the team behind the implementation of these waste reduction and cost saving initiatives.

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Eye on Finance

CUSTOMER FOCUS IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS For Keys Commercial Finance’s Operations Team there aren’t too many quiet days... but that’s the way they like it.

T

he Operations Team is the engine room of an organisation that continues to shake the status quo of Northern Ireland’s business finance sector. KCF’s headline figures paint a vivid picture... in the past 12 months it collected debts of £55 million owed to its client companies and it paid out £58 million in advances to those clients.

KCF’s client list, at the same time, continues to grow and now spans just about every sector of the local economy and includes companies of just about every size and scale.

Funded by Dutch wholesale bank ABN Amro and led by one of Northern Ireland’s more charismatic MD’s in Judith Totten, Keys has worked hard to get to where it currently stands in the local finance marketplace.

And it probably rankles around KCF’s modest Boucher Crescent headquarters that the main banks here are being feted for starting to lend to business once again where Keys – through its debtor finance channel – never stopped. The company, in fact, came into being during recession and has grown to its current level in tough economic times.

KCF’s Operations Team is led by Operations Director, Kelley Toner, alongside Operations Manager, Heather Mills and Finance Manager, Bill Hichens.

“Our job is to keep all the plates spinning... managing client relationships, cash collections, risk management and providing support all day every day,” says Kelley simply. “We have a very clear philosophy and that is that every problem has a solution.

There’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”

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It’s an ethos that in reality seems to course through the veins of what is essentially a small team and a small operation handling some very large amounts of money which, in many cases, keeps some of its clients companies in existence.

The importance of the job they’re doing for their clients isn’t lost on Kelley, Heather or Bill. “We know that our clients rely on us to provide the working capital that their businesses need,” says Heather Mills.

“But we also know that they look to us for advice, sometimes on a daily basis. And they look to us for quick, no nonsense decisions.”

“On that front, we make all of our decisions right here in Belfast so one thing we can almost always avoid is giving our customers the dreaded ‘slow no’.”

Both Kelley and Heather are veterans of Bank of Ireland’s Commercial Finance division, while Bill worked across Donegall Square with National Australia Group, the former owners of Northern Bank (now Danske Bank). With a combined total of 72 years of experience in banking and commercial finance, they form part of a total team of twelve working in Operations at Keys.

“We always work closely with our clients,” explains Kelley. “We make it our business to understand each client’s working capital requirements, flexibility is crucial to what we do.

An off the peg solution simply doesn’t work when you’re dealing with a diverse range of business clients.”

“I suppose you could say that communication is the key. It’s important for us to keep in touch with our clients.

But there is always a balance to be struck.

Some clients like us to be in contact with them every day. Others are happy as long as they can talk to us when they need to. It’s horses for courses.”

The Keys Commercial Finance offering is built around teamwork, the personal management touch and leading edge technology built around the centrepiece of its E3 Customer Contact System. In short, it’s a bespoke piece of software which is installed in each client’s IT system, allowing the client to view transactions and manage its account in real time 24/7/365.

“It’s very intuitive and user friendly: built around a dashboard format, and it provides both us and our clients with all the information needed on a day to day basis,” adds Heather Mills.

While Heather, Kelley and their colleagues spend the bulk of their time working with clients, Bill Hichens is responsible for managing and reconciling payments through the clearing banks and handling the business’ overall budgets and financial control in tandem with Colin Dundas,

“ We have a very clear philosophy and that is that every problem has a solution. There’s nothing that can’t be fixed.”

the overall Finance Director of Keys Commercial Finance. Dundas will be a well-known name in Irish banking circles as the senior Executive of Northern then Danske Bank. Colin retired following 37 years’ service and joined the KCF team in 2012 first as a Consultant before moving into a Board position in 2013.

“We operate a partnership based relationship with our clients” states Kelley. “and that is a real differentiator for us . But additionally, speed and turnaround time when it comes to processing transactions, and agreeing to new business - that’s

something that we pride ourselves on here at Keys. Whatever hat we wear, we feel that a backbone of traditional banking alongside an entrepreneurial understanding of the challenges faced running a business make us unique. We have real empathy with our clients. After all, we are business owners ourselves with a mix of skill sets in different sectors, geographies and across very different businesses.”

The KCF team offers an undisclosed but full credit control element to its service if it’s needed or indeed clients can retain responsibility for the debt management function if they have the infrastructure to do so. The company can also work on both sterling and currency ledgers.

“We work hard to find a solution that suits every customer, whatever their needs,” Kelley Toner adds. “That means clarity on our part with no surprises and transparency in our charging structure. And it absolutely means the flexibility and customer focus that we talked about earlier.”

KCF recently conducted the first ever major online survey of its customers, and the results produced an overwhelming vote of confidence for the firm’s offering and how it worked with its clients.

They were described as – “A real solution for funding a growing company in the current climate, this model is the future as Keys treat us as an individual and provide a tailored service”. Another client commented “Keys will find a way to do something rather than a reason for not doing it”.

In summary, where others see problems, the team in Keys Commercial Finance sees opportunities and solutions.

And as Richard Branson says “If you aren’t making a difference in other people’s lives, you shouldn’t be in business ... It’s that simple.”

And the team in KCF is most certainly making a difference.

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Eye on Giving

CHARITY ON THE AIRWAVES Peter McVerry, General Manager, U105 1. What are your thoughts, in general, on charitable giving?

I firmly believe that it is the responsibility of all of us, both as individuals and organisations, to recognise our social responsibility and give back in whatever form we can. I am lucky that I was raised in an environment where I saw my father lead by example in terms of the time and effort he gave to the local community.

2. Is your giving personal or corporate or a combination of both?

It’s a combination of both which I think would be the answer for most people in society these days.

3. How do you give to charity: monetarily, your own time as a volunteer or your specialist skills?

Again it would be mix of all of these. As well as personal gifting, I am involved in a number of community initiatives.

I am a committee member of my local GAA club in Dundrum. I sit on a cultural committee that has recently organised a St Patrick’s Weekend event and a choir for a folk Mass, both of which gave a platform for local youngsters to develop and contribute. I have also recently taken on the chair role for the Club Development Committee with a view to looking at the infrastructure, both physical and societal, needed for the future of the club and community. For three years I was also chair of the management committee of the Dundrum Cross-Community Playgroup.

I have friends who are giving so much of their time in the Donard Fundraising Group, raising funds for a range of charities in South Down, especially Marie Curie, defibrillators for rural communities and also the Mind Your Mate initiative and do all I can to support their efforts.

4. What types of causes do you favour and why?

Personally and professionally I want to support as many as I can. Like so many

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Peter McVerry (right) with U105 presenter Frank Mitchell, Sandara Kelso-Robb (Strategic Advisor to Giving NI) and Gary Mills (Chairman of Giving NI).

other people I have had family members who lost their lives to terminal illnesses such as cancer and so those will always have a special place in my heart.

5. Are there specific charities or causes that you give to regularly? How do you choose which to support?

In U105 we try to support as many different charities and initiatives as we can. I am conscious that we can’t always be asking our listeners to give money but one key thing we can do as a radio station is offer a platform for charities to communicate their key messages to our 189,000 listeners each week and then allow those listeners to decide if they wish to help and how.

Over the past six years we have organised an annual fundraiser on U105 in aid of the Northern Ireland Hospice and the way in which staff and listeners have embraced the project has been astonishing. In 2014 we raised £126,000 – bringing the total raised across the lifespan of the fundraising to more than £600,000. We have kicked off planning for year seven already, due to take place this autumn, when Operation Purple will again encourage individuals, community groups and businesses from across Northern Ireland to show their purple power through a series of events and innovative fundraising activities.

6. Do you believe that companies and individuals have a duty to help others? If yes, why?

I firmly believe that we all have a duty to help others in whatever way we can. Often the help can take a form

other than financial and can be in time, advice, skills or putting them in touch with others who may be able to offer specialist help. You never know when it could be you that is in need of the help.

7. What is your message to business people who may be thinking about becoming more involved in strategic philanthropy?

I think developing a philanthropic strategy is key. That is why U105 were delighted to sign up as a media partner for Philanthropy Fortnight last year and again this year to play our part in bringing that message to as wide an audience as possible and to highlight the many forms that support can take.

8. Giving Northern Ireland was set up last year to champion Philanthropy.

Why do you think it is important that there is an organisation that helps businesses and individuals think more strategically about giving?

An organisation such as Giving Northern Ireland, which aims to promote that culture, rather than giving to one particular cause, means businesses and individuals can gather more information and case studies on Philanthropy in general, before taking the next step of deciding which particular causes to support.

Continuous Commitment As a client of Caulfield Corporate you will form a relationship with our company and we will be a long term partner for your business. That is why we put a premium on getting to know you and your organisation.

We put your needs first and we will always keep it that way.

Insurance & Risk Advisors

Caulfield Corporate 162 Lisburn Road Belfast BT9 6AL T: 028 9066 1999 F: 028 9066 3560 caulfieldcorporate.com

Eye on News

BELFAST CLINCHES DEAL TO HOST LARGEST-EVER CONFERENCE Belfast has fought off stiff competition to host the largest-ever global business event to be held in the city, attracting over 5,000 delegates and generating over £7 million for the local economy this year.

V

isit Belfast has secured two major tech events developed by organisers of the Web Summit - Europe’s fastest growing technology event. The conferences will bring thousands of tech leaders, investors, entrepreneurs and media to the city for a week in June.

