BQ YORKSHIRE Issue 15 by We Are UMi

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ISSUE FIFTEEN: WINTER 2012

twice bitten, never shy How a belated return paid off for one entrepreneur Poised for growth The estate agency set for national expansion turnkey talent Career step change fuels widespread success Oiling the way The slick transiton from bedroom to booming industry

worlds apart ISSUE FIFTEEN: WINTER 2012: YORKSHIRE EDITION

BQ discovers a thriving realm of greenery, nostalgia and global success hidden within an old Yorkshire mill

BUSINESS NEWS: COMMERCE: FASHION: INTERVIEWS: MOTORS: EVENTS

YORKSHIRE EDITION

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WELCOME

BUSINESS QUARTER: WINTER 12: issue FIFTEEN Two of our interviewees in this issue got sacked at some point in their careers – and had the courage and honesty to admit to it to us. Such a result should in some way be some source of hope to all of us – a sign that even when you think things have reached rock bottom, you can always climb out again. That’s a great message to be spread in the current economic climate. Because Kevin Hollinrake, having been sacked by one large estate agency chain, went on to found an agency of his own – York-based Hunters - that is just as successful, and has just completed one of the most daring acquisitions in the sector in recent times. Up in Northallerton, David Kerfoot, founder of the Kerfoot Group, didn’t waste time moping when he lost his job either. Within days of being dismissed from a job he had returned to Yorkshire to take up, he was founding his new company. And as we see in our profile, that company has gone on to be a hugely successful oil trading and manufacturing company. It is certainly one that David can be proud of as he hands over the reins of the business to his daughter Jennifer this April. Richard Grafton, in contrast, has just split away from his family to launch Richard Grafton Interiors. In this issue, he tells us how reaching the age of 45 made him realise that he needed to break away from the family businesses he has been running for the past two decades to prove to himself that he could do it on his own. His family must be proud of his achievement so far. Howard Gould and Gail Dudleston could not be said either to have been sacked or to have had strong family connections which have influenced their careers. But that has not made them any less interesting. With a background in telecoms, Howard has run the same business twice at different periods, while stopping off in between to launch a very successful interim management agency. Gail had had a career in direct marketing, and thought that when she was first called in to run what has become Twentysix that it was

much of the same. Instead, she has led it to become one of Leeds’ most dynamic digital agencies. Also this issue, we take a look at Holbeck, Leeds’ often forgotten little district on the south side of the River Aire. It was once up for much under the Holbeck Urban Village scheme. With Yorkshire Forward no longer with us, and with the property market still in the doldrums, how is it doing now? Following on from last issue’s focus on the Leeds City Region’s city deal, we interview Barry Dodd, the chairman of the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), to see how he sees the outer section of our region developing. And we celebrate the 20th anniversary of Coutts arriving in Yorkshire – surely a sign of sustained wealth in the region – by finding out why their Yorkshire boss Mark Yellops is feeling so positive in the new year. Peter Baber, Editor BQ Yorkshire

CONTACTS room501 ltd Christopher March Managing Director e: chris@room501.co.uk Bryan Hoare Director e: bryan@room501.co.uk George Cheung e: george@room501.co.uk Euan Underwood e: euan@room501.co.uk EditorIAL Peter Baber Editor e: peterb@bq-magazine.co.uk Andrew Mernin e: andrewm@room501.co.uk Design & production room501 e: studio@room501.co.uk Photography KG Photography e: info@kgphotography.co.uk advertising For advertising call 0191 537 5720 or email sales@bq-magazine.co.uk

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THE LIFE AND SOUL OF BUSINESS

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BUSINESS QUARTER |WINTER 12

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CONTE BUSINESS QUARTER: WINTER 12 twice bitten, never shy

Features

42 still going strong Exclusive banking empire Coutts looks back on 20 years in Yorkshire

46 poised for growth 22 Worlds Apart Inside the fast-moving realm of a soaring digital agency

28 back to holbeck BQ charts the regeneration of a blossoming part of Leeds

36 second coming The return to a Yorkshire business that has reaped rewards

BUSINESS QUARTER | WINTER 12

The estate agency thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on the march to national expansion

70 turnkey talent

20 years and counting

How a step change in business created an emerging success story

74 oiling the way The slick transition from bedroom to a booming industry

TENTS YORKSHIRE EDITION

32 commercial property

Deals, developments, moves and expansions from across the county

warmth in the winter

52 business lunch BQ meets a man who could have a major influence on the region’s economy

Regulars

56 wine A couple of wines from sunnier climes to warm the winter nights

58 motors Welcome to Yorkshire’s Gary Verity lives out a boyhood fantasy

08 on the record Looking at the positives in business

10 news Who’s doing what, when, where and why here in Yorkshire

20 as i see it How to avoid a data disaster

56 oiling the way

60 equipment A new breed of vehicle is launched on the luxury market

66 fashion Enter the mysterious world of the brand with no branding, Loro Piana

80 frank tock With BQ’s backroom boy Frank Tock

74 BUSINESS QUARTER | WINTER 12

ON THE RECORD

WINTER 12

Stepping down but here to stay, zombies on the rise, airport link re-established, double joining of forces, taking it easy with apprenticeships, and sneak peek at shopping centre have also been timed to connect with onward services to major international destinations. Leeds & Partners claims the new link will boost the region’s economy by £10m a year. Lurene Joseph, chief executive of the organisation, which used to be called Marketing Leeds, said: “The Leeds city region economy needs to connect to a global hub airport, and these flights offer huge benefits. An airline with BA’s global reputation reinforces that we are a city moving forward with confidence towards a landmark year.”

>> Marwood bows out Ian Marwood, one of the best known dealmakers in the Yorkshire region, has left Grant Thornton after 11 years as head of the firm’s corporate finance practice in the region. He said he plans to take on a number of independent advisory roles with entrepreneurial businesses in the region, while continuing to work for Grant Thornton on a consultancy basis for some of its clients. He said: “After 25 years in corporate finance, I feel the time is right for a change of direction. Having helped to secure a strong position for the practice in the Yorkshire market place and with a number of deals currently at an advanced stage, it is an opportune time for me to step down and pursue new challenges.”

>> Leeds gets link to Heathrow Leeds Bradford Airport has re-established its connections with Heathrow after a direct British Airways service resumed in December. The four times daily service is the first time British Airways has run a connection between the two cities for three decades. The flights

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>> Confidence still strong in Yorkshire... Confidence among businesses in Yorkshire has now remained positive for thee consecutive quarters, the latest ICEAW/Grant Thornton UK Business Confidence Monitor suggests. The survey, which this time interviewed 74 senior business professionals in the region, has recorded a confidence index score of +10.3 for the final quarter of 2012, suggesting that, overall, despite the flat economy, local businesses remain optimistic for the future. ICAEW regional director Chris Manners said: “It is encouraging that many companies expect turnover and gross profits to rise, by 4.2% and 4.0% respectively, and there are some signs that the labour market in Yorkshire and Humberside is strengthening, as this quarter businesses report staff headcounts increasing by 1.3% over the past year. This is the fastest annual employment growth since the third quarter of 2008 and follows a general upward trend from a -0.8% annual reduction in the first quarter of 2012.” Jonathan Riley, senior partner for Grant Thornton in Yorkshire, said: “We’re continuing to see pockets of dynamic

business activity, particularly in the midmarket. We also welcome Lord Heseltine’s review calling for the establishment of a stable locally-based private sector business support infrastructure.” However he warned that slowing export growth also highlighted in the survey “raises concerns”.

>> …But zombies increase Yorkshire, the Humber and the North East now contain some 16,000 “zombie” businesses – companies which can only pay the interest on their debt but not the debt itself – new research from insolvency trade body R3 suggests. That figure represents 9% of all businesses in the region. The organisation adds that the number of companies across the UK which would match that description has risen by 10% in the past six months. Robert Adamson, chair of R3 in Yorkshire and northern head of restructuring services for Mazars, said the term “zombie business” could also apply to companies that were currently over-geared and could not pay back their debt in full. “We know that banks are displaying greater forbearance on existing debt, but when a business cannot get extra lending it will be unable to expand. Others would argue that this stagnation ties up capital that could be used for other, healthier businesses,” he said. However he said the current recession was also “re-writing the rules”, because corporate insolvencies remain historically low, especially in comparison to other recessions. There were nearly 8,000 fewer corporate insolvencies in 2009 than there were in 1982, and the figure dipped again at the end of 2012. “This surely reflects this longer period of low growth that is the new norm, with low interest rates and low liquidation rates, but many businesses running at a loss,” he said.

WINTER 12

>> Kaisers to open arena The Kaiser Chiefs, probably the most prominent band to emerge from Leeds in the past decade, have been booked to play a special one-off concert in September next year at the Leeds Arena, to mark the opening of the new venue. The band, who by that time will have completed a major UK, European and international tour, will be the only local act to appear during the opening season.

ON THE RECORD

of those plans and our new scale will give us the strength in depth, and sector insight to support our clients’ growth plans.” At the same time, BDO Stoy Hayward and PKF, two accountancy practices with a significant presence in the Yorkshire region, have agreed to merge. The new firm, due to be called BDO, will employ some 3,500 people in the UK generating revenues of £400m.

>> Agency to make apprenticeships easy An agency which aims to reduce much of the risk and cost for small businesses of recruiting apprentices has launched in Leeds. The Apprenticeship Training Agency (ATA) is jointly owned by Leeds City Council and Leeds City College.

It aims to work with businesses to identify their skills needs and then advertise for and recruit appropriately talented and focused young people. The ATA, which is part of the Leeds Apprenticeship Hub developed on the back of the Leeds City Region’s City Deal, says it has worked closely with the city’s businesses and with the Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce to develop the model. Leeds City Council leader Coun Keith Wakefield said: “All the evidence shows that public spending on apprenticeships produces an excellent economic return – every £1 spent on apprenticeships delivers a £16-£21 return. As it is SMEs that will drive our local and regional economy forward, it makes sense for SMEs to reap the rewards of taking on talented, enthusiastic apprentices. The ATA will help make that a reality.”

>> Two mergers among professionals The Yorkshire professional sector has been stirred by two mergers in the last months of 2012 – both well trumpeted. Dickinson Dees, the North East-based law firm which first moved to Yorkshire to locate in York before moving to Leeds, has agreed to merge with law firm Bond Pearce to create a new practice called Bond Dickinson. The merger, which is due to take place in May 2013 – will see the creation of a £95m operation with over 1,200 staff in eight cities across the UK. Dickinson Dees managing partner Jonathan Blair will become managing partner of Bond Dickinson while Nick Page, chairman of Bond Pearce, will be chairman of the new firm. John Marshall of Dickinson Dees and Victor Tettmar of Bond Pearce will complete the senior management team. Blair said: “As we said when we announced our discussions, both firms had clearly articulated strategies. “Our merger is a major step in the delivery

>> Women get a sneak peek at shopping centre A networking organisation for women in property has pulled off a coup by getting its first major event outside London to include a tour of the inside of the soon-to-be-opened Trinity Leeds Shopping Centre. The CBRE Women’s Network were shown around the centre, due to open in 2013, by owner Land Securities. The centre is already 84% pre-let or in solicitors’ hands and will include Primark, Next, Top Shop and Marks & Spencer as anchor tenants as well as the first Everyman cinema in the north of England. CBRE senior surveyor Carla Fox said: “To secure a tour of the only major scheme in Western Europe to complete in 2013 prior to its completion was a real coup.”