Belfast was chosen from a long list of global cities which were vying to secure the landmark events after a successful pitch by Visit Belfast in partnership with Invest Northern Ireland and Belfast City Council. The organisers have said that they were highly impressed by the city and its ‘can do’ attitude the enthusiasm they encountered.

MoneyConf and EnterConf will take place across a number of venues over four full days from Monday

15th June until Friday 19th June 2015 and discussions are already under way to expand these events in 2016 and 2017. This year, T13 in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter will host the main conference programme.

The two events combined represent the largest ever conference programme to be held in Belfast and will be coordinated with similar tech gatherings in Las Vegas and Hong Kong.

Visit Belfast also confirmed that the combined series of events could be held annually in Belfast and may be worth up to £25 million to the local economy by 2017 as the conferences expand.

MoneyConf will attract 2,000 delegates who specialise in creating and developing technology to support some of the biggest names in the global finance market for two days

from Monday 15th June. EnterConf will then begin on Thursday 18th June for a two-day run that will see more than 3,000 delegates participate in a busy programme focused on the development and expansion of business technologies.

In December, Belfast was named the world’s most Business Friendly City of its size by the fDi intelligence division

of the FT. Not only that, but it was also named in the world’s top 10 cities for Business Friendliness of any size – beating locations like Dubai and Tokyo.

Last year, Belfast helped to kick off the 2014 Web Summit with an Invest Northern Ireland-hosted event which saw 150 global technology start-ups and 20 tech investors get a taste of what was to come.

publishing company, using technology to stay in touch with clients is extremely important to me to ensure that my business continues to evolve and develop no matter where I am in the world.”

Paul Convery, Head of BT Business, added: “The BT Business innovation Breakfast has been a great success and we are delighted to have welcomed so many key business figures from across Northern Ireland to hear about the benefits of our BT Cloud Voice technology and its

importance for local businesses.

“With an increasingly mobile and flexible workforce it is becoming crucial that businesses remain in touch with staff as well as clients with a telephone system that works hard for them and keeps everyone connected.

BT Cloud Voice does just that, giving local businesses a competitive advantage, while our reputation gives companies the confidence to know that they are purchasing a quality and reliable service from an established and trusted provider.”

SNOW PATROL’S DRUMMER & A BUSINESS BREAKFAST Leading business people from across Northern Ireland attended the BT Business Innovation Breakfast in Belfast to hear from two of Northern Ireland’s top local entrepreneurs, including international music star Jonny Quinn from Snow Patrol.

J

onny, who swapped his drumsticks for the business breakfast, was a key speaker at the event, which was designed for businesses across Northern Ireland to discuss the importance of BT’s latest businessgrade IP voice service, BT Cloud Voice. The breakfast highlighted the importance of staying connected to colleagues and clients on the move and of equipping companies with the tools to future-proof their business.

Jonny, who is also founder of publishing company Polar Patrol

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Publishing, was joined by Chris Johnston, founder and Chief Executive of Adoreboard, an award-winning brand intelligence tech start-up company. Both speakers discussed their business experiences and the key factors that have led to their success.

Jonny Quinn, said: “I am delighted to have been involved in the BT Business Innovation Breakfast to highlight the importance of technology in the growth and success of businesses across Northern Ireland.

“As a founder of a successful

Donal Doherty, Owner and Manager, Harry’s Shack

‘Natural gas is the way forward for businesses.’

Donal Doherty, Owner and Manager of award-winning Portstewart eatery Harry’s Shack, switched from LPG to firmus energy and hasn’t looked back: ‘The pipes were laid when we were a bit quieter after the summer rush and the switchover itself was done within 24 hours!

‘When we were hit with bad storms the benefits of natural gas became apparent.

The cooking equipment, heating and hot water are all operated by the energy supply, which remained uninterrupted, so we were able to open just two days later.’

That’s good business To find out more, call us for a chat on

0800 032 4567

www.firmusenergy.co.uk

Eye on Finance

A Financial Asset For Northern Ireland Business 60

Eye on Finance

Interview with Adrian Madden, Head of Sales for the Asset Finance team at Close Brothers Commercial Finance.

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ith 27 years’ experience in the finance sector, Adrian Madden leads the Asset Finance team at Close Brothers Commercial Finance in Ireland. Here he talks to us about his career and the work he does with local businesses.

Tell us about your career history…

I joined Close Brothers in 2011, having previously worked for over 10 years with Lombard Ireland, firstly as Area Manager and then as Head of Business Development.

Prior to that I held roles with GE Capital and Hitachi Capital UK, which is where I started my career aged 20.

My educational background is in marketing, but my interest has always been in finance.

What does your role as Head of Sales (Asset Finance) entail?

Based in Dublin, I am responsible for the Asset Finance sales team in Ireland, managing a group of 17 including sales directors, sales support and valuation experts.

We work closely with our Belfast office and our colleagues in the invoice finance side of the business to support clients of all sizes, across a diverse range of industries, through the provision of bespoke finance facilities.

Together, we provide invoice finance, asset finance and asset based lending (ABL) solutions.

In my role as Head of Sales for asset finance, I act as an assessor on many of our applications and support our underwriting team to improve the structure of our asset finance deals.

I’m also heavily involved in our marketing and recruitment and while I’m not as active in sales anymore, I still enjoy spending time with my sales team, travelling across the country meeting new and existing clients.

Why do you think asset finance is so important in our current economic climate?

The strength of asset finance is in its ease. For any business that needs an asset, be it machinery or vehicles, it provides a readily accessible way to fund this capital expenditure.

It is ideally suited for firms who have unpredictable cash flow as it is flexible and can be easily adapted to grow in line with your business.

This is a vital offering in our current climate and crucially, asset finance is ring fenced, so the funding is only secured against the specific asset.

While there are other forms of funding that include a multitude of conditions and take personal property as securities, asset finance facilitates business growth using the asset itself as collateral.

Have you seen any interesting industry trends over the last 12 months?

The biggest trend has been continued growth in demand for asset finance.

We’ve found that despite an increase in the supply of credit, we have continued to experience growth in our loan book.

I believe this reflects a number of important developments for local businesses. Primarily, the economy in Northern Ireland appears to be improving, generating greater confidence among firms.

Figures from the latest Close Brothers Business Barometer, an independent quarterly survey of SME owners and senior managers from a range of sectors, found that three-quarters of businesses believe the worst of the economic downturn is behind us.

Local firms are optimistic, and gradually realising that they cannot defer their capital spend any longer. They know they

need to react to the changing market in order to survive and with 91% of Northern Irish firms planning to invest in their operations in 2015, it’s clear they are ready to take action.

Do you think local business attitudes have changed?

Businesses in Northern Ireland, for many years, have put their financial eggs in one basket.

A common metaphor perhaps, but one that rings true, as firms would often stick with a sole lender, failing to consider the wealth of alternative funding options available to them, that might be better suited to their needs.

This has undoubtedly changed, as after periods of recession and the serious financial uncertainty experienced by many, businesses have become more receptive to alternative forms of funding.

This is something that I believe is heavily driven by turnaround time.

Our customers often need funding quickly in order to captialise on opportunities for growth.

It’s critical that they get access to finance in a timely manner to fulfill the needs of their business and there is now an understanding that through solutions such as asset and invoice finance this can be achieved.

How has the asset finance landscape evolved since you first started your career?

The biggest development has been the growth of professional bodies such as the Finance & Leasing Association (FLA), the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA) and the National Association of Commercial Finance Brokers (NACFB).

Through these organisations, the structure of asset finance has improved. The industry has become increasingly regulated and we work closely with these bodies to ensure our service is of the highest standard.

As a result, asset finance as a product has strengthened and gradually become a norm in many ways, rather than an alternative.

How do you see the future for asset finance?

The industry is in a strong position, seeing good demand and benefitting from increasing regulatory oversight.

As a form of funding it should be an obvious choice for any business, of any size, seeking to invest in capital equipment and as growth in our loan book demonstrates, an increasing number are realising this.

Its increasing popularity reflects the strength of its offering, and at Close Brothers Commercial Finance, we’re looking forward to supporting businesses in Northern Ireland as they use it to build for the future.

For more information on Close Brothers Commercial Finance and how we could help your business, please visit www.closecommercialfinance.com or call our local sales team on 028 9517 0406.

“ The industry is in a strong position, seeing good demand and benefitting from increasing regulatory oversight. s a form of funding A it should be an obvious choice for any business, of any size, seeking to invest in capital equipment and as growth in our loan book demonstrates, an increasing number are realising this.”

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Eye on Agri Food

Leona’s A Real Kitchen Table Tycoon Sam Butler talked to Leona Kane of Broighter Gold Rapeseed Oil in Limavady following her success in a competition run by one of the world’s leading hospitality businesses.

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asterChef judge William Sitwell recently labelled Northern Ireland’s Broighter Gold Rapeseed Oil as “an epic product and a great example of successful farm diversification”.

Sitwell, also editor of Waitrose Kitchen magazine and a respected food critic, heralded the success of Broighter Gold at the awards ceremony of the prestigious Flavours of the Neighbourhood, a UK competition launched by the Hotel Indigo Group, part of the global Intercontinental Hotel Group chain, to find the best artisan food product. He was among a team of highly regarded food experts on the judging panel.

He followed up by describing Broighter Gold as “an exciting product which deserves to be on the shelves everywhere”.

Sitwell’s comments were based on a visit to the small company that’s located on Broglasco Farm overlooking

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the Foyle, near Limavady, where husband and wife team Richard and Leona Kane now press a range of culinary oils for chefs and retailers throughout Ireland and even in Paris.