BUSINESS QUARTER |WINTER 12

NEWS

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Middle East delight, interest heats up, sluggish social media uptake, innocent advice for restaurant, Hilton heads to York, curtains open on film school, and funding boost for food innovation West Yorkshire Trading Standards. She has recently run an education project involving more than 1,500 people to warn them about smoking and alcohol misuse – and successfully applied for Big Lottery funding to widen the project out to other West Yorkshire districts.

>> Buyer interest grows

Howard Moss with a container bound for Jordan

>> Jordan is latest chapter in astonishing story Bradford-based cleaning products supplier Astonish has notched up a 40th country to export to with Jordan becoming the latest country to take an order. The new destination was unveiled in the same week that the company experienced its biggest ever week for exports, with goods worth £200k leaving its custom-build factory. The company, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in 2013, prides itself on conducting all research, design and manufacture in the UK. It has also banned all animal testing both on finished goods and the materials used in its products. Initially selling an oven and cookware cleaning paste door-to-door and at trade shows, the company now employs 50 people and manufactures over 70 household, automotive and personal care products in Bradford, including the original Astonish Oven & Cookware Paste, now Britain’s best-selling household cleaning paste. Managing director Howard Moss said: “We are delighted that our market in the Middle East is growing rapidly. We now export to Israel, Lebanon, the UAE and Jordan in the region, with strong demand across all these countries for a broad range of our products.”

>> Park to be proud of Bradford’s City Park, the long-planned project that included flooding part of the city centre to create a lake, has won an award for outstanding contribution to local economic growth at this year’s Local Government Yorkshire and Humber Awards. Bradford council leader David Green said the award was justified. “There is no doubt that City Park has had a massive impact both in terms of enhancing the environment and in improving the well-being of the people who live and work in the city.

BUSINESS QUARTER | WINTER 12

“Hordes of visitors have been enthralled by this innovative and attractive public space, with its dancing fountains including the largest fountain in any UK city. The awards, which were held at Huddersfield’s John Smith’s Stadium, also saw former Bradford deputy mayor Val Slater voted top councillor in the region. Slater, stood down from her post in May this year after working with Lord Mayor Councillor Naveeda Ikram in a rare all female civic team. Bradford Council’s executive member for housing planning, and transport, is chair of

Enquiries from would-be house buyers rose again in the region in November, and have now risen by a total of 8% over the past two months, the latest RICS housing survey suggests. However, the amount of homes coming up for sale remained flat, and a net balance of 29% more chartered surveyors reported prices falling during the month. Nevertheless, the region’s chartered surveyors are optimistic that activity levels should hold firm. Some 4% more respondents are expecting sales to increase rather than decrease over the coming three months.

>> Bradford school gets another gong Bradford University School of Management has added to its growing collection of trophies, with a quality award from the US-based Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). As of April this year, only 57 business schools across the world had achieved the triple top standards from AACSB as well as EQUIS (European Quality Improvement System) and AMBA (the Association of MBAs). AACSB says that its accreditation differentiates a business school in terms of quality, rigour and relevance. It praised the school for the quality of its programmes and research; its international operations in Europe, the Middle East, India and Far East; and for its relationships with and support for alumni. School dean Dr Sarah Dixon said: “This American kitemark recognises the quality >>

NEWS

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of the school from our undergraduate to MBA programmes and our research to executive education. It is particularly important for worldwide student recruitment and assures them that we are world-leading in all aspects of our business education. The award comes just as the latest QS Global 200 report shows that international employers rank Bradford among the world’s top 200 business schools that they would consider recruiting from.

>> Molecule winners Paraytec, a University of York spin-off company whose technology uses ultraviolet light to identify molecules that are of interest to human health, is one of a group of organisations which has won part of £50,000 worth of aptamer selection services from York-based Aptamer Solutions. Aptamers can be used to replace antibodies in a wide variety of scientific research projects. Paraytec chief scientific officer David Goodall said the services the company has won “will enable us to more readily highlight and collect the molecules we need to analyse”. The competition results were unveiled at a networking event run by Science City York. Other winners included Badrilla and the University of Cranfield.

due to complaints. Despite this, the survey findings suggest security is not a key concern, with less than one in five Yorkshire businesses (19%) agreeing that passwords should be changed regularly. Martin Tyley, risk consulting director at KPMG in Yorkshire, said: “Businesses are usually quick to put measures in place protecting intellectual property and reputation. “It seems, however, that the cautious approach to social media that many of us would expect has, so far, failed to materialise in the workplace. “With the threat of data loss and litigation, as well as a duty of care obligation to manage information securely, Yorkshire businesses must take a more mature approach to managing their social media policy by providing more robust security measures, stronger usage guidelines and training.”

Rod Fisher

>> Print Leeds invests >> Region slow on social media uptake Yorkshire is well behind the national average when it comes to using social media commercially, a KPMG survey has found, with 20% of businesses in the region not yet active, compared to a national average of 14%. However, the region’s private sector is more open to use of social media by employees than the national average, with 80% compared to 74% comfortable with social media tools being accessed at work. Nearly one in four businesses in Yorkshire (39%) have experienced a social media-related security issue, from the leaking of information to malware attacks and reputational concerns

BUSINESS QUARTER | WINTER 12

Print Leeds has invested nearly £3m in a new B1 Heidelberg press and computer to plate (CTP) system, following its acquisition of S&C Labels in Huddersfield earlier this year. This move comes ahead of the centralisation of the printing company’s operations in Leeds where a building programme is increasing capacity from 10,000 sq ft to 19,000 sq ft. The new press will be in production for January 2013 and will double capacity because of its increased speed and reduced make-ready times. Managing director Rod Fisher said: “Aside from the persuasive quality improvements,

the new machine will also provide other cost reductions - it will double our production capacity, significantly reduce our power bills and cut make-ready times. All these make us a leaner, greener and more efficient company.” Print Leeds, which is 11 years old, has made two acquisitions in the last three years and is still on the acquisition trail. It currently has a turnover of about £5m and employs 40 staff.

>> Thai restaurant gets innocent advice Leeds-based Thai restaurant group Chaophraya was one of nine businesses to benefit from an exclusive masterclass with Innocent Drinks in October, aimed at giving them first-hand tips on how to boost their business growth. The company’s owners Martin Stead and Kim Kaewkraikhot opened their first restaurant in Leeds in 2004. They now have restaurants in Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow, and recently in Edinburgh. They have also created the ‘ChaoBaby’ brand which is designed specifically for shopping centres. There are currently ChaoBaby restaurants in the Trafford Centre and in the Meadowhall shopping centre. The Breakthrough masterclass event, organised by Santander, also provided attendees with practical advice on the use of marketing and social media, as well as the effective use of supply and sourcing strategies to boost sales and help accelerate growth. Breakthrough masterclasses are part of Santander’s Breakthrough programme, which is providing up to £200m of growth capital loans to fast-growth companies looking to invest in and grow their business. Chaophraya recently secured £2.4m of growth capital from Santander to continue its expansion plans. Chaophraya group operations manager Ian Leigh said: “The masterclass was a fantastic opportunity to learn directly from a highly successful entrepreneurial company about the strategies we can put in place as we expand our business.”

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>> New Hilton checks into York Hampton by Hilton has opened a 119-bedroom hotel in York city centre - the 12th hotel in the UK for the international hotel group. Avantis Hotels, which operates the Hampton by Hilton franchise in the UK, opened the ÂŁ10m hotel with funding from Lloyds TSB Commercial. The six storey hotel, located within the city walls, employs 14 people and is designed to meet the needs of business and leisure guests. The Lord Mayor of York, Coun Keith Hyman, arrived in a New York-style taxi to perform the official opening, which was attended by around 100 guests. With more than 1,900 properties globally, the Hampton brand is part of Hilton Worldwide.

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NEWS

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>> Hat-trick for York Handmade The York Handmade Brick Company has won three categories in the prestigious 2012 Brick Awards. The company, based at Alne near Easingwold in North Yorkshire, won the ‘Best Single House’ category, the ‘Best Craftsmanship’ category – specifically for the product it supplied to Tupgill Cellar near Middleham in North Yorkshire - and ‘Specialist Brickwork Contractor’ category – for its work at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. Judges said this was an “outstanding showcase for brick”. Chairman David Armitage said: “It is important to stress that our three winning entries were completely different jobs in design and execution, graphically illustrating our ability to work in a wide variety of colours and styles.”

>> Physio Med awarded Leeds-based physiotherapy provider Physio Med has earned a top industry accolade for its self management Physiotherapy Advice Line (PAL) service. The company, which has a physiotherapy network of more than 780 clinics throughout the UK, was presented with a Promoting Self Management excellence award at the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy (CSP) Service Excellence Awards for the service,

BUSINESS QUARTER | WINTER 12

which assesses patients with musculoskeletal conditions. It provides them with individually tailored, self-management plans to aid recovery and help them return to work more quickly. Clinical director Mark Fletcher said: “We have worked really hard to develop PAL over the past five years and are absolutely thrilled that the innovative nature of the service has been recognised as excellent by the industry and our governing body. The service is used by thousands of people a year, with 80-85% of customers reporting that employees referred to the service return back to work.” Dr Helena Johnson, chair of council at the CSP, said: “Getting staff well and back to work quickly saves employers money, which is crucial in the current economic climate. Physio Med’s innovative use of modern technology to encourage workers to manage their own health problems, like back pain, has been highly successful.”

>> Curtains open on new film school Bradford College and Asian film institute Whistling Woods International have formed a partnership to open a film school in the city, which was recently named UNESCO City of Film. From autumn 2013 students at the school, which will be based in Bradford College’s old building, will be able to study a BA (Hons) Film and BA (Hons) Animation. They will also have the opportunity to study at the Whistling Woods campus in Mumbai - rated among the 10 best film-schools in the world by the Hollywood Reporter - and experience the Indian film industry first hand. David Wilson, director of Bradford City of Film said: “Bradford has a fantastic film heritage and a fast growing young population. This is a great way to live up to our UNESCO title with a truly international partnership and help to develop the film makers of the future”. The move comes after a four-year affiliation between the two organisations. In 2009, students from both institutions created an award winning stop-motion animation, The Music of Life.