As is often the case with innovation, the award winning oils developed out of necessity.

Leona Kane had been planning a steak dinner when she discovered there wasn’t enough olive oil in the cupboard. It was Richard who came up with the idea of using oil pressed from the oilseed rape grown on the family’s 170-acre arable farm.

He had been experimenting with the oil and was aware of similar products in Britain.

Around 100 acres are used to grow the oil seed rape plants on the farm the Kane family has owned for over 100 years.

The farm also produces crops of wheat, barley and potatoes.

The small business was born from a successful and distinctively tasty steak dinner!

That was in 2011. “I then started doing some basic research into the health benefits of rapeseed oil and what I needed to start producing it,” Leona remembers.

“Because of its low content of saturated fat and high content of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, rapeseed oil is increasingly being used in cooking, salad oils, dressings, mayonnaise and of course for frying!

“It’s ideal for cooking, frying, roasting as it does not smoke until 220 degrees C unlike olive oil which will smoke at 180 degrees, therefore rapeseed oil does not lose all its goodness when cooked. Our oil is rich in Omega 3,6,9 and Vitamin E. It’s a natural product that’s free from preservatives and artificial colourings, has the lowest saturated fat content of any cooking oil and half the saturated fat of olive oil,” she adds.

Mother of two young children, Leona has also become one of the most effective users of social media, especially twitter, to promote the oils and grow the business. She’s used twitter, for example, to reach leading chefs outside Northern Ireland including Clodagh McKenna in Dublin. She has earned UK recognition through her success in the Great Taste Awards.

A regular participant in farmers’

markets across Northern Ireland, Leona has also succeeded through gritty perseverance in winning business from La Grande Epicerie in Paris, the famed French food store, a success that resulted from phone calls, emails and sending samples over two years. “I was really determined to reach the right buyer and win the business,” she says. It worked and the store became the company’s first client in the ‘land of olive oil’.

The Broighter Gold brand was chosen because it set the company apart as being from the farm where the famed Iron Age treasure hoard was found in 1896 Leona’s has also strengthened business by winning backing from the EU Economusee to set up a small museum for craft tourists.

As an economusee, or working museum, Broighter offers a unique visitor experience, inviting tourists to see a working farm, view the rape seed in bloom, learn about the process of harvesting the rapeseed oil as well as a tour of the pressing room and bottling room.

A small farm shop followed as the company has expanded its range of oils to six products.

It’s an impressive example of a real kitchen table business that’s growing fast and successfully here and abroad from the enterprise of its founder.

Eye on Education

Colleges & Business Forge Closer Links Connected is here to encourage, ease and increase potential knowledge exchange links between academia and industry, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The aim of Connected is to develop interaction and stimulate innovation to benefit Northern Ireland companies and Northern Ireland’s economy.

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unded by the Department for Employment and Learning, Connected is a clear sign that the further and higher education sectors in Northern Ireland are ready and willing to offer their vast pool of expertise, knowledge, research capability and world-class facilities to businesses and the community at large.

Belfast Metropolitan College, in conjunction with Ulster University, have been working closely with the Lisburn based Independent Care Provider, Advanced Community Care.

The Company’s Director Niall Smyth, states: We aim to deliver more than just a service to our clients, Advanced Community Care is committed to promoting independence and allowing people to remain at home for as long as possible.

The Company are currently developing an innovative new delivery model that will take advantage of the emerging technologies associated with Ambient Assistive and Connected Living.

The Director’s rationale for the new delivery model asserts: The NHS will soon be struggling to afford the traditional domiciliary care model which is currently

the only one available. A new more efficient and cost effective model is urgently needed.

As part of this process Belfast Met facilitated a visit for the Company to the Great Northern Haven, ‘Living-Lab’, managed by the Research Centre in Dundalk Institute of Technology.

With regard to this knowledge transfer opportunity, Karen McCann, from Belfast Met said: This has been an extremely useful and insightful knowledge transfer opportunity. It is particularly timely for the company as they are researching new innovative care delivery models that take advantage of emerging technologies.

The Ulster University and Belfast Met have jointly worked with the Company to submit a successful proposal to Innovate UK under the Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) initiative. A KTP graduate Associate will soon be working with the Company on this innovative project to develop the technology enabled care delivery model.

Paul Jeffers, the technical consultant working with Advanced Community Care said: The domiciliary care market is facing a “perfect storm” of a rapidly ageing populations driving demand,

overloaded resources and smaller, more dispersed, supporting families.

A more efficient way to deliver care to people in their own homes is urgently needed.

Technology on its own cannot provide the answer as ultimately care is about people helping people.

The key is to maximise technology to inform when people most need care and the type of care they require.

It may also be used to deliver this care more efficiently and to monitor its effectiveness.

This will require new and innovative thinking on both the enabling technology and the training methods used to allow the caring workforce to take full advantage of this new way of working.

I’m delighted to be working closely with BMet and Ulster to help Advanced Community Care develop this much needed service for the community.

“ The domiciliary care market is facing a “perfect storm” of a rapidly ageing populations driving demand, overloaded resources and smaller, more dispersed, supporting families.

A more efficient way to deliver care to people in their own homes is urgently needed.”

For further information on the diverse range of support services available please visit our website www.connected.ni.org or contact us by emailing Lynn.connaughton@collegesni.ac.uk or you can follow us on twitter @ConnectedNI

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stor yhouse films great brands make great stories what story are you telling? stor yhousefilms.com

Eye on Internet

The Stream Is The New Home Page

By Gareth Dunlop, Fathom.

Unknowingly and very probably subconsciously we have become master curators. In the face of the overwhelming complexity thrown at us by the web, we have created our own online realities, built around our professions, hobbies, personal lives, cultural interests and sporting affiliations.

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hus our Twitter feed and the Buzzfeed home page are just as likely to determine our in-themoment online behavior as the websites of BBC, New York Times or The Guardian.

News has become social and the online media platforms that have successfully democratised the news agenda are winning the battle for web traffic, or in advertising speak, eyeballs.

Some years back, we reached the point where many news stories broke on social media, or at the very least relevant unofficial video or audio footage complementing the story was socially driven. The most recent example of this is the video footage of TransAsia flight GE235 crashing into a bridge and then into the Keelung river in the Taiwanese capital, Taipei.

But even since then there has been a further shift. And this shift is that our daily dose of news revelation, heralded on front-pages on newsstands all over the country has been replaced by the stream.

The stream is the new home page.

Consider this dynamic through the lens of consumer media platforms. TV remains the master of exposition and story telling, radio at companionship, magazines at celebration and newspapers at revelation. But where the web excels is in distilling the stream, to curate and understand our multi-faceted lives and to point us to whatever may interest in the moment. And so it should be no surprise that Buzzfeed or Twitter or something in between has become the de facto online front page. And this front page is not the size of a desktop or even a laptop, most

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frequently it is the size of a mobile device.

The stream gathers all of our news, personal and professional information, sports, politics and anything else into real-time barometer of our lives. So social platforms on mobile devices become the means by which the stream becomes immersive, joining up the online and offline worlds.

Incidentally, this smörgåsbord of influences and our resultant parallel consumption means that very rarely does a single brand have our sole undivided attention.

The two masters of stream-focused social sharing are Buzzfeed and Upworthy and its hard not to be impressed by their obsession with the user in their design and content decision-making processes.

Buzzfeed in particular have defined their two primary personas beautifully as “Bored at Work” and “Bored in Line”, citing behavioural motivations as “alleviate boredom” and “connect with current frustrations”. Good manners forbid me from suggesting the addition of “Bored on the toilet” but you get the picture.

Simply by defining context of use and understanding user motivation, they have earned their way into millions and millions of streams.

For those pursuing the marketing tactic of “getting our customers to do our marketing for us”, the approach of these organisations which dominate the stream should be studied carefully; Buzzfeed has been the most shared site on social since 2013, with up to 20m monthly interactions according to NewsWhip.

The impact of these changing dynamics on online marketing more generally is the relevance imperative. Relevance is the currency which gets brands into users’ streams at an affordable cost. Crudely, the more relevant your product, price, promotion and place, the more costeffectively you can join the stream.

You can stand outside and shout in from banner ads and above-the-line advertising. You can lure the user from their stream to your website and that is entirely appropriate but very difficult on the first encounter. However by far the most effective means to get into your target’s stream is to gain their permission to enter.

And to do that you need to provide content which is relevant, shareable and valuable.

Gareth Dunlop owns and runs Fathom, a user-experience consultancy which helps ambitious organisations get the most from their website and internet marketing by viewing the world from the perspective of their customers.

Specialist areas include user-testing, usability and customer journey planning, web accessibility and integrated online marketing. Clients include Invest NI, Permanent TSB, Three, Ordnance Survey Ireland, and Independent News and Media. Visit Fathom online at fathom.pro.

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Eye on Technology

A HAND TO MOUTH STRATEGY – WHY VOICE COMMAND AND SMART WATCHES DON’T GO There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks regarding Apple’s new smart watch and rather than bore you with yet another opinion, I’d actually like to talk about another obsession many digital and tech designers have… voice control.

By Rachel Ray, Strategic Planner, Simply Zesty.

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t seems every time someone gets on a stage to wax lyrical to an overexcited crowd about their latest ‘thing’ that’s going to be a ‘#gamechanger’ (groan) they hit nerd-climax presenting something with voice control functionality.

Whether it’s the latest marketing campaign, xBox, smartwatch or the key function on your new phone, voice control is angled as the ‘magic ooh-ahh’ bit to which all other new functions or developments pale by comparison. And it is magic. But here’s the thing…

Nobody wants it.

Or rather, more specifically, nobody wants to use it.

Yes, we’ve all sat around for half an hour that first week of getting our precious new gadget – cooing over it like a newborn – and giggling at Siri’s responses to every crude question we could think of (the tech age equivalent to looking up rude words in the dictionary). But what happens then? Well we just sort of, ignore it really. Don’t we?

And this isn’t because the tech isn’t ‘good enough’ to use. It’s because

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we just categorically do not want to use it. And we never will.

From the moment this new digital revolution kicked off, the key developments in communications that have been successful have had 3 things in common: 1. They allow/speed up broadcast communication – often to multiple people or points simultaneously vs. face to face / voice calls.

2. T hey allow us time to ‘buffer’ in between communications vs. face-to-face / voice calls.

3. T hey allow us to ‘filter’ our response vs. faceto-face / voice calls.

Email, the text message, any social media platform… all of them have these three characteristics in common. Email, for example, is designed to allow us a ‘quick’ and ‘non-intrusive’ communication with others, but at the receiving end of that mail, it allows a ‘pause’ in response and to prioritise those communications. It also allows us to ‘filter’ how we say things. We

have time to think, to structure, to sound professional – to craft the most ideal response. Just think about how and when you have calls or meetings in the office these days. I’m betting, you’ll find they tended to be exclusively reserved for things that either had or needed to convey a sense of urgency, or things that needed to be kept ‘vague’/off record in response.

Text messages and IM services like WhatsApp also do the exact same thing in our private lives between our friends and family.

Think about the last time you called a friend (excluding partners) just for a chat. When was it? Why? In the last few years we have rapidly backed away from the telephone call for every little thing. Even voicemail - which most people admit to now finding ‘annoying (just text me!)’. All of them (particularly Whatsapp and social networks) give us the

perception that we are ‘saving time’ – we can update our groups en masse, rather than personalised and time consuming responses.

Perhaps even with those contacts we may still have the habit of phoning regularly (although this obviously doesn’t apply to anyone aged 20, who were born after the text message), one gets a sense of growing guilt for ‘intruding on them’ unless we have some very specific news. Of course this is a rapidly developing behaviour, so there are clashes on etiquette.

People get upset if one uses the ‘wrong communication’ or is ‘caught’ multitask communicating at the wrong time. And everyone has a personal example – like myself, when my sister got engaged at text me on WhatsApp, rather than calling. Or my friend, who last week decided not to go on a second date with the guy who left his mobile out on the restaurant table...

Eye on Technology

Perhaps it’s a stone-aged thing, but it seems the our human psychological default is for selfcontrolled, rapid communication with as many connections as possible...and that means text.

Of course this is effecting our relationships with one another and how we develop psychologically on a fundamental level but the outcome of this won’t really be known for another few years – when we have the advantage of retrospect. What we can see at this stage however, is that in the ‘presentation of the self in

everyday life’, the human race in 2015 seems to be supporting the theory that our social drive is primarily gesellschaft (social relations based on impersonal ties, such as duty to a society or organization) over gemmeinschaft (those spontaneous and ‘organic’ social ties, characterized by strong reciprocal bonds of sentiment and kinship within a shared tradition).

So if we are (rightly or wrongly) reducing our face-to-face and voice-to-voice communications to an equally reduced number very close ties… why on earth would we

give our smartwatches the time of day? (OK maybe that should be ‘ask our smartwatches the time of day’).

If we’re speaking less and less to our valued contacts, why on earth would we want to speak to our machines?

Besides, do we really want the the guy standing next to us on the pavement to know that we want to ‘find the nearest pharmacy that sells pregnancy tests’ or how often we want to ‘call Mum’?! I’m thinking ‘no’.

As I’ve said numerous times before and times again, it really doesn’t matter how ‘high tech’

you make something or how new and shiney the gimmick is for your digital marketing campaign – it all still comes down to basic human psychology and behaviour. So if we really want to use digital effectives for new products and new communications, I think we should be thinking more about how to tap into the very behaviours and habits technology itself has already nurtured in us. Not fighting to create entirely new ones.

So forget the #gamechangers and get back in the game of understanding real human behaviour.

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Eye on News

Gilfresh And Musgrave Give Action Cancer Home-Grown Support Co. Armagh vegetable supplier, Gilfresh Produce has teamed up with Musgrave Retail Partners (MRPNI) to help raise vital funds for NI’s leading local cancer charity Action Cancer.

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he Loughgall company, which has been supplying vegetables to MRPNI for 18 years, will donate 10p for every Seasonal Vegetable pack sold across the three retail brands - SuperValu, Centra and Mace, throughout Northern Ireland from April 5-25.

The promotion will benefit Action Cancer, which has been supported by Musgrave for over 14 years through SuperValu’s sponsorship of its Big Bus and Centra’s support of the charity’s Health Action Programme.

The fresh local offering by Gilfresh Produce is a tasty treat for customers with the 1kg Seasonal Vegetable pack, which consists of carrot, parsnip, turnip, onion and parsley, on special offer for £1 throughout the period.

Speaking about why they wanted to support Action Cancer, Danielle Mitchell of Gilfresh Produce said: “Action Cancer is a fantastic local

charity which supports so many people affected by cancer. We felt it was a great opportunity to support this worthy cause through our relationship with Musgrave by encouraging their customers throughout Northern Ireland to support Action Cancer while making the most of the fresh local produce grown on their doorstep.”

Aiden Kearney, MRPNI Trading Manager said: “We are delighted to have Gilfresh Produce support our charity partner, Action Cancer through this fantastic promotion, as Musgrave continues to support the Action Cancer Big Bus and Health Action programme. I would encourage our customers throughout Northern Ireland to pick up a pack in-store during the three-week promotion.”

Action Cancer’s Gillian Thomson commented: “This is a fantastic way to help raise money for Action Cancer and I would like

Local vegetable supplier Gilfresh Produce has teamed up with Musgrave Retail Partners to help raise funds for Action Cancer. The company will donate 10p for every Seasonal Vegetable pack sold across Musgrave’s three retail brands – SuperValu, Centra and Mace throughout Northern Ireland from April 5 – 25. Kicking off the fundraising is Gillian Thomson of Action Cancer and Aiden Kearney, MRPNI Trading Manager with Thomas McLaughlin and Danielle Mitchell of Gilfresh Produce.

to thank Gilfresh Produce and Musgrave Retail Partners for supporting us as we continue our mission to save lives and support local people affected by cancer through detection, support, prevention and awareness.”

SuperValu has sponsored the Action Cancer Big Bus since 2001, which visits 220 communities providing breast screenings for more than 4,500 women and health checks and advice for over 2,600 people each year. Centra supports Action Cancer through its Health Action Programme

which has delivered healthy lifestyle messages to more than 480,000 young people since its launch 11 years ago.

MRPNI supports over 250 independent SuperValu, Centra and Mace retail stores in Northern Ireland, with a combined turnover in excess of £600 million. MRPNI is part of the Musgrave Group, the leading partner to more than 3,500 entrepreneurial retailers and food service professionals in the UK, Ireland and Spain.

Issued on behalf of Musgrave Retail Partners

REMEMBERING A LEGEND...

Golfers among you should take note that the third annual Raker McLean Golf Classic tees off at Belvoir Park GC on Thursday, 14th May. And sunshine, if previous years are anything to go by, is virtually guaranteed.

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he Golf Classic has raised £20,000 over the past couple of years for the excellent Marie Curie Cancer Care charity.....and it will be topping up that total in May. It’s all in memory of one of the true characters of the sporting

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and business world, Michael ‘Raker’ McLean.....a rugby-playing legend (in his own lunchtime, at least), former Ravenhill master of ceremonies, bon viveur, noted after dinner speaker, more than occasional golfer and the most entertaining company that any

of us could have asked for.

Organised by Mike’s daughter Caroline, the Golf Classic attracted 92 golfers to Belvoir last May, and a further 60 guests to the evening reception afterwards.

Four ball packages with a table for eight at the evening dinner start at a very competitive £650. To get your names down, contact Caroline McLean at caroline@cmdsports.co.uk

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02/01/2013 15:41:48

Eye on Moving On

1 Mark Sproule and Bernie Kerr have been 2 appointed Business Acquisition Managers at Danske Bank. Based in Derry, Mark is responsible for developing new relationships and acquiring new business customers in the North West, while Bernie Kerr will perform the same role in the Mid Ulster area.

3 Catriona Saunders has been appointed Finance Manager at Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry (NI Chamber). She has previously held roles in Moore Stephens and BMW and joins NI Chamber from NILGOSC.

1 Mark Sproule

4 Grace Collins

2 Bernie Kerr

5 Elaine Smyth

3 Catriona Saunders

6 Dr Joanne Stuart OBE

Willowbrook Fine Foods, has strengthened its commercial offering with the appointment of a new dedicated Sales Development Manager, 4 Grace Collins. Grace has a strong track record of sales in the food industry having previously worked for Deli Lites and the Bite Group where she managed new customer accounts and worked closely with the NPD team to develop products and packaging to meet customer and market demands.

5 Elaine Smyth has been has been appointed to the role of Head of Programmes at NISP CONNECT at the Northern Ireland Science Park.