>> New office head gets feet under the table Online retailer Graphics Direct has recruited Kelly Dixon to head the firm’s new venture, GraphicsOffice.co.uk. Dixon, who joins from stationery supplier Jespers, will manage the new office supplies website that launched in November and will be based at the firm’s Tockwith head office and warehouse. “Kelly has over a decade of experience marketing office supplies to businesses, and we wanted GraphicsOffice.co.uk to be led by a specialist with strong knowledge of the sector, the product range and key suppliers,” said Chris Booth of graphicsdirect.co.uk. “We have built up a very loyal customer base in the graphics supplies sector, and many of them want to buy quality office supplies at the same time. We have expanded our range from 1,800 lines to over 22,000, and we are looking to attract brand new customers who don’t already know us through the Graphics Direct business,” he added.

>> Stakehouse appetised by new Leeds location Steakhouse chain Miller & Carter is to open its first Leeds city centre restaurant in the former Lacoste and Henri Lloyd units at The Light shopping centre. Following a major refit, the steakhouse, due to open in February 2013, will cover 1,034 sq ft and create dining for 128 covers. The business will create over 40 jobs. The chain has 27 branches nationwide and serves only Ashdale beef, specially reared in the West Country. Retail director Adrian Frid said: “Finding the right location for a Miller & Carter is one of the things that helps make our steakhouses so special. We already have some fantastic venues across the country, from the historic to modern, and each one has a unique feel and personality. “The Light provides us with a perfect venue for our first Miller & Carter in Leeds city centre, nestled amongst some wellestablished restaurants in an area well known for offering quality dining.”

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NEWS

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Barker started his apprenticeship, aged 14, at Oxendales, the forerunner of the Barkers department store of today. The new concept bistro adds to the existing store restaurant and café offering and occupies the prominent corner of the Barkers Arcade and High Street. James O’Dwyer, managing director of Just Desserts said: “Barkers’ pedigree is second to none in the north of England and beyond and we are proud to work with the 1882 Café & Bistro catering team to deliver delicious desserts for its discerning customers.”

The £1.4m Aston Martin One-77 being unveiled in the showroom by David Clapham (right), JCT600 brand director, specialist cars, and Mark Hill, Aston Martin brand manager, at JCT600 Brooklands

>> Driven by expensive tastes Over £2m of Aston Martins, including the One-77, the most expensive new car produced by the company worth over £1.4m, were on display in December at JCT600 Brooklands as part of an event hosted by the dealership and HSBC. More than 100 customers came to the event, which is believed to be the first time that an Aston Martin One-77 has been in the same showroom as a V12 Zagato and the new Vanquish. “To have one of just a handful of One-77s in the UK here in Leeds is fantastic. “Very few people will ever get a chance to see an example of the car first hand as the majority are likely to end up abroad or in a museum or private collection,” said David Clapham, JCT600 brand director for specialist cars.

>> Website for apprentices A dedicated website aimed at helping young people in Leeds find apprenticeship opportunities and supporting companies in the city to share best practice on apprenticeship training has been launched by Leeds and Partners, the new name for what was Marketing Leeds. The website, which is due to go live early in 2013, will include details of key projects that are currently underway in such companies and organisations as Asda, the Create Foundation, Marriott, Tunstall, PwC, Land Securities, Leeds Building Society, Addleshaw Goddard and the Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce mentoring service. “These may be tough times for the economy but that cannot be an excuse for neglecting the next generation of talent,” said Andy Clarke, Asda chief executive and chairman of the Leeds and Partners board.

“Leeds is able to move forward with confidence into 2013 because the city has such a fantastic pool of talent to choose from,” he added.

>> Sweet desserts Shipley based pudding manufacturer Just Desserts has won a contract to supply Barkers in Northallerton with a range of its traditionally handcrafted pastries and desserts for the department store’s 1882 Café and Bistro, which it opened recently. Products the company will be supplying include fresh fruit tarts, gateaux, chocolate truffle tortes, lemon meringues and tiramisu squares. The 1882 Café and Bistro is named after the year that farmer’s son founder William

ONLINE: For the latest breaking business news from Yorkshire and the wider UK visit BQ’s website www.bq-magazine.co.uk

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>> Property app gets Finance Yorkshire backing A young entrepreneur from Leeds who launched the first property search app on Facebook in the UK is building on strong foundations for his business thanks to a Finance Yorkshire Seedcorn Fund investment. Sohail Rashid launched Property Place in January 2012 and it is now the largest property network on Facebook. The 27-yearold can also lay claim to the fastest growing property website of 2012. Property Place integrates property search with social media, allowing listings to be matched to Facebook’s existing membership. The search and match tool allows users to connect with property listings that match their lifestyle and interests, helping them find a home close to friends, family, work, local schools, universities and favourite social hangouts. Sohail set up the company in April last year and, alongside the loan from Finance Yorkshire, also received a cash injection from a private investor and former group finance director for LSL Properties, Dean Fielding. The company has also been mentored by staff from Finance Yorkshire. Sohail said: “Property Place aims to improve how the property sector is marketed, adding some much needed change and innovation to what can be a traditionally quite stagnant and rigid structure. “Finance Yorkshire saw the opportunity for international expansion and we hope to move quite quickly into Europe and beyond and become a global industry leader.”

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Graham Davies, investment manager at Finance Yorkshire, which is backed to the tune of £75m by two EU funds, said: “The Seedcorn Fund aims to back innovative companies that have the potential to become ‘beacon companies’ for the region – and Property Place is a perfect example of that.”

>> Hair salon expands The owner of a York-based hair salon has managed to expand his business into a hair and beauty salon after being advised by accountancy practice Hunter Gee Holroyd. Grant Davison was initially advised by his bank to resubmit his proposal, when he wanted to expand the Grant Ashley salon on Poppleton Road.

Mark Grewer, head of corporate finance at Hunter Gee Holroyd, was able to produce a cash flow forecast and business plan for Davison, and answer any financial queries from the bank, which finally persuaded it to change its mind. Davison said: ‘‘It’s amazing to see my vision become a reality. The salon looks beautiful and will be the perfect home for our truly unique services.”

>> Carnegie helps heroes Carnegie Great Outdoors is to provide coaching for inclusive sport and adventure activities to enhance the recovery of injured and sick servicemen and women. The company, which is the official outdoor sports provider of Leeds Metropolitan University’s Well Met Conferencing arm, is to

NEWS

provide coaching and evaluation at the Battle Back Centre in Shropshire, which was opened in November by The Royal British Legion. The company was commissioned because of its expertise in the delivery of education and training courses using the outdoors and sport. In addition the University’s Institute of Leadership and Management Centre has accredited the programme to give those who take part an ILM Level Two award, recognising team member skills to support their future career prospects. Dave Bunting of Carnegie Great Outdoors and head of coaching and development for the Battle Back Centre, said: “Our university has been involved with the Battle Back Centre from day one. We have undertaken more than ten pilot courses, each one better and more refined than the last, based on our evaluation and on feedback from those taking part.”

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Expect More

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NEWS

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>> Garden centre goes down but trading continues A buyer is being sought for Whiteleys Garden Centre in Mirfield after it was put into administration. The business, which has been trading for over 25 years, currently employs 45 staff and, according to Julian Pitts, joint administrator from Begbies Traynor, suffered from financial pressures that are “not related to its day-to-day operations”. “We are continuing to trade the business and the garden centre will be running as usual while a buyer is sought,” he said, adding that there are no plans to make any redundancies.

>> Funding for food innovation Small food and drink companies across the Yorkshire and Humber region are set to benefit from funding and consultancy support for robotics and automation from InnovateBetter, a new project being run by Centre of Food Robotics and Automation (CenFRA). The two year project, which is supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), will see more than £1.4m being made available for the estimated 900 small food and drink businesses in the Yorkshire and Humber region under the Automation and Robotics Innovation Grants Scheme, which offers matched funding to help companies invest in business improvement projects. The InnovateBetter project will offer organisations specialist advice and guidance, with dedicated engineers and business consultants helping organisations innovate and automate. The aim of the scheme is to help small companies in the food and drink sector increase competitiveness, enhance production, drive growth and develop new market opportunities. InnovateBetter director Steve Cann said the project “comes at just the right time, as manufacturers are facing increasing production and commodity costs, along with ongoing pressure from the market to keep prices down”. He said: “We expect that this project will have

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a major impact in safeguarding and creating jobs, as well as adding to the efficiency and competitiveness of this region’s food and drink companies. As well as providing funding, we will also be supporting the transfer of knowledge and learning to improve business performance, by bringing like-minded networks and individuals together through a programme of events.” Gary Quinn, director of Bare Earth in Melmerby in North Yorkshire, which produces specialty meat snacks, has invested in automation and has already seen the benefits. He said: “Automating our packaging and other production processes means that we have been able to reduce costs and that has made us more competitive, so it is fantastic news that funding and support is now available for automation for SMEs.”

>> York gets super-connected York has become one of the latest cities to be awarded a share of £50m coming from central Government for the Super-Connected Cities Programme fund, a project aimed at boosting broadband coverage in key regional cities. The money awarded to York will cover a range of initiatives, including the development of a quality city centre wi-fi network, rolling wi-fi out along public transport corridors and across the 10 major business parks within the city, and a grant scheme that should provide 50% of the cost of broadband connection for businesses in outer York. Coun James Alexander, leader of City of York Council, said: “This is an endorsement from Government for our broadband and city centre wi-fi infrastructure work and will accelerate York’s aim to become the most digitally connected city in Europe by 2015”. Leeds and Bradford were awarded funding earlier in 2012.

>> Telecoms firm gets the 4g deal Leeds-based telecoms business the Weston Group was one of only a handful of

companies to be awarded the rights to sell the UK’s first 4G service, which launched in October. The company has become a direct business partner of EE, the parent company of Orange and T-Mobile, which launched the 4GEE and fibre broadband service. 4G typically has speeds five times faster than the current 3G, while the new fixed-line fibre service can give speeds on average ten times faster than today’s standard broadband. The company is offering a simple process for Orange and T-Mobile customers who have already purchased a 4G-ready handset to swap to 4G. When 4G is not available customers will automatically ‘jump’ across to the EE 3G network. It is expected that EE’s 4G and fibre broadband will be available to 98% of the country by the end of 2014. Weston Group general manager Gary Dale said: “We are proud to be helping to pioneer the rollout of 4G and fibre broadband in the UK which will see us deliver next-generation services backed by our award-winning customer service.”