Elaine has over 18 years’ experience in the science and technology industries, including her role as Chief Operating Officer of Aepona 6 Ltd for ten years. And Dr Joanne Stuart OBE has been appointed to the role of Director of Development at the Science Park. Joanne has over 25 years’ experience working in the IT industry including nine years with the Oracle Corporation where she held various senior management roles in Sales and Operations.

First Trust Bank has further enhanced its Agri-Food offering with the appointment of 7 Kieran Mailey to the role of Specialist AgriAdvisor. Kieran - who previously worked as a livestock specialist with the Irish Farmers Journal, and as a farm development adviser at the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise - will play an integral role in First Trust Bank’s Agri-Food Team, providing on-farm support and expert knowledge across different farming systems to bank customers.

7 Kieran Mailey

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8 Andrew Mearns

9 Oliver Johnston

8 At Lambert Smith Hampton, Andrew Mearns moves from JLL in Glasgow as a Surveyor. He is MRICS qualified and a RICS registered valuer.

9 Oliver Johnston and Shane Cooke both join 10 the LSH team as Graduate Surveyors. Both are graduates of Northumbria University and have spent placement years with the Belfast firm.

Our PeOPle are YOur PeOPle www.graftonrecruitment.com Business Eye Header - Moving On Page.indd 1

02/01/2013 15:41:48

Eye on Moving On

11 Brian Cumming has been appointed as an Investment Director at Clarendon Fund Managers. Brian has 10 years international business and corporate development experience with a further 10 years in Venture Capital Fund Management with Enterprise Equity in Belfast.

At Ardmore Advertising, Derbyshire12 born Steve Jackson joins the team as Strategic Planner bringing with him two decades of experience in agencies across the UK, including 10 years in London.

10 Shane Cooke

11 Brian Cumming

12 Steve Jackson

University of Ulster Marketing graduate 13 Andrew McCormick has been appointed Account Manager at Ardmore. Andrew, who has extensive agency experience, will work with some of Ardmore’s leading clients on campaigns across all platforms.

14 And Theresa Hannon joins the Account Management team at Ardmore, bringing a wealth of agency experience to her new role.

15 Rory McCurry joins new Belfast PR firm Lanyon Communications as an Associate. He will work alongside the partners providing services to clients in the financial, legal, commercial property and technology sectors.

13 Andrew McCormick

14 Theresa Hannon

15 Rory McCurry

16 Lorraine Tierney has been appointed a Paralegal in the property department of Belfast law firm Cleaver Fulton Rankin.

Her role focuses on residential property and re-mortgages. Lorraine currently acts for one of the leading lenders in the UK securing their interests over their properties and overseeing transactions.

She was Law Society President at her University during her third year.

17 Francis Shields has been appointed as Head of Professional Practices at Grant Thornton Northern Ireland. With more than 13 years’ experience in the UK and internationally, Francis will specialise in advising businesses with partnership structures across the professional services sector in Ireland and the UK, on taxation matters.

16 Lorraine Tierney

17 Francis Shields

18 Michael Barnett

18 Michael Barnett has been appointed Audit Director at Grant Thornton Northern Ireland. Michael has 18 years’ experience in audit and advisory roles in the Province, providing corporate advice to a wide portfolio of clients, particularly Owner Managed Businesses in the agri-food, engineering, wholesale and renewable energy sectors.

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Eye on News

AIRPORT SCHOOLS GO BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MAC George Best Belfast City Airport teamed up with The MAC to offer their adopted schools behind the scenes access to the popular arts venue’s awe-inspiring galleries.

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upils from two of the airport’s adopted schools - St. Joseph’s Primary School and Victoria Park Primary School - were treated to a ‘Gallery Challenge’ workshop where they honed in on an inspiration of their choosing.

Led by local artists Katrina Sheena Smyth and Charlotte Bosanquet alongside The MAC’s education team, the children gained invaluable insight into how to recreate some of their favourite art forms and design their very own masterpiece.

Paula Bittles from Belfast City Airport, said: “Belfast City Airport is committed to providing even the youngest members of our community with invaluable and memorable experiences to help expand and nourish their intellectual and social development.

“With that in mind, we are absolutely delighted to be working with The MAC to provide these children with such a fabulous opportunity.”

Mrs Gillian McDougall, a teacher at Victoria Park

Pictured helping P6 Victoria Park pupils with their works of art is Paula Bittles of George Best Belfast City Airport.

Primary School, said: “We would like to say a huge thank you to both Belfast City Airport and the entire team at The Mac for their warm hospitality and for giving the children a truly unforgettable experience.”

As part of the airport’s community engagement initiatives, the Belfast City Airport has invested more than £180,000 into a number of local groups and projects which aim to strengthen

community relations, sport, social development, environmental responsibility and education through its Community Fund.

For more information on how your school, group or project can apply to the Belfast City Airport Community Fund, please contact: communityfund@ belfastcityairport.com

Lambert Smith Hampton Named NI’s Most Active Property Agent Commercial property agent Lambert Smith Hampton has been named as Northern Ireland’s most active property agent and overall regional winner in the prestigious EGi Deals Competition for 2014.

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very year EGi, part of Estates Gazette, compiles rankings across all property types and all regions of the UK based on the number of deals conducted by each agent.

It is the 5th consecutive time Lambert Smith Hampton, previously known as BTW Shiells, has topped the list in Northern Ireland. For the 2014 year, the company led the way in each of the three main property sectors – Office, Retail and Industrial.

The company said the top rankings are indicative of both the recovery of the commercial

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property sector and LSH’s leading position within the market.

Criona Collins, director and Head of Retail at LSH in Belfast said: “The retail team at LSH is delighted to receive this recognition from Estates Gazette. 2014 saw the first real signs of recovery in the retail market and the retail team, after a long period of stagnation, capitalised on this upturn. We have every confidence that 2015 will continue with this slow but sustainable recovery and our team is in the best position to ensure this will be another

Lambert Smith Hampton NI directors Criona Collins and Stuart Draffin at the company’s Belfast headquarters.

successful year for retail leasing.”

Commenting on the office and industrial markets, Stuart Draffin, director and Head of Agency at LSH in Belfast added: “Due to a number of variables an unprecedented level of commitment and determination has been required in recent years to ensure property transactions have completed and the information has been available to allow decision makers to take an informed view.

LSH have 22 members of staff dedicated to the Belfast agency team. This has grown substantially

in the last 24 months and we are all very proud to have transacted more property than any other agency in Northern Ireland. The team remains extremely enthusiastic and motivated for all sectors in 2015.”

EGi said the findings of its latest research provide evidence of an industry which has “left the downturn in bullish mood and with expansion very much in mind”.

Lambert Smith Hampton was also the clear leader in industrial deals and combined lettings volumes across the UK.

New Pension Reforms And Tax Planning Seminar

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• The significant pensions changes which are coming into force • How to plan for long-term care costs in advance and asset protection issues • Inheritance tax planning with options for saving on inheritance tax Join us for a free seminar which will cover these vital areas as well as areas to look for investment returns in 2015

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Eye on Interiors

Stand to Attention Over the last decade, a number of studies have been published in the study of sedentary working and the suggestion that constantly sitting at work is bad for you. With results proving that excessive sitting can be damaging to our bodies, and an hour of exercise per day not being enough to reverse the adverse affects, what can we do?

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ost commonly proposed is that we sit less, and stand more! So, could workplaces be heading for a redesign around standing up, and with our offices filled with desks and chairs, what does this mean for office products around the world?

Step one in heading towards a flexible sit-stand workspace could be the introduction of the height adjustable desk. Height adjustable desk systems give the users the option to sit or stand during their day, stretching muscles and increasing blood flow!

Another innovative product option is 360° Dynamic Seating, a seating solution with a seat that is constantly pivoting on an axis. With this free flowing mechanism we can increase the energy being expended through micro movements, a process known as “Non-exercise activity thermogenesis” or NEAT. So in the immortal words of the great James Brown, “Get up offa that thing”!

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For more information, why not contact Innov8 Office Interiors, and they can advise, recommend and survey your company’s current needs. You can find them at www.innov8office.com

Workspace Innovation

In the immortal words of James Brown “Get up offa that thing” A number of studies have suggested that constantly sitting at work is bad for you. So, could workplaces be heading for a redesign around standing up?

Medical research has been building up for a while now, suggesting constant sitting is harming our health - potentially causing cardiovascular problems or vulnerability to diabetes.

One way of moving towards a “Standing Office” is to introduce height adjustable desking & seating with 360° dynamic movement.

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Eye on Digital

Victoria Hutchinson & Ardmore’s Digital Direction So no big surprise, things change quickly in the digital arena.

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hose who inhabit the industry, such as Victoria, can’t help but emphasise that point. As Digital Account Director at Ardmore Advertising, Victoria looks after a wide range of clients in a variety of businesses and sectors; each of whom have their own objectives to meet in a competitive and ever evolving environment.

Victoria joined (or rather re-joined) Ardmore last year having spent six years in the Client Services team of UTV Media subsidiary Tibus. She joined Ardmore for the first time in 2004 fresh from university in Glasgow, heading back to the Scottish city a couple of years later to work for the Daily Record and TMP Worldwide Advertising.

Victoria returned home in 2008 to link up with Tibus and it was working in this software design and development house she really learned what makes a digital project successful, and getting the absolute best out of the team for the benefit of the Client.

Ardmore puts a digital focus at the core of every communications strategy, for every client. “The public now spend a huge portion of their life online, more often than not on a smartphone, and the brands and organisations we work have no option but to be mindful and respectful of that. We

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help our Customers understand their Customers’ journey, and the web has become a massive part of it, whether it’s via their own website, their social presence, online reviews or search.”

“For a long time digital has been considered a bolt-on service by creative houses and agencies” says Victoria. “At Ardmore, digital is part of what we do for the vast majority of our clients.

Considering how a creative and/or media strategy plays out across the relevant online platforms available is central to our approach; in fact for some of our more recent Clients, digital is actually all we do for them!”

“Working on a day to day basis with account managers, media specialists and creatives throughout the agency we provide tailored digital solutions integrated with ‘traditional’ services such as TV, radio and outdoor advertising. Social media, for example, has developed into another channel for the delivery of advertising messages, extremely effective due to the fact it allows us to target our message at defined audiences.

This minimises budget wastage and reduces the chances of ‘polluting’ social feeds of users to whom our message is irrelevant.”

As a team the agency is creatively and strategically led, “It’s vital we offer creativity to all our Clients, and that our creative team are involved in the process from the briefing stage right through to development and delivery. Our creative approach is

Victoria Hutchinson

based on a solid understanding of our Clients’ business and the market in which they operate, and most importantly their consumers’ needs. ” Ardmore works on all forms of website design and development, on social media campaigns and on relatively new areas like persona development, conversation mapping, content marketing and search optimized content, all of which we regard as effective ways of making contact and engaging with target customer groups.

“User generated content is everywhere, reviews are everywhere … customer opinions matter more than they ever did. They’re easily findable, easily shared and completely immediate. So you can see why the right level of contact and engagement with customers is as crucial as it has ever been.”

“Within Ardmore, we pull all the strands of a campaign together, so our Clients end up with an integrated and comprehensive package of results focused solutions.”

The agency produces allencompassing solutions for a number of clients. Victoria quotes the example of Craigavon’s Rushmere Shopping Centre.... for whom Ardmore produces everything from TV, radio and outdoor ads to website and social media campaigns. “The reality now, is that not all clients want or

need a fully integrated campaign across all media for all forms of marketing undertaken; it depends on their product or service, their brand, their budget, their target market, their timeline… the list goes on. Ardmore establish the main goals of a campaign and produce a strategy that fits the needs of each Client, funneling the right level of investment into the avenues that will provide the best return. It’s fair to say that digital is seeing a significant increase in investment.”

What’s really important for us is talking to our Clients at every turn. They know their businesses and their customers better than us, and we have greater insight into technology, media, creative solutions and the digital industry overall, so we get to tap into each other’s knowledge as we go along.”

Looking to the future, Victoria says that Ardmore’s digital offering has seen growth and will continue to do so as our existing Clients extend their digital activities, and new ones join the client list.

“We’ve got a really enthusiastic team here, and a very knowledgeable group of people.

We’re completely entrenched in the digital world and excited about what we’re doing for our Clients. We’re even more excited about what we might be doing digitally 6 months from now, such has been the rate of change.”

Eye on NLP in Business

Fresh Thinking – Better Results

By Douglas King ANLP Certified Trainer and Coach NLP

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any organisations in the UK, Ireland and around the world have embraced the science and art of Neuro Linguistic Programming to assist them to achieve their corporate goals. Those goals vary between coaching individual executives for improved performance and communication, to customer service improvements involving every employee in the company. In a nutshell, NLP provides measurable benefits in any situation in which two or more people must communicate in order to produce results.

So what is NLP? • Neuro – how you use your nervous system to think • Linguistic – how you communicate your thoughts to others and to yourself via verbal and non-verbal language • Programming – most of the things we do each day consist of programmes (habits) we have done before. NLP gives you the tools to upgrade and re-programme your habits Would you like to know how to communicate with others to elegantly build better and more productive inter-personal relationships with them for win-win outcomes?

Would you like a way to be able to replicate excellence shown in the people you respect the most?

Would you like to be able to feel confident and at ease speaking in public or doing presentations?

Would you like to know how to replace limiting beliefs and unwanted behaviours in yourself and others with more useful beliefs and behaviours?

Would you like to have a way to set yourself clearly defined life goals and achieve them at a predetermined time in your future, just when you intended that they would?

Would you like to be able to quickly and easily boost and super-charge your motivation to achieve those

goals just as you desire?

Would you like to have the coaching skills to motivate others to achieve their goals?

NLP has tools to change, create and generally work with emotions, or states. In addition to this, a skilled Practitioner should also be able to modify their thought process for any given outcome. This is why it’s called NLP – tools to modify thinking (neuro), to flex communication (linguistic) and dispel old beliefs and habits and to create new behaviour (programming).

For instance, an individual employee with NLP skills is more empowered in the performance of their duties. The skill to read and interpret others’ mental maps is the basis of effective communication.

A manager identifies the employee’s motivation strategy, i.e. how the employee motivates him/herself, and incorporates this naturally into the employee’s development plan.

A team member does a presentation of a proposal in a planning meeting. She begins by building rapport in the group.

She then communicates with each type of personality in the group, chunks up for consensus and chunks down into specific details and agreement.

A salesperson uses precision questioning, the meta model, to understand how their customer has been using their company’s service. In the process of gathering information she uncovers another area in which the service may be able to help the customer.

In a call-centre a customer service representative handles a call from an angry customer. He establishes rapport with the customer, paces the customer’s state of mind, then leads him into a calmer state of mind, clarifies the problem, and resolves it.

Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness have increasingly been added to how an organisation can address problems relating to stress, greater empathy with staff and customers and self-awareness and leadership. They have something in common with NLP - start with your State of Mind. Habits are created from past experience and are often thought to be

difficult, or impossible to change. Habits are made up of our Internal State, Internal Processing and External Behaviour.

People change and learn new things when they have a purpose and desire to do so, and when they can access the optimal Internal State and Internal Processing required for success.

If you want behaviour change, begin with the state, and then move on to the thought process. NLP techniques provide the “how to” techniques and processes to embed updated and more resourceful habits.

In The Power of Habit, awardwinning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg highlights how advances in neuroscience explain why habits exist and how they can be changed, and NLP is a core methodology and set of techniques to make change lasting and effective.

Diners Club trained every manager and representative in their customer service area in NLP skills for handling customer and internal communication.

The net result was a 254% increase in customer spending, and a 67% reduction in customer loss. The Customer Service Department, previously a cost centre, became a revenueproducing part of the organisation BMW in England modelled the communication patterns of the top 1% in sales. After determining the successful behaviours of these salespeople, the skills were taught to every salesperson in the

organisation. Sales of a newly-introduced model greatly exceeded projections.

Marketers at Procter & Gamble studied videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. One of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.

An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.

One of the fundamentals of NLP is that it is outcome –focused: as Stephen Covey commented, “Begin with the end in sight”. This is where NLP scores highly, and why more leaders are turning to NLP to help their people embrace change and communicate more effectively. The best NLP practitioners use their NLP to increase learning, create change and transfer new skills into the workplace.

NLP gets right into the way you think, emote and behave, it cuts across all disciplines. You will find Leadership programmes designed with it, along with Sales, Communication, Negotiation, Managing People, Motivating Teams, Presentation Skills, Project Management, and just about anywhere you want to develop your skills.

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Est. 1984

Improving Your Cash Flow

• • • • • • •

Celebrating

30 Years

1984-2014

Debt Recovery (B2B & B2C) - Domestic & International Cash Flow Assistance Pre-litigation reports Insolvency Help Credit Reports Credit Insurance Advice Invoice Discounting Advice T: 028 9055 9999 E: debt@redmondjohnson.com Twitter: @redmondJohnson1 www.redmondjohnson.com Forsyth House, Cromac Square, Belfast BT2 8LA Redmond Johnson is a trading style of Cashflow Management Ltd.

Sole Irish Member of

Eye on News

eircom Business Solutions Tees Up Irish Open Sponsorship eircom Business Solutions has joined forces with The European Tour to become Official Telecommunications Sponsor of the 2015 Irish Open, hosted by The Rory Foundation.

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he event takes place in Royal County Down Golf Club from May 28-31 and will bring many of the biggest international golfing stars to Northern Ireland, including tournament host and World Number One, Rory McIlroy.

The combination of McIlroy’s influence in his homeland and the return to Royal Country Down has ensured a high-quality field featuring Ernie Els, Padraig Harrington, Darren Clarke, Graeme McDowell, Lee Westwood

and American Rickie Fowler.

This will be the second year that eircom Business Solutions has been involved with the Irish Open, having launched its partnership with the event at the 2014 Irish Open at Fota Island.

More than 80,000 visitors are expected at Royal County Down with an audience of millions watching the action on TV across the world, showcasing Irish golf on a global stage.

James Finnigan, Irish Open Commercial Director, said: “We are delighted to have eircom Business Solutions on board as Official Telecommunications Sponsor. The Irish Open is one of the most highly anticipated events in the European golfing calendar and this year will showcase the greatest names in the sport.

The support of companies such as eircom Business Solutions is instrumental in highlighting the Irish involvement in golf and showcasing some of the world’s best players.”

Commenting on the announcement Gary Disley, Marketing Director, eircom Business Solutions said: “We are very honoured to play such a big part in the tournament this year. Home-grown events of this kind benefit the whole country – from an economic perspective, but also in terms of showcasing our world-class players and the stunning Irish scenery. Our customers are passionate about sporting events like the Irish Open and eircom Business Solutions is very proud to be cheering alongside them this year.”

Breast Cancer, Don’t Duck the Issue!