>> Spawforths retains lead Yorkshire-based town planning and architectural practice Spawforths has retained its position as the largest single office planning practice in the entire North of England according to the annual planning consultancy survey carried out by Planning magazine. The company, which has experienced a 19% growth in turnover in the 2011/12 financial year, now has 14 chartered planners and has risen to become the 25th highest earning planning consultancy in the UK. Spawforths’ chairman and director of planning David Rollinson said: “Our position as a multi-disciplinary consultancy puts us at a great advantage in relation to the comprehensive services that we can offer clients and we believe it is because of this great in-house service that we can continue to grow and strengthen our position in the market.”

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AS I SEE IT

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AS I SEE IT

Don’t have a data disaster Even small businesses need to think about how they dispose of data, says Simon Brailsford Data theft and data loss, you say. Isn’t that something only large organisations and the public sector have to worry about? Well no, actually. Businesses ignore the storage and disposal of confidential information at their peril as the Government’s regulator steps up its scrutiny of private sector breaches in data laws. It is true that until recently the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) focused mainly on the public sector. But it is increasingly looking at data protection practices in the private sector. Small businesses, in particular, often fail to understand the business impact of failing to have secure systems in place to dispose of private data. This is a serious matter. If as a company you fall foul of the law, you risk your reputation and quite possibly your business as the ICO is ramping up its fines which can run into

If you fall foul of the law you risk your reputation and quite possibly your business as the ICO is ramping up its fines to as much as six figures

six figures for data law breaches. In addition businesses that have been successfully prosecuted and fined can be struck off tender lists, as well as lose customers through a diminished reputation. Yes, data destruction and IT asset disposal are heavily regulated and complex areas, but unfortunately pleading ignorance will not let your business off the hook. No matter who is responsible in the organisation for the operational aspect of data protection and destruction, the chief executive or managing director is ultimately accountable. That, if you are reading this, probably means you. This even applies if you get an external company to destroy data. In one recent high profile case a Scottish council was fined £250,000 after sensitive documents were found in supermarket waste bins. The Scottish ICO said the local authority had “taken their eye off the ball” when outsourcing and had not carried out sufficient checks on the provider. The process for disposing of redundant IT equipment and data can overlap a number of departments and functions, including IT, procurement and data governance. I find that mistakes often happen because just one person is given sole responsibility for the

entire issue, therefore leaving other areas of significance overlooked. Don’t let that happen in your business.

So what are the necessary steps you can take to ensure you are fully compliant? Simple: If you handle any sensitive or personally identifiable data then you must have provision to destroy it securely and be able to prove that you have done so when required. Check your internal processes and systems, making sure that you have robust protocols. Have someone senior in charge who can bring relevant departments together and who understands the consequences of poor security procedures. Run regular staff training for key people on information security procedures. If necessary bring in specialists to advise. Be particularly careful of how you classify data. “Aggregation” and “accumulation” of data – just the kind of thing you need to watch out for - often occurs at the disposal stage, where assets of all types are merged together. So it pays to consider the worst case scenario for every asset that you deal with. n

ONLINE: Read more news and views from Yorkshire business leaders. www.bq-magazine.co.uk

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ENTREPRENEUR

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Twentysix steps to success Leeds-based digital marketing agency Twentysix thrives on not having a hierarchy and being like the client, it’s boss tells Peter Baber On the outside, Royal Court on Sovereign Street in Leeds is a fairly ordinary converted mill office building. Even walking into the foyer, nothing particularly grabs you, except perhaps the artists’ impressions on the wall of nearby office schemes that have yet to come to fruition. But go up in the lift to the offices of digital marketing agency Twentysix, and once they let you in, you will feel almost as if you are in another world. For a start, a huge office buzzing with over 100 young and obviously enthusiastic people confronts you. Walls are decked with colourful posters of all the work the agency is currently

working on. And if you are lucky enough to be ushered into one of the range of meeting rooms the company has on its lower floor, you are in for an even greater surprise. Many of the meeting rooms are decked out in radically different styles. There’s a white room, all minimalist for those sniffy purists who like that kind of thing. There’s a green room, filled to the brim with houseplants and flowers to keep our eco-sensitive friends happy. Best of all is the room that has been decked out just like managing director Gail Dudleston’s mother’s front sitting room. It is, perhaps the first time I have conducted a business interview sitting on a brown velour sofa with a ragged fringe, with

one of those 1970s electric bar fires roaring away in the fireplace and what a friend of mine refers to as a “squashed cat carpet” to look at. It may sound like the kind of very trendy office interior that is typical in the digital sector and which you either find endearing or annoying. But this is a deadly serious operation at work here. Twentysix is the digital arm of a group of marketing agencies that come under the Media Square banner. Late in 2011 the parent company, which had been listed, took itself private. Like many companies, it struggled to pay off its debts – although all creditors at the time were repaid in the deal. >>

You have to have that idea in your head all the time. You also have to measure what you do and make sure you know what you want out of it

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ENTREPRENEUR

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ENTREPRENEUR Notwithstanding that, the Leeds part of the business is thriving. Every one of the meeting rooms, for example, is fitted out with video and audio conferencing facilities so that the agency can be connected not just with its clients all around the world, but with its staff who may be out there too. The agency already has representation in London and New York, and has just taken on an employee to sell its wares to the Asian market in Singapore. Yes, this is truly a global player: Dudleston says having your main development team in a UK regional centre like Leeds is not a problem. “It used to be an issue when we were smaller,” she says. “But it’s because of the way the agency has grown. Agencies used to be very Londoncentric in the 1980s and 1990s, but a digital business, by the nature of what it is, is remote, and you can be anywhere in the world. We have a great talent pool here, and our rate card can be less because of lower property costs and overheads. “Plus,” she adds, with a smile, “we have the northern approach to business, which is about getting things done right.” The agency has indeed grown. Dudleston, who had a career in direct marketing including working for Leeds-based JDA, came to manage the business in 2006 when she says it was just six people under a railway arch in Leeds. “We had a lap dancing club on one side, and a bar on the other,” she says. “It was just following dotcom boom and bust, when digital was just taking off, and we had some great clients. But it was quite badly run when I took over. I think I was the last ditch attempt to turn it round.” She claims she had been told it was a direct marketing agency when she took the job on, and it was only when she arrived that she realised it wasn’t that at all. For someone who had up until then only known the old ways of direct marketing – print mailing shots, flyers and so on – it has been a steep learning curve to switch to digital and to manage the growth of an agency as large as this, but she says she would never go back now. “Digital marketing is really direct marketing on steroids,” she says. “It is faster, more exciting, and gets results quicker. It is also more enabling: with technology you can do anything. I find it very

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I find it very difficult to believe that I used to work on direct marketing packs that used to take eight weeks to get out the door

difficult to believe that I used to work on direct marketing packs that used to take eight weeks to get out the door.” She says the change is partly reflected in the way we all lead our lives now. “Once you become steeped in digital, it’s the world you live in,” she says. “I do everything online now. I bought my car online, and I bought my horse online. Obviously I went to see it first, but I found it through a website.” The change has also been reflected in the way marketing now works. “It has taken a while for digital to be sat at that top table with other marketing disciplines,” she says.

“Over the years I have often seen digital being treated as a bit of an afterthought. But now it is definitely at the top table. One client we started working with three years ago had digital as a very small element of the marketing they did. It’s now 50% of their business.” But this word “digital” is of course banded around a fair bit, and people often have different interpretations of what it means. What, according to Dudleston is the “digital” marketing that Twentysix does? Taking a deep breath, she starts off. “The core of what we do is design and build our client’s main asset online, which is usually their website. “As part of that we will be looking at their user needs, at the requirements and behaviours of their target audience, and will then design a site for them based on brand guidelines.” A good example of a major project that the agency has done – one that she is allowed to talk about – is the website the agency designed for Gatwick Airport. “It was done in line with BAA’s sale of the airport,” she says, “and we had four months to put it together. We had to go live on a particular day, and as it happened we went live during the Icelandic ash cloud crisis, which was a bit of a challenge.” Other successes have included a website for game.co.uk. “This was voted by Webcredible as moving from the 18th to the second most usable ecommerce site in the UK,” she says. And there was Concrete4U, the world’s first ecommerce site for concrete. Putting together such a site was trickier than it sounds, because the issue with concrete is that if your customer over orders, he or she is effectively left with rock. So the website had to be able to respond to customer’s exact requirements. Twentysix has a five-stage methodology when it comes to building websites, which is: discover, define, design, build, and maintain. Dudleston says the most important part is probably the discovering. “Discover is about finding out what the objectives are, and finding out about the brand and the IT that is available,” she says. “We leave no stone unturned. We do wireframes, then do clickable wireframes, and only then does the plan then go through to creative, and >>

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ENTREPRENEUR

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ENTREPRENEUR

when that’s approved it goes to build. It is like building a house. You have got to get all your plans laid out to know what you are doing. She says a website that has been through a good digital agency like hers should come out looking like a newly repaired bucket. “A website is like a bucket with holes in, and our job is to plug those holes,” she says. “That can have a massive uplift in people’s business. If you are in ecommerce, and you are only converting 2% of your visitors and spending loads on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, our job is to get you to spend less on PPC but to fill the holes. That way we will be increasing your average order value, your revenue, and so on.” But she also admits that her agency is not one that just tries to foist a website on anyone. That is one of the reasons why Twentysix has moved into other digital areas as well. It launched a search division two and a half years ago, which is now 20 people strong. In 2010 it acquired a Huddersfield-based mobile development agency. And it now also employs six people in a social media team. “Our first question with a new client really is:

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‘Why do you need a website?’” she says. “If you are in ecommerce then obviously you do. But if you are a communication brand, your best destination could be a Facebook page.” She says clients are slowly getting the hang of the idea of social media. “Some don’t do it yet, so they just sit and watch, or they don’t know how to handle it. So we have a programme to bring new clients on board.” She believes a digital agency – in fact any marketing agency – can only really be effective if it has a policy that you “spend the client’s money like its your own”. It is an important consideration for a digital agency which, unlike more agencies in more established marketing fields, only has a tiny portion of retained income – everything else is commissions. “You have to have that idea in your head all the time,” she says. “You also have to measure what you do, and make sure you know what you want out of it. If you can’t measure it, you shouldn’t be doing it.” The hard reality of digital media, which, unlike traditional marketing, is instantly measurable, has clearly hit home. Dudleston says this is one of the reasons why

she much prefers a relationship where what you are doing is having dinner with the client, not waiting at the table. “You need to be more like a consultant, rather than sat there waiting for the client to breathe,” she says. “You really can’t be reactive. If you are you have missed the boat.” She says such an attitude is easy to foster because of the informal atmosphere she has fostered within Twentysix itself. Outside the meeting rooms, within the Leeds office there are no partitions at all. Dudleston herself sits in a corner, and if she is approached, she quips: “I say: ‘My name is Gail and I am happy to help.’” There are managers with teams, but she insists she has tried to iron out “hierarchy and false status”. As someone who worked as a manager in McDonald’s in an early part of her career, she says she has learned the importance of “getting stuck in”, and the hierarchy-free environment helps here. “We have a really quick ‘think it do it’ culture,” she says. “If we think about something at nine o’clock, we do it by ten. If it takes you six months to do it, what is the point?” But it is clear that one thing that really motivates her is nurturing talent in a younger than usual office and watching it grow – a tricky thing to do for a woman boss in an office that is 80% male. The company has always taken on two sandwich year students from the “M62 universities” every year – one in development and one in design – and many have come back to work for it at the end of their courses. “It is great to take on a graduate as a junior, and two years later he is flying off to Geneva to present some work,” she says. You kind of get the feeling, however, that there might be some more maternal instincts at play here as well. Back in 2006 when she took over a company of only six employees, Dudleston introduced the practice of buying pizzas for all the staff every payday. The company might have grown to 104 people now, but Pizza Friday, as she calls it, still continues. “We have 104 pizzas delivered every payday,” she says. There must be some pizza deliveryman who is doing seriously well out of that. n