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orthern Ireland’s leading local cancer charity Action Cancer, is launching their new breast cancer awareness campaign, ‘Breast Cancer, Don’t Duck the Issue’.

The pink duck campaign, which is supported

by Action Cancer Patron Gloria Hunniford, alongside Hastings Hotels and Business Eye Magazine, endeavours to raise awareness, encourage ladies to regularly check their breasts, whilst aiming to raise £20,000 towards the charity’s unique breast screening facilities.

Action Cancer is asking local business owners

and staff to help get all their ducks in a row, by signing up to receive two pinks ducks – one for you and one for a friend, family member or work colleague. Each pink duck represents a breast screening and encourages you to raise £80 to cover the cost of one screening.

This year, 10,000 women in Northern Ireland will choose to make their screening appointment with Action Cancer and this service is entirely free of charge. We screen women aged 40-49 and over 70, who fall outside the government screening programme.

Brenda Buckley, Business Eye, Julie Hastings, Hastings Hotels and Gillian Thomson, Action Cancer are launching Northern Ireland’s leading local cancer charity Action Cancer new breast cancer awareness campaign, ‘Breast Cancer, Don’t Duck the Issue’.

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Eye on Competition

Business Eye Exclusive Reader Competition Win a week’s France Summer NLP Business Training and Certification! Business Eye has teamed up with King NLP to provide one reader with this fantastic opportunity. The prize includes return flight from Dublin, accommodation in the Chateau for 7 nights, airport transfers, breakfast, lunch and 4 evening meals. Your training will be hosted at the magnificent Chateau Domaine des Granges Vieille, Souillac sur Dordogne, Lot France, 13-20th June 2015.

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he NLP Practitioner Course is an intensive programme that gives you an exciting & fun ‘hands-on’ introduction to all the fundamentals of NLP. Frequently known as the “users manual for your mind”, the course will provide a toolkit to enable you to think and act differently and so achieve greater personal development

and professional goals.

In a nutshell, how to get even better results, even faster.

The successful entrant of the £2,500 course will be announced in the June edition of the magazine. There is pre-study requirement and with a 130 page manual, 16 CD audio programme, Integration Paper as well as the Certified live training, coaching and accreditation.

Douglas King is a certified ANLP International certified Trainer and Coach and has delivered this programme in New York, Los Angeles and France, to a diverse range of 130 companies and individuals.

The programme is a powerful set of techniques, models and principles that is guaranteed to demonstrate better outcomes across a wide range of business and personal goals.

HOW TO ENTER: To enter go to www.kingnlp.co.uk and click on the Business Eye Magazine Competition banner.

Answer the question and register for the free 8 day Introduction to NLP that will be emailed daily directly to your inbox.

The closing date for entries is 8th May. The winner will be notified by registered post.

Summary of what to expect: You will learn how to:

• Understand and reduce stress and conflict

• Set clear goals and define realistic achievable strategies

• Build confidence and assertiveness

• Coach new and existing staff to enable them to

• Significantly boost new customer relationship-

gain even more satisfaction from their roles

building and sales performance

• Add new techniques to improve customer care staff performance and reduce customer attrition • Improve people’s effectiveness, productivity and thereby profitability

Eye on Events

British Airways Hosts Flying Start Event in Belfast British Airways recently hosted a Big Night Out at the Holiday Inn Hotel in Belfast. The event was a fundraiser for their charity Flying Start in conjunction with Comic Relief, as well as local charity The Orchardville Society.

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ulian Simmons hosted the evening which included a quiz, dinner and dancing. A great night was had by all and a lot of money was raised for the charities.

Flying Start is the global charity partnership between British Airways and Comic Relief and it aims to raise money for

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children’s projects at home and around the world in locations that the airline currently flies to.

The Orchardville Society is a local charity which supports over 250 people with learning disabilities each year, preparing them for placements with local employers across Belfast.

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(1) Joanne Irwin, Marjorie Briggs, Karen Duckett, Alan Mooney, Julian Simmons, Christine Wright. (2) Charlotte Duckett, Benjamin Duckett and Joanne Irwin. (3) Joanne Irwin, Shelley Armstrong and Stephen Rea. (4) Emmie Ellison, Lauren Burke and Christine Wright. (5) Joanne Irwin, Michael Potts, Julian Simmons, Karen Duckett, Alan Mooney, Marjorie Briggs and Christine Wright. (6) Joanne Irwin, Emma Wright, Eoin Rodgers, Rosie McMaster, Christine Wright and Julian Simmons. (7) Julian Simmons, Ruth McKeown, Fiona McCallan, Emma Evans, Suzi Blair and Christine Wright. (8) Alan Mooney, Michael Potts, Marjorie Briggs and Christine Wright.(9) Karen Duckett, Joanne Wright, Joss Fiorini and Julian Simmons.

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Eye on Employment & Skills

Executive Must Invest In Skills To Drive Productivity

Bill McGinnis.

As his term as Northern Ireland Adviser on Employment and Skills ended last month, Dr Bill McGinnis outlines what has been achieved during his seven years in the role.

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he challenge I was set as Northern Ireland’s first Adviser on Employment and Skills and as the local commissioner on the UK Commission on Employment and Skills was to raise the level of awareness within industry here of the importance of workforce training and development in improving productivity and competitiveness.

As most business people and commentators are well aware, productivity here is below the UK average. This situation impacts adversely the ability of our companies to compete for business particularly in international markets. Accelerating the growth in exports, of course, is now a strategic imperative for the Northern Ireland Executive. Exports assist economic growth and community wellbeing.

Improving workplace skills must be seen as the key route to pay and prosperity.

I believe that the need to invest in training is now more widely accepted here than ever before.

Excellent research has been carried out across a broad range of industries that is signposting what needs to be done to ensure further investment in skills in the skills our companies require to ensure greater success and faster growth.

For instance, a priority skills report that I developed from discussions with representatives from industry and education is influencing Further Education colleges in developing more effective courses. The Assured Skills Programme has grown out of this and has created closer working relationships between the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, Invest NI and Department for Employment and Learning. This is ensuring the flexibility and responsiveness required to attracting and support business investment.

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Apprenticeships, a key focus for me during my term, now have greater acceptance within industry and the current DEL minister has been a strong advocate. In June 2014, he published ‘The Northern Ireland Strategy on Apprenticeships’, which highlights the importance of up-skilling to raise productivity, increase social inclusion, and help Northern Ireland to compete in the global marketplace.

While I have seen some excellent apprenticeship programmes being developed locally, the Butchery Academy at Dunbia in Dungannon and the programme being implemented at Specialist Joinery at Maghera being good examples, I still see scope for much greater engagement by many more local companies which declare issues with skills shortages.

Employment and Learning minister Dr Stephen Farry is leading from the front and has been extremely positive about measures suggested from my discussions with local companies. While he has responded very positively, it remains the responsibility of companies here to embrace government initiatives to improve their business prospects.

A key focus for me during my term was to promote closer links between education and employers to help improve the breadth and quality of vocational education. The relationships are stronger than ever before. Further educational colleges are certainly more responsive and willing to adapt courses to meet employers’ specific requirements. I was particularly encouraged to see the work that Harland and Wolff is doing with Belfast Metropolitan College and the Northern Regional College to expand welding skills for the Yard.

DEL, of course, is facing integration within a new Department for the Economy.

It is essential that the good work on skills continues within the new structure and does not fall victim to budgetary constraints which will continue for some years ahead. It will be up to industry to make sure that our investment in the skills of our people is not impacted adversely. Our growth in both short and long terms depends on the development of skilled and easily motivated people who recognise that learning is a journey.

We also need to address the fact that much of the growth in employment in recent years has been in lower-skilled jobs. While Invest NI has been successful in attracting a significant number of better paid jobs from inward investors, many of the posts being created in local enterprises are lower wage posts.

As a result of the depth of the recession, slow recovery and the growth in low paid employment, productivity has taken a hit. In the UK overall, for instance, productivity is now 14 per cent below the pre-recession level. The problem remains as serious in Northern Ireland and is weakening living standards.

Our hopes of rising wages and greater skills hinge on improving competitiveness, which hinges on greater productivity. If our companies are to achieve greater success in global markets, as the Executive and Invest NI wish, they need to be encouraged and assisted to invest long-term in skills.

My experience in business and the role as Northern Ireland Adviser is that people ultimately drive growth. We frequently hear policymakers talking about people being our greatest natural resource. Measures have been introduced to support this. But we need to be doing more, much more to build a talented, highly skilled and easily motivated workface within industry-focused structures that will lead to a substantial improvement in productivity and our overall economic competitiveness.

Own your company vehicles and need a cash injection? Talk to us about Sale & Leaseback...

Eye on Motoring

dfcbelfast.co.uk Motoring with Derek Black dbmotoring@btinternet.com

Style, Power And Economy In The Diesel TT The gorgeous new Audi TT roadster - with a profile echoing the R8 supercar - may not immediately leap to mind as an ideal company car. Take a close look at the diesel version and you may change your mind!

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f you are prepared to sacrifice a second or two in acceleration and forgo the quattro allwheel drive system, then you could be in business with an eye-catching two-seater that will not enrage the bean counters.

Yes, Audi has cleverly slipped in a 2.0-litre TDI ultra model into its fashionable new line-up.

I found it an extremely agreeable car to drive with plenty

of beef when you need it and a quiet drive when just cruising - as you tend to do when the top is down. Audi has stuck to a fabric roof on the new model rather than a heavy fold-away metal roof favoured by others.

It only takes ten seconds to raise or lower the roof, so you can quickly take advantage of sudden changes of weather.