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Two cheers for Holbeck It has come a long way, but has Holbeck – that bit of Leeds immediately south of the railway line and the River Aire – really regenerated itself fully? Peter Baber finds out

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When I first came to work in Leeds over a decade ago, the city felt it was very much taking a lead against other northern cities, particularly Manchester, in securing the first regional branch of Harvey Nichols. The company I came to work for could also be said to be taking a lead. Ananova, a web company set up by the Press Association and subsequently sold to Orange for an impressive sum, had launched the world’s first avatar newsreader, also called Ananova, and known for her green punk-style hair. The company had also made something of a departure in where it chose to locate. Not in the professional centre of the city, not even in the Calls, then still buzzing in the afterglow of Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman’s failed private club Teatro. No, not in either of those places, but in Holbeck. In Marshall’s Mill, in fact, a large imposing former warehouse first named after Victorian industrialist John Marshall, who also built the famous Egyptian inspired Temple Mill next door. It was, it now turns out, Orange’s presence in the building that first tempted another innovative company – property company Igloo Developments, which is famous for its regeneration projects right around the country – to invest in Marshall’s Mill when it came up for sale. “Orange was the main reason we thought it was worth coming into Marshalls Mill in the first place,” Igloo chief executive Chris Brown said this year, “as it made us feel that if people like that felt comfortable moving here, it was worth investing in.” Even still, it was a bold choice to invest in Holbeck then. The area might have been only a short walk from the railway station, and it might include some of the city’s most historically interesting buildings, including what purports to be the world’s very first industrial-scale steel forge, but back at the start of this century Holbeck had a very seedy reputation. Orange employed the services of a minibus to take any female workers to the station if they were leaving after dark, such was the area’s reputation. Even an AA man who came to fix my car when it had broken down in Marshall’s Mill’s car park was propositioned by a lady of the night. And you never wanted to go too far

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SUCCESS STORY

Orange made us feel that if people like that felt comfortable moving here, it was worth investing in

into the many derelict sites and open grassland in the area, for fear of what you might come across. The area, of course, has changed quite considerably for the better since then – for one thing the ladies of the night are all gone. But is Holbeck really set to be Leeds’s thriving new creative suburb, perhaps Leeds’s answer to somewhere like Shoreditch in London, as so many people claim? Ten year’s after Igloo first invested in Marshalls Mill, as the company held a morning seminar to celebrate the anniversary, it was perhaps a fitting time to find out. Within Marshalls Mill itself, there has clearly been change. Orange, having scaled down operations and Ananova (the green haired lady has gone to avatar heaven) moved out to Clarence Dock in 2010. Its absence has not been too keenly felt, however, as other creative and digital businesses, including TV

production company True North Productions and market analytics company Flashtalking have moved in. But what about the surrounding area? Although it wasn’t strictly aimed at the creative industries, by far the most prominent addition on the horizon – although not everyone’s cup of tea - is Bridgewater Place, now the tallest building in Yorkshire. When it opened in 2007 it quickly became the Leeds headquarters of Ernst & Young and Eversheds. And when Jemella Group, the company behind what is perhaps Yorkshire’s most recent consumer manufacturing success story, GHD, moved into a space age new head office on the ground floor, it seemed to signal that Leeds business was indeed moving south. Perhaps more relevant for the creative industries was the development further into Holbeck proper of the Round Foundry (the site of the famous steel forge) into a mixed use

development that includes the Round Foundry Media Centre, a home for digital start-ups that, having been initially funded by Yorkshire Forward, is now under the wing of the Homes and Communities Agency. Under proposals first put together through Yorkshire Forward’s Holbeck Urban Village scheme, there are still plans afoot to develop Tower Works, the site that includes two carbon copies of Italian Renaissance towers (they were nothing if not bold and imaginative, these Victorians). And Igloo’s residential arm has now completed the Granary Wharf development of flats on the part of Holbeck that nestles up against Leeds station. But an area, of course, is much more than just buildings. What immediately grabs most people’s attention is the new cafes, restaurants and bars that have sprung up in the area. Holbeck is beginning to become a destination in its own right, rather than somewhere people hurry by on the way to somewhere seemingly more attractive. Even Jamie Oliver has given his blessing to the Midnight Bell, one of the pubs that has sprung up along Water Lane. (It features in his TV series and book, Jamie’s Great Britain.) It is no doubt this sense of conviviality that has most recently attracted marketing >>

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SUCCESS STORY

agency Elmwood to relocate to the Round Foundry. The agency, one of the most high profile in the Yorkshire region, had for the past two decades been nestling in the leafy suburb of Guiseley, although it had been looking for a new office for five of those years. Chairman Jonathan Sands said the agency felt it was important to move further into the city centre both to make it more convenient for clients and to attract new talent which might not feel at home in the suburbs. But it wanted to make sure it found a place that had the right culture. He believes he has in Holbeck. “The area is an exciting place where many of the city’s most interesting companies

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work cheek by jowl,” he said. “We have put our own particular stamp on our new, modern, flexible space, located in the heart of fantastic, historic mill buildings which are full of character. Our office culture is very open and personable and this area was a natural fit, humming with an energy and vibe which extends beyond the building’s walls. It seems like quite a bit of business is done in the fantastic bars and cafes here, which suits us down to the ground.” And yet, none other than Chris Brown himself, the chief executive of Igloo, has some concerns about the pace of change. “This was always a ten-year vision,” he told BQ, “and we

always know that regulations take a long time so it is inevitable that we would go through a recession while we were developing Holbeck. But we did think public sector support for Holbeck, particularly from the council, would have been stronger. Fortunately we now have Tom Riordan [Leeds City Council chief executive] in place, and things are starting to get going.” His most niggling criticism is what he sees as relatively quick wins that were missed that could have made such a difference to the pace of change. For example, four years ago a bridge was built across the River Aire connecting the south side of the river to the Whitehall Road area. But no bridge has yet been built across the Leeds & Liverpool Canal, which would have then made the connection to Holbeck complete. As a result, a walk from the Whitehall Road area to Holbeck still takes around 20 minutes when it could take five. “It is little things like that that might save us from having to swim over the canal,” Brown joked. Even more of a niggle is the long saga of giving the station a southern entrance – something that has been talked about for well over a decade now. Holbeck may be near the station, but for the moment anyone wanting to walk to it has to walk right around and through Neville Street underpass to gain access to a station entrance, even though most of that walk is along the outside edge of the platform. If it’s late at night, you have to walk even further. Tom Riordan, who was also at the Marshalls Mill meeting, said he believes the southern entrance may now be just two or three years away. “We have transformed our relationship with Network Rail from the point where we were slugging it out in a tennis match to where we are playing doubles with them,” he said. But Brown clearly isn’t too enamoured with Network Rail at all. Looking out of the window at Marshalls Mill, you can see a railway viaduct that sets off from the station virtually down to the Leeds United Football Ground at Elland Road. Almost all of the arches underneath the structure, which belongs to Network Rail, are currently vacant – and Brown thinks that is a scandal. He thinks the arches could be providing valuable space for start-up

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businesses, while the viaduct could be turned into a walkway, similar to the High Line in New York or the Promenade Planteé in Paris, both of which are former public transport lines that have been turned into “greenways”. “Just think of the contribution that viaduct could be making to this place,” he told the meeting. “Lots of the sites that should be developed here are owned by parts of government.” He is equally disheartened that, ten years into the remaking of Holbeck, so many private sites also remain derelict wasteland. “I don’t understand why landowners think it is acceptable to leave sites in the way some of them have in Holbeck,” he said. He believes that many of these sites were bought up by private speculators at the height of the property boom, and they have now turned them into car parks. These car parks, however, do serve a function in providing relatively cheap all-day parking to the companies that choose to locate here. Both Dan Freeman from Flashtalking and Carol McKenzie from True North Productions mentioned ample parking as something that attracted them to the area. Brown, who is relatively rare within the

SUCCESS STORY

property industry in not having his own car at all, is unimpressed. “I don’t think parking is crucial. I sometimes wonder if these site owners are waiting for things to deteriorate so badly that the council will let them do anything,” he said. In response, Riordan pointed out that it was always more tricky to progress with such plans in a recession, particularly when the council had had to stomach cuts of £45m and 3,000 redundancies in two years. He also admitted that as a newcomer – he only took on his current role in 2008 – he was often being urged to make his own mark, and “sometimes the hardest thing to do is to take on things that are half way through”, like Holbeck’s regeneration. Nevertheless, he said: “If you think about where the city has grown, there is only one answer to future growth, and that is from the railway line south of the city. This area is the future of Leeds, because despite us being in the worst economic climate that any of us have experienced, investment here is happening.” He puts particularly strong faith in the network of pipes and network cables that criss-cross the area beneath street level, and have done so since well before Freeserve,

the country’s first ISP, was founded in the area. Data company AQL was one of the company’s taking advantage of this network to improve connectivity across the city, he said, both in an existing data centre in Salem Church and in a proposed new centre on the former Yorkshire Chemicals site. Leeds City Council has now approved the latter proposal. Such an idea clearly has support. Freeserve founder Ajaz Ahmed, who also spoke at the meeting, said Leeds could parry with the best cities in the world when it came to digital technology. He said he was sick of hearing other regions in the country describe themselves as “silicon whatever”. “Just because you call yourself that, it doesn’t mean that you are,” he said. “In Holbeck we don’t call ourselves silicon anything, but we still have a large number of technology companies here.” Brown agreed, and like, Ahmed, said the main thing to do was to make more of a song and dance about such progress. “The Government thinks technology is something sexy that happens around Silicon Roundabout in London,” he said. “We need to show them that it can happen in Leeds.” n

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COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