Even on cool spring days, you

can raise the rear wind deflector and switch on the heated seats and still enjoy the open air!

The sheer efficiency of the 184PS turbo diesel is reflected in consumption of 65.7mpg combined and emissions of 114g/km putting it in BIK group 14 or 15 (depending on wheel choice!). These are highly credible returns for a car capable of 0-62mph in 7.3 seconds and

with a top speed of 147mph!

Among the many clever features of the new TT is the 12-inch graphic display in front of the driver which can be changed to include the satellite navigation map and instruments of differing sizes. In-car internet is an option!

The TT roadster 2.0TDI ultra is priced from £31,955 and is predicted to have the strongest resale value of the range.

LOOKING FOR A CHEAP AND TRUSTY STEED? Just as I was thinking there was no such thing as a cheap workhorse any more, along comes the Great Wall Steed, made in China like nearly everything else is today!

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riced from £14,998, it is claimed to be the least expensive doublecab 4x4 pick-up. This is the second generation Steed to be sold in the UK and is a notable improvement on the original which I drove a couple of years ago.

The price had crept up £1,000 but there are more features.

Now made in a more modern factory the latest Steed has improved capacity, a revised interior, new instruments and better materials. Among the new bits is a tyre pressure monitoring system that shows the working

pressure for each tyre.

With alloy wheels and roof rails this is an eye-catching vehicle.

The driving experience is less memorable with a wide turning circle and a rolling gait. It is a far cry from a modern executive car. But, horses for courses, and this is primarily a load carrier.

The latest model is certified to tow a 2.5 tonne braked trailer - a useful increase from 2.0 tonnes.

The 2.0-litre turbo-diesel is a bit of a plodder but has plenty of torque and flexibility. Top speed is 87mph and acceleration to 62mph takes 17 seconds.

A BorgWarner transmission system is fitted with on-demand 4-wheel drive selectable by pushing a button at speeds up to 12mph. It is a serious off-roader with selectable low ratio gears when needed. Rear brakes are now disc rather than drum.

Fuel consumption is rated at just under 33mpg combined and emissions at 220g/km.

There are three models - the S priced at £14,998, the SE at £16,998 and the Tracker at £15,998. There is a six-year or 125,000-mile mechanical warranty.

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For used VAT qualifying vehicles visit our website...

dfcbelfast.co.uk

Eye on Motoring

Congratulations To DFC... 25 Years!

DFC Celebrates 25 Years In Business With Special Offers What’s included • For your firm and family! DFC provide both Business Contract Hire & Personal Contract Hire • Prices are based on 6 monthly rentals on delivery + 23 payments as per contract profile with 10000 miles per annum allowance * Other models and contract profiles available*

BMW 5 Series Diesel saloon 520d M Sport 4dr Step Auto

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£299+Vat / month

£315+Vat / month

Road Tax and Metallic paint included

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Eye on Motoring

Telematics Technology Standard On All Vehicles Northern Ireland’s leading Vehicle Management Company DFC celebrates 25 years in business with this exciting new announcement.

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e are pleased to announce that all DFC Contract Hire Vehicles, ordered from April 2015 will include RAC Telematics, Breakdown Cover and Accident Management as standard. Our new holistic fleet management approach will be widely available for all vehicle users.

DFC and the RAC have joined forces to provide market-leading Breakdown

Recovery, Accident Management and Telematics services, ensuring the cutting edge vehicle technology is available for all customers.

Uel Butler CEO at DFC said, “DFC has just celebrated 25 years supplying and managing vehicles in the UK and Ireland and this exciting new partnership with the RAC is a fantastic way to mark this milestone. This game changing approach, a first in Northern Ireland guarantees maximum cost savings on your vehicle(s), secures peace of mind and promises full GPS cover for your vehicles 24 hours a day.”

RAC Corporate Sales Director Jenny Powley say, “We have developed a powerful relationship with DFC which will provide their customers with the level of Breakdown Cover

and Accident Management they would expect from the DFC brand.”

A feature of this partnership is that businesses will also be able to avail of RAC Telematics systems, whether they are a customer or not from DFC in Belfast.

This will provide further support to businesses looking to drive down costs and provide highly accurate insight into how fleets are functioning in terms of fuel consumption and driving styles.

The new partnership with the RAC will not only provide peace of mind for DFC’s customers in terms of breakdown, with eight out of ten vehicles being fixed at the roadside, but will also help support business and personal customers with a range of service enhancements.

For more information please visit our website www.dfcbelfast.co.uk or call us on 02890 734222

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Local Company Local People Local Service

DFC is Northern Ireland’s only major independent locally owned Vehicle management company.

For 25 years DFC have supplied, funded and managed cars and vans.

We are confident we can provide a cost effective solution for your business or individual needs.

Call us today for more information on our car and van offers on 028 9073 4222 or email sales@dfcbelfast.co.uk

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Eye on Motoring

Motoring with Derek Black dbmotoring@btinternet.com

Polo With Tiny Engine But Tons Of Attitude The Polo is quite a posh little car these days and has moved closer to the Golf in many ways. It offers that familiar blend of quality and robustness that you expect from a VW, but in a smaller package.

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his particular Polo is interesting in that it uses a little 1.0-litre, threecylinder petrol engine. How does this compare to the diesel engines preferred by most companies?

Better than you might think!

Power output of 60PS is modest but the little engine makes up with sheer eagerness. Acceleration to 62mph takes a sluggish 15.5 seconds and top speed is 100mph.

Yet the power unit is so willing that the car feels livelier to drive than these figures suggest.

Even with ‘Bluemotion technology’ the petrol Polo returns 60mpg combined, a bit short on the diesel’s set piece return. But the

petrol version is cheaper to buy and is an alternative for those concerned about the future of diesel as a ‘green’ fuel.

Emissions of 106g/km will help keep the company car tax down and insurance is a modest group 6E so this is a relatively cheap car to run. Despite this, the Polo is well equipped with a 5-inch touchscreen and Bluetooth phone connection.

It also has six-speaker sound with USB input and an SD card reader.

There is a post collision braking system designed to reduce the chance of a second impact after an accident. Other standard

features include front side airbags, hill-hold, central locking and front electric windows.

I am also happy to report that it has a full size spare tyre - an increasingly rare commodity in the age of weight saving. Having been stranded on several occasions by cars equipped only with a repair kit, I can see this simple item saving time and money in the event of a bad puncture.

My test car was in plusher SE trim with a P11D value of £13,055. Most Polos are sold to retail customers but this Bluemotion petrol may appeal to business buyers who do a lot of town driving.

Mazda6 Gets Make-Over And Lots Of Premium Touches New versions of two of the top selling ‘repmobiles’ - the ubiquitous Ford Mondeo and the stalwart VW Passat - have been launched already this year. Can the Mazda trump these top dogs with its face-lifted 6?

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ith sporting ‘Kodo’ design and LED running lights the Mazda certainly looks the part.

In typical Japanese fashion many weak points have been addressed. So the interior is transformed, there is extra soundproofing and extra kit.

For such a spacious car, the 6 sits on the road with poise and feels rather nimble. Inside, the dashboard and interior have a more premium feel with a big 7-inch colour screen and a controller knob on the centre console for navigation, radio and other functions.

There is now a DAB radio and a push-button parking brake.

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Also available are adaptive headlamps, lane assist, driver attention alert and blind spot warning. There is auto braking at low speeds if the ‘radar’ detects an obstacle in front of or behind the car.

Mazda has not gone down the hybrid or electric car route.

Instead their comprehensive Sky-Active approach involves a barrage of measures from lighter, stronger steel to a braking system that recoups energy that would otherwise be wasted.

I tried a 2.0-litre petrol and a 2.2-litre diesel. Both felt responsive and had long legs for relaxed long-distance drives.

There is a choice of a slick six-

speed manual gearbox or a sixspeed automatic with steering paddles for sporty driving.

The petrol engines come with outputs of 145 or 165PS while the diesels offer either 150 or 175PS. That smooth 175 diesel saloon is a star performer with acceleration to 62mph in 7.9

seconds yet returning 62mpg combined. Emissions for the diesels range from just 107g/ km to 127g/km - a tax-saving boost for company car drivers.

Prices range from £19,795 for the starter petrol saloon (145PS) and run to £28,795 for the top Tourer diesel (175PS) automatic.

Lateral thinking

Being on the ground in more locations than any other commercial property agency, it’s fair to say we know the market inside out.

With 27 offices across the UK and Ireland, we provide our clients with properly researched, independent advice and insight into every part of the commercial property market.

Our team of 75 in Belfast offers specialist services from retail consultancy to asset management, building surveys to property management, rating to valuation, auctions to corporate recovery, business space agency to capital markets.

With our blend of national prominence and local knowledge, Lambert Smith Hampton is ideally placed to offer best advice on all aspects of commercial property.

Making commercial sense

Lambert Smith Hampton Clarence House, 4-10 May Street, Belfast BT1 4NJ +44 (0)28 9032 7954

LAND IN LONDON. ACTUAL LONDON. We fly from Belfast City Airport to London City Airport.

Not to Gatwick or Heathrow.

On sale now from ÂŁ39.99 one way.

Available for travel from 27.10.14 to 28.03.15. Fares are one way including taxes and charges, only available on Flybe.com, subject to availability. No debit card fees apply. Bookings made by credit card will incur a fee of 3% of the total transaction value, with a minimum charge of ÂŁ5.00 per booking. Information correct at time of going to print.