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An enlightening offer, Elmwood on the move, Frederick splashes out on new site, triple expansion at media centre, Verity House up for grabs, and new owners cheer pub conversion >> Share in the light Kames Capital, the owner of The Light, one of Leeds’ newest shopping centres, is offering a 50% share of the freehold of the asset for a price of around £52.025m, as a means of helping to diversify its existing property portfolio. Such a price reflects a net initial yield of 6.5%, with a gross total income equivalent to £7.32m per annum. The 220,000 sq ft scheme was developed in 2000/01 behind a listed façade and includes leisure, hotel and retail units. Anchor tenants include a 14 screen Vue cinema, the only multiplex cinema in the city centre, a 147 bed Radisson SAS hotel, a Virgin Active gym with a 20m swimming pool and spa facilities, and a 420 space multi-storey car park operated by Q Park NV. There are currently 41 tenancies within the scheme, which includes restaurant occupiers such as Prezzo, Zizzi and Nando’s as well as retail operators such as Superdry and O’Neill. The centre sits opposite the prime retail pitch of Briggate, The Core and Victoria Quarter, and footfall currently stands at 6.1million per annum. It is soon to benefit from the opening of the Leeds Arena, a 13,000 seat venue within walking distance of the scheme, which will host 140 events per annum. Andrew McGregor from Knight Frank, which has been appointed to market the scheme, said: “The Light is one of the top five schemes in the UK. Leeds is thriving and, whilst I believe the asset will appeal to UK institutions, it will also have a broader international appeal. “There have been some high profile leisure sales in 2012, including The Gate, Cornerhouse and Printworks Manchester. There is a feeling that values have improved due to strong occupational demand, the prospect of open market rental growth, as well as index-linked rental uplifts. Compared to certain retail sectors, especially poorer bulky schemes, the better leisure parks and schemes are now similarly priced and almost certainly offer better income security.”

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>> Travel firm moves into new-look West One CBRE has already completed its first deal on West One at 100 Wellington Street, after being appointed joint agents on the scheme, which now forms part of the wider West One Estate, with DTZ. TD Travel has taken a lease on 1,600 sq ft in the property, while CBRE has claimed that another letting is immiment. CBRE’s appointment follows the recent acquisition of the property by Bruntwood, where CBRE represented the vendor, Aberdeen. Bruntwood has completed a comprehensive Grade A refurbishment of the office space including a brand new contemporary reception. West One now provides 32,000 sq ft of additional prime office accommodation offering suites from 500 sq ft. CBRE senior surveyor Alex Hailey said: “The refurbishment and development of West One is a really exciting prospect for the Leeds city centre office market. There is currently a real lack of top quality Grade A accommodation for smaller suites and we are confident that West One will successfully fill this void. The early letting to TD Travel and advanced interest demonstrates the appeal of the accommodation.”

>> Elmwood moves down river to Water Lane Global brand design consultancy Elmwood has moved its 60-strong Leeds team to a new headquarters on Water Lane, following a five-year search to find city centre office space. This is the first move in more than two decades for the Leeds company, relocating from its previous space in Guiseley to a 9,473 foot space in Igloo’s Round Foundry estate. Chairman Jonathan Sands said: “This is our fifth consecutive year of organic growth in

which we’ve doubled our revenue and grown overseas by 500%, so it was the ideal time to put down new roots to accommodate our ever-expanding team. “The right environment is important to our company culture. A move to the city centre is more convenient for clients and will help us to attract the best emerging talent in the industry to come and work for us.” Elmwood, which recently added an office in Hong Kong to its network of London, Melbourne, New York and Singapore, has now

ONLINE: More commercial property stories are available on BQ’s website www.bq-magazine.co.uk

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signed a 10-year lease for its new Leeds office in a deal agreed by commercial agents Carter Towler on behalf of Igloo, with Gerald Eve acting for Elmwood. The new open-plan office space makes a feature of the historic elements of the building, with exposed brickwork and towering structural beams, and has a number of meeting rooms and hot desk facilities. The office also offers a range of break-out spaces with giant, brightly coloured sofas and a quirky turfed area complete with picnic bench. The new reception area will host bi-monthly art exhibitions which are specially curated by Leeds Art Gallery. Igloo director Paul Simmons said: “Elmwood is a great example of a home-grown enterprise which has gone on to become one of the leading companies in its field internationally. Being able to attract companies at different stages of maturity into our spaces makes for an interesting mix.”

>> Knight Frank takes on Park Place Knight Frank has been appointed as the marketing agent for 33 Park Place, a flagship office building in central Leeds. Owned by Aviva investors, the site covers 41,555 sq ft of quality Grade A office space, with 16,000 sq ft immediately available to lease at £18.75 per sq ft in suites of 1,500 sq ft upwards. Knight Frank is joint agent with Jones Lang LaSalle. Current occupiers include Stephen George & Partners, The Passport Office, the TUC, Turley Associates, RG Group and Allsop. Knight Frank partner Elizabeth Ridler said: “The building provides Grade A comfort cooled offices, which have been finished to a high standard to capitalise on the everreducing levels of quality stock in the prime core of the city. “Benefitting from a welcoming and impressive manned reception area, together with on-site parking, the building offers flexible and easily divisible floorplates. This enables us to target a wide occupier market, which will benefit from the property’s prime location.”

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

L to R: Andrew Gent and Ben Crowther

>> Frederick snaps up Brighouse site Industrial manufacturer Frederick Crowther & Sons has bought the freehold interest on a 50,125 sq ft unit at Locksley Road in Brighouse from Threadneedle Pensions in a deal arranged by Gent Visick. The family-owned company, which has an additional site in Scotland, supplies conveyors and filtration equipment to the machine tool industry which are used in a wide range of engineering sectors. It will be relocating its Yorkshire operations to the new factory from its existing site off Queens Road in Halifax. Managing director Ben Crowther said: “The relocation of our business to the new factory is exciting and will give our company the opportunity to grow and develop our products with existing and new customers. Times are challenging and as a business it is paramount that we invest within the company, whether that’s in new premises, machines or people.” Andrew Gent from Gent Visick said: “The sale continues a recent trend of take up of vacant accommodation by companies from within the manufacturing sector which is seen as a positive indicator for the resurgence of the manufacturing sector over the service sector.”

>> Three pronged expansion in media centre Three companies based at the Round Foundry Media Centre in Leeds have

expanded into larger office space following a period of sustained growth. Digital Minds, a specialist digital recruitment agency which formed in 2009, has doubled its office space in just two years and recently taken over a 500 sq ft office. It is the company’s second expansion in the centre since relocating from West One, Wellington Street in 2010. The business, which also has an office in London to service the 60% of its clients which are based in the capital, now plans to double its team by the end of 2013. Meanwhile technology company Publish Interactive, which provides digital publishing software for market research publishers, has taken on five new members of staff this year and knocked through into a third office space in the Media Centre to accommodate its growth. The business moved into the Media Centre in 2009, and has since quadrupled its staff, won a host of industry accolades and a raft of international clients, and increased revenue by 499%. Finally behavioural research consultancy SimpleUsability, which moved to the Media Centre in 2007, has doubled its office space in just five years, and is now occupying a 1,714 sq ft unit. It has grown its staff from two to 14 in the same period, following a number of new business wins. The company invested £100,000 in its facilities earlier this year which added a new office, a new observation room and a second laboratory, trebling the company’s capacity for fresh projects. Current clients include Asda, Jet2, and clothing brand Republic. Tim Dodkin, development manager with the Leeds City Region and North Yorkshire team at the Homes and Communities Agency, lease-holders of the Round Foundry Media Centre, said: “The Media Centre has fulfilled our ambition to become a nucleus for new and burgeoning creative companies, many of which are seeing tangible results in terms of physical expansion into new office space and creation of jobs. These are just three examples of the many start-up companies that are on a growth trajectory in the centre and whose expansion we can facilitate seamlessly, allowing them to continue to focus on driving their business forward.”

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>> Verity House on the market CBRE has been instructed to let 12,069 sq ft of grade A office space within Verity House, on Canal Wharf, on behalf of The Pensions Trust. Located in a waterside setting next to the Leeds/Liverpool Canal, the three storey high office building has suites from 4,842 sq ft upwards. The building forms part of a courtyard development and is within close walking distance of Leeds Train Station. The landlord plans to undertake a comprehensive refurbishment of the vacant suites, common areas and facilities to provide grade A accommodation with comfort cooling and raised floors. CBRE senior surveyor Alex Hailey said: “Verity House is an extremely attractive offering to anyone in the market for high quality office accommodation in the city centre with associated car parking. Verity House also benefits from being close to the amenities of Granary Wharf, Bridgewater Place and the Round Foundry, making it a fantastic opportunity for a wide range of tenants.” BNP Paribas has been appointed joint agent on the scheme.

>> Data centre aims to put Leeds in the fast lane Leeds City Council has approved plans for the construction of a £43m data centre by telecoms firm AQL on part of the former Yorkshire Chemicals land in Hunslet. AQL has been working with Leeds and Partners to drive forward the region’s digital strategy and the new centre - the UK’s largest independent data centre outside London - could attract more major players in the industry to join Operator AQL is already working with Cogent, SSE Telecom, Level (3), Janet and Fujitsu. Current projects the company is working on include a 100 gigabit connection to health operator EMIS. The facility has been designed in collaboration with local architects, Garnett Netherwood, to sit within a larger scheme by Yorkshire Design Group where the data centre will share not only connectivity, but also heat

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with surrounding businesses and residences. The centre comprises two six storey buildings totalling 120,000 square feet of space, and will be connected to AQL’s existing city sites (DC1, 2 and 3) by a private fibre loop. The facility, known as DC4, will allow local companies to rent secure IT storage space that minimises the chance of disruption to their business and will be used to house computer systems and associated components such as telecommunications and storage systems. AQL chief executive Dr Adam Beaumont said that until the last couple of years, internet service providers have had to direct Leeds internet traffic via London. But he said thanks to AQL’s development Leeds can now become a city that is independent of technical problems in the capital, creating a base that would keep traffic local, faster and more reliable. “AQL’s existing city centre DC2 facility is the

home of IXLeeds - the only mutual not-forprofit internet exchange outside of London,” he said. “This exchange, formed two years ago, provides a hub which allows regional operators to exchange traffic via optimum routes. This not only allows faster access speeds, but also increases the quality of the connectivity, which is important for services such as video conferencing and webinars – an important part of e-learning. We’re on track to fill our existing sites by mid-2013, so the new DC4 site will allow expansion room to support the data growth from the IT, media and mobile sectors – including the huge demands which 4G mobile will place on the regions infrastructure.” Lurene Joseph, chief executive of Leeds and Partners, said: “The data centre anchors the region’s digital sector, sending the strong message to national and international investors that they can have confidence in our infrastructure.”

>> CBRE focuses its gaze on three sites CBRE in Leeds has been appointed by the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) to bring three major development opportunities in Dinnington, Featherstone and Grimethorpe to market. The three sites from across West and South Yorkshire include an extensive 43 acre site on Todwick Road in Dinnington, a 1.65 acre plot on the established Green Lane Industrial Estate in Featherstone, and a 2 acre plot at Park Springs in Grimethorpe, north east of Barnsley in the Dearne Valley. CBRE associate director Dave Cato said: “The HCA sites all provide significant development opportunities for interested parties, a fact evidenced in the early interest in all three sites.” He also highlighted the site’s transport links and its required planning for various industry uses.

>> Yorkshire House in £3m refurbishment Yorkshire House, an 80,000 sq ft Grade A office building in the centre of Leeds, has just been through a £3m refurbishment

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organised by its owner Apia Regional Office Fund and asset-manager Warner Estate. Office suites in the building, which lies between Greek Street and East Parade, are available from 1,500 sq ft to 18,000 sq ft with rents from £21 per sq ft. One suite on the fifth floor features a terrace with panoramic views across the Leeds skyline. The building’s main tenant is law firm Lupton Fawcett Lee and Priestley. David Bowden, property partner with Lupton Fawcett, said: “We now find ourselves in office accommodation which fully provides the exceptional offices which we, as a 21st century law firm, would wish to provide for our clients and staff. The journey has taken us from accommodation which, in some areas, would have fitted in well with a 1950s public school to the fully-refurbished and elegant Yorkshire House. With the newly-decorated stairwells and stunning re-configured entrances to the building on both East Parade and Greek Street giving a whole new aspect to the building and the impression it gives to visitors.” Mark Nicholson, of Dove Haigh Phillips, who are joint marketing agents with DTZ, said: “An exceptional number of amenities are available in the immediate vicinity and include Carluccio’s, Jamie’s Italian, Pret, Restaurant Bar & Grill, Piccolino, San Carlo and the Gaucho Steak House Restaurant. The building is located close to Leeds Rail Station and within an easy walk of the city’s retail amenities. On-site car parking is a real bonus.” Eamon Fox of DTZ said: “The combination of iconic Yorkshire Stone and granite define the entrance, ensuring this spectacular building makes a confident design statement.” A spacious entrance foyer features two highspeed passenger lifts, which lead to all levels. The fully air-conditioned floor plates have been carefully designed to ensure occupiers benefit from a highly efficient and flexible workspace.

>> Bramley pub set for new conversion Resilienti, a Peterborough-based developer, has bought the Gamecock public house in Bramley in Leeds for £350,000 from Punch Taverns in a deal

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

brokered by CBRE. The pub, which had already closed down, will be converted into a retail scheme. Resilienti development Director Kerrie Whiteley said: “We have agreed lease terms with Heron Foods, Greggs and Subway and the development will be completed in 2013.” CBRE’s Sam Frankland said: “This sale illustrates our specialist team’s ability to unlock value in our clients’ property portfolios and also to use the CBRE network to introduce buyers outside of the region to stimulate development and growth.”

>> Kerfoot expands in Goole Ilkley-based property and investment company Opus North has sold 60,000 sq ft of warehousing on the outskirts of Goole to the Kerfoot Group for over £1m. The Kerfoot Group of Northallerton, which manufactures and supplies edible oils, already owns 30,000sq ft at the Opus 36 industrial park. It has bought two adjacent warehouse units of 30,000 sq ft each. Opus North has spent £1.6m on the complete refurbishment of Opus 36, the former Fletcher Transport site. The site is adjacent to Junction 36 of the M62 and comprises six single-storey units, ranging from 7,000 sq ft to 30,000 sq ft, and two offices. There are still two warehouse units, comprising 25,000 sq ft, in addition to 7,000 sq ft of office space, available to buy or lease. Opus North managing director Andrew Duncan said: “This second significant deal with the Kerfoot Group proves that Opus 36 is an extremely attractive business park. “We believe that the remaining two refurbished warehouse units, underpinned by the park’s excellent location, will prove very popular. The units have extensive yards and parking and are fully serviced and secure. They are available in a combination of sizes.” Ben Medhurst, of property agents PPH in Hull, who brokered the deal, said: “Opus 36 is superbly located, with easy access to Yorkshire’s motorway network, to Lincolnshire and to the increasingly successful and popular East Coast ports. It provides an excellent opportunity for local, regional and national occupiers to

purchase or lease buildings on flexible terms ranging from 7,000 sq ft to 25,000 sq ft which are being substantially refurbished”.

>> DTZ takes on Parkside DTZ has been appointed to market the Parkside Industrial Estate in Leeds. Owned by CBRE Global Investors, Parkside Industrial Estate provides approximately 75,000 sq ft of high quality warehouse and industrial units ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 sq ft. The scheme is just over a mile from Junction 5 of the M621 motorway and approximately three miles to the south of Leeds city centre. DTZ said: “The estate provides quality accommodation in a well known commercial area of Leeds and is likely to attract good levels of interest.” Gent Visick is joint agent on the scheme.

>> Retailer sees value at Dearne Mills Food retailer Frozen Value has expanded its operations on Dearne Mills in Darton near Barnsley by taking out a 65,036 sq ft unit next to its current home. The new site is set to create around 20 new jobs during the coming 12 months and will assist the continuing expansion of the company which has just celebrated its 100th store opening. At the same time, Kingspan Renewables has relocated from within the site to sign a new lease on a 63,316 sq ft unit. Both deals were advised by CBRE and GVA who were acting on behalf of F&C REIT Asset Management. Dearne Mills is a 321,511 sq ft, five-bay industrial warehouse scheme which is located between junctions 37 and 38 of the M1 Motorway. Following the recent lettings, three units remain available for immediate occupation totaling 193,159 sq ft. Toby Vernon, senior director at CBRE said: “It is always testament to the strength of a scheme’s offering and positioning when an existing tenant chooses to expand within their current location.”

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ENTREPRENEUR

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There is absolutely no fallout from being British and we trade very hard on that

Twice bitten, never shy Howard Gould returned to take over ISIS-Ex, a company he had been involved in setting up, some years after he moved onto other things. He explains to Peter Baber why it was worth it The Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was seen by many at the time as a disaster for British business’s reputation in the area. A large British multinational, BP, had entered the region to compete against other US-owned companies. And its safety standards had been found wanting, resulting not just in the deaths of 11 employees on the oil rig itself, but also in the damage to the economy and environment of vast swathes of the Gulf of Mexico coast. It may have been a disaster for BP, particularly after its then chief executive, Tony Hayward, ill advisedly told a reporter coming to view the damage that all he wanted was “my life back”. In an initial settlement in November 2012 BP agreed to pay US$4.5bn in fines, but

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it still has to agree payments to thousands of people affected by the spill. But there is one company from the Yorkshire region at least that is still doing very well with the oil barons in Houston, thank you very much. ISIS-Ex makes computers that are certified safe to use in a possibly explosive atmosphere, a sub-category of hardware known in the trade as ‘Ex’. The oil business is the company’s most obvious client – although it initially started out selling many to the pharmaceutical sector. These are sophisticated products. A fully loaded ISIS-Ex computer costs about the same as a small car. People think we just get Dells in here and modify them,” says managing director >>

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ENTREPRENEUR Howard Gould. They certainly don’t do that. The product itself is cased in solid aluminium, which the company machines out to make space for the technology. There are many technological challenges that have to be met as well. Given the varied parts of the world oil platforms are located in, for example, ISIS-Ex computers have to be able to function in anything from -60°C to +40°C. “We have to put heaters in them,” says Gould. “There we are, putting together something that won’t cause an explosion, and we do that by essentially making sure its surface temperature doesn’t rise above a certain level, and yet we put heaters in them. It’s very exciting.” There is also the question of how to respond to the current demand from customers – forged, says Gould, by the popularity of the iPhone – for all computers to be touchscreen. Not easy when they are stationed outdoors. “How do you differentiate between a raindrop and finger press?” says Gould. He and ISIS-Ex must know the answer, however, because in the three years since Gould took over, the company’s growth has been exemplary. Since 2009, headcount at the company has gone up from 15 to 35, turnover is now at £4.2m when it was below the million mark, the company has taken on an office in Houston, and it has also just employed another business development manager for the Europe and Middle East region. Not bad for an operation that is headquartered in sleepy Malton. Gould says the focus on Texas is not surprising. Even today, he says, there are more oil platforms located within the mainland USA than there are in the rest of the world put together – and every one of them is a potential customer. “There are between 2,500 to 3,000 active platforms in America,” he says, “and they all need products. Flying across West Texas, all you can see are nodding donkeys.” And despite the Deepwater Horizon affair, there is still a marketing advantage in being British. “There is absolutely no fallout from being British,” he says. “We trade very hard on that. We are the only British manufacturer of this type of product, and our customers like that.” Yet what is remarkable about the company

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We are the only British manufacturer of this type of product and our customers like that

and Gould’s achievement with it, is the long history it has had. Gould was in fact, involved in managing the company in its very early days, but that was two decades ago. Since then the company has been through several owners, two different locations, and even came very close to being closed down. It is, if anything, a real survivor. The company started out in the early 1990s as a subsidiary of Bradford-based Beacon Controls, itself set up by an ex-Courtaulds employee to make time temperature devices for the textiles industry. Courtaulds had approached Beacon Controls to see if it could design a product that would be safe to use in an explosive atmosphere, and ISIS Products as it was then called was born. (The word ISIS includes the ‘IS’ acronym widely understood within the sector to mean “intrinsic safety”.) Gould, who had over 20 years in IT and telecommunications behind him including a stint working for BT, was taken on to run the subsidiary, although he also soon had a seat on the main board. By the end of the 1990s, however, Beacon’s original owner had sold up, and the new Swiss owners, realising that textiles were, in Gould’s words, “moving east”, decided to sell a business they no longer viewed as core. As part of the sale, ISIS-Ex went to Technor, based in Stavanger, Norway. That was where Gould and the company initially parted company. He opted to stay with Beacon Controls under its new Belgian owners, who had not been interested in the computer business, even if it was in the same building as Beacon. Gould claims that it was under the Norwegian owners that ISIS first began to market to oil and gas companies. Even still, they managed the company very much at arm’s length, and effectively allowed it to drift. Eventually, Technor put together a plan to close it down. “The only problem was that some of the customers the main business had were big names to whom they had sold from other parts of the group, including ISIS,” he says. “So, realising that it would have been very embarrassing if they couldn’t honour their obligations, they asked the guy who was running ISIS if he would look after warranties for them.” >>

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ENTREPRENEUR

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ENTREPRENEUR That, it turns out, was how the business ended up in Malton. “He said he would,” Gould continues, “but only from his home. He had a farm near here, and he converted a barn to carry out the warranty business.” Then the story gets even more bizarre. “The guys in Norway more or less forgot that they had decided to shut the main business down,” says Gould, “and they carried on selling ISIS products in America.” One company liked the product so much they ordered 50 at once, and suddenly the business was reborn. “There it was, taking its last gasps of breath, and all of a sudden it was resuscitated as a result of this one order,” says Gould. Even still the new start wasn’t exactly promising, and in 2007 Technor approached Gould again to see if he might be interested in coming in to turn it around. It wasn’t just because of his past history with the business that they chose him. In the intervening period Gould, having left Beacon in 2001 when the Bradford operation was merged with one in Blackburn, had set up his own interim management consultancy, called Tandim (or Turnaround ad Investment Management). Managing turnarounds, he says, is something he particularly enjoys. “I realised not long after I left Beacon that I enjoy sorting problems out, and that when things are working well I tend to get a bit bored and get itchy feet,” he says. “In any case, problems are not always bad. Sometimes they are good – people are growing very quickly. You get the best of both worlds.” But this was not your typical interim consultancy – he had seen enough of those, and wasn’t impressed. “A lot of those companies are no more than glorified employment agencies,” he says. “They put you up for work, then take a huge percentage of fee, and you get the rest and actually have to do the work. Most are also based in London. I went to see a few, and what I saw was awful. So I thought: ‘Let’s have a different model.’ “The people I was using were all in as nonequity partners. We effectively traded among ourselves, they had their own businesses as well. I had people with expertise in IT, in sales

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and marketing, accountancy, bookkeeping, and a Chinese national based out of Harrogate – we did quite a lot of work with her. We had all sorts of opportunities and interesting ventures. We were even involved in setting up football sponsorship in China. They wanted to set up the equivalent of the Champions’ League in the UK, and unfortunately it wasn’t until I was well into it that I realised that it was all corrupt and wasn’t to be. “But simply because we were there there were all sorts of opportunities.”

He had been aware of his old company’s move to Malton in his absence, but little else, and was initially reluctant to get involved when Technor approached “out of the blue”. But he had just come to an end of one particular project, so he thought he would just go for three months and produce a report at the end. But Technor only agreed to implement his recommendations if he became managing director – albeit still an interim one. He agreed. “For me it was important because people relied on this business for their living”, he says.

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He continued to work for Tandim, and had a number of conditions about his new role. “One of the main things I required was that we became a profit centre rather than a cost centre,” he says. “We had to become accountable, and when we did, things started to improve. We also needed direct contact with customers – we weren’t even allowed to talk to them before. And we needed more control over product design. The Norwegians interfered too much. Then I installed better control systems and better reporting. For a year things rallied along, and the company moved into bigger premises. But then at the end of 2008 Gould was summoned to Stavanger – an event so unusual he knew something must be up. “They told me they didn’t think our business was core to their interests, and they wanted me to sell it. I had a strange sense of déjà vu.” Even though he managed to find them a buyer, Technor didn’t want to sell to them. It became clear who they wanted the buyer to be. “They finally said: ‘Will you buy it? We will make you a very good offer,’” he says. To get some final reassurance on this question, Gould contacted a trusted business associate, John Holliss, from FDYL, an agency supplying interim finance directors to Yorkshire businesses based out of Cleckheaton. “John is the most commercial accountant I have ever met,” says Gould. “He is not just a bean counter. He had already been working for Technor, and they had retained his services. I rang him and explained the situation. I asked him: ‘Will you take a share if I buy the business?’, and without hesitation he said yes. It was like when you ask someone if they love you, and if they don’t hesitate to say yes you know they mean it. John didn’t find it daunting, so I knew I wouldn’t.” But what persuaded Gould, in his early 60s by now, to park Tandim into a position where he now only has a chairman’s role, and raid his pension to raise money, all for the sake of buying such a business? He admits the banks he approached initially thought he was crazy. “It was the company’s prospects,” he says. “We are operating in a very niche market. We are one of four big players in the world, and we only have a tiny fraction of market share, so we only have one

ENTREPRENEUR

If I woke up this morning and said ‘I want to open a business’ it would not be this one

way to go.” There are challenges ahead. One concerns certification. Each new product design has to be certified by governing bodies, and there are different bodies for different parts of the world, including a new AEX American standard that was introduced as a direct result of Deepwater Horizon. Similar bodies also have to visit the factory to audit the production process. Naturally enough, none of these certification systems synchronise perfectly, and they all have different methods of auditing. The new territories ISIS-Ex wants to start exporting to – Russia, for example, and Kazakhstan – are each busy developing standards of their own. “So all our products need recertifying,” says Gould, “and that costs between £30,000 and £40,000.” In America as well, there are political factors to consider. The Texan oil barons, it seems, had been assuming that Mitt Romney would just cruise into the White House. President Obama cut back on issuing licences to the industry following Deepwater Horizon, and during his campaign Romney had been making noises about giving the industry a boost again. However, because the barons all assumed that this would be in the form of a tax cut, they held back on any additional investing. Now, says Gould, they are in “mourning”. “But Obama is going to have to do something,” says Gould. “The oil lobby is so powerful in the US, after all. We haven’t yet got a car that runs on water, and right now interest in the electric car has waned. Obama will be under pressure.” And that, he thinks, will play into his company’s hands, even if businesses supplying computers to the oil industry are “at the bottom end of the food chain”. “If I woke up one morning and said: ‘I want to open a business’, it would not be this one,” he says. “But you can see the cost of entry to this sector is high. When I came back into this business I saw we had a presence here, we had the technology, the licences, and people who know what they are doing. I like to say we are a 20-year-old business with the energy of a start up. We punch well above our weight. To my mind we just needed to get the ducks in a row, and now we have done that we are flying.” n

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SUCCESS STORY

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20 years and ready for more

Coutts has just celebrated 20 years in Yorkshire. But Peter Baber discovers that isn’t the only reason why the head of its Yorkshire operations is smiling

Early in December last year some 120 customers of Coutts were entertained at the Leeds Grand Theatre by the Children’s Chorus of Opera North, and by the members of the opera company itself performing excerpts from its latest productions. It was, of course, a suitably upmarket event for a bank that is still perhaps best known for being banker to the Queen. But the event was also an important milestone for the bank itself, as it marked its 20th anniversary of being in Yorkshire. “Leeds is one of the bank’s oldest regional offices,” says Mark Yellops, the banks’ executive director for Yorkshire. And unlike other banks which may be cutting back and centralising their operations, he says the 22 regional offices Coutts has is testimony to how it still values the importance of face-toface meetings. Yellops, who has been with Coutts for 11 years but has worked in financial services for 26, opened up a newer office in his home town of Sheffield in 2006. “Face-to-face meetings are still absolutely critical,” he says. “We are obviously a large wealth management firm, but people want to deal with people. If it is urgent they want to come and see you, or they want us to go out and see them.” But the 20th anniversary milestone isn’t the

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only reason why Yellops is feeling particularly bullish as 2012 turns into 2013. The new year also sees new regulations in financial services known as the Retail Distribution Review come into force, and Yellops thinks that as Coutts is already very well prepared for that, their arrival will put his bank in a very good light. The press has widely described these reforms as the end of providing financial advice for a commission, and instead the introduction of system based on fees, where all advisers have to gain qualifications in order to be able to advise. Such a change has been brought about because of horror stories about people’s hard earned saving being eaten up by commissions they were not even aware they were paying. Yellops says that while you could describe the changes in that way, they are actually a little bit more complex. “The regulator is trying to raise professional standards and increase transparency for financial investing,” he says. “What they are trying to do is make it very clear to the investing public what services they are paying for. There will certainly be more transparency about when they are paying for the service or product that is being recommended, and when they are paying for ongoing advice.” The reason why he thinks this is particularly good news for Coutts is because Coutts has

already been adopting these practices for some time. Yellops says that as the cold light of the new regulations begins to shine on the industry, more and more current and would-be Coutts clients will come to realise the value of this. “The standards we at Coutts are asked to achieve are actually well above the minimum standards the regulator is setting. But then you would expect that, because of the nature of the people that we are advising. So is he implying that some wealthy individuals who currently put their money elsewhere might realise that the financial institution does not have such high standards? Yellops is more circumspect. “I am not saying other companies say you have to do A, B, or C,” he says, “but there is a reason why the regulator wants us to go down this route. I suppose it depends on how other companies present themselves to clients. Some companies have embraced the concept already, others are yet to face the market. I think the change will serve us well as an organisation.” So what can a new client of Coutts expect in their first few contacts with the bank? To begin with we need a little scene building. Perhaps because of the minimum thresholds for entry – Coutts will really only accept as customers people who have over £1m in investable assets – Yellops says most of the clients he and his team deal with will >>

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SUCCESS STORY

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The most important driver is what their goals over their lifetime are. We need to understand those in detail already have sold at least one business in their lifetime – unless they are lucky enough to have inherited such wealth. What the bank does with new clients is draw up a detailed wealth plan - a bit like a business plan, only for an individual’s wealth, and encompassing all his or her financial and personal objectives in life. “This is a living, breathing document which lasts over time,” says Yellops. “We revisit it as often as the client would wish, but as an absolute minimum once a year.” This plan is not something that just gets thrown together in an instant (like some business plans, you might say). In order for a Coutts adviser to be able to fulfil their job properly, Yellops says they have to have a very detailed – often very personal – knowledge of their client’s aspirations in life, their personal beliefs and choices, and exactly what their goals might be, and that takes time to find out. “We need to invest a lot of time,” he says. “Very rarely does it happen in just one meeting. We often have to talk about very confidential things. We need to have a full picture of their financial circumstances. The most important driver is what their goals over their lifetime are. We need to understand those in detail.” Obviously in such circumstances there is an ultimate need to get the money away into something where it can be earning a reasonable rate of return. Yellops, however, insists that it is just as important for the client themselves to take their time and think about what they really want to do. He doesn’t mind them prevaricating too much – as long as he is able to make proactive suggestions

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while they decide. He says the need for this consideration time often stems from the hectic lives the clients themselves may have been living as they build up and exit their business. “They will often have been very focused on their business,” he says, “and then they have moved into a sales process, which is also a very intense period and can be very tiring. Some of them step away from the business immediately while others may stay if that is part of the sale terms and conditions, but whatever happens they need time to think. The last thing someone wants to do is tie up money immediately. So we usually say: ‘Let’s think about this.’ And we keep thinking about it. It is often an education process in terms of talking about what’s available, and seeing them as individuals coming to terms with what they can do now.”

One frightening new aspect that may spur on people who have just sold their business is inheritance tax. Yellops points out that if most of their wealth is tied up in their business, then this may not have been an issue for them before because, under business property relief, shares in a business are not subject to tax. But as soon as they sell the business and those shares become cash, the whole issue of looking at ways of minimising inheritance tax suddenly becomes very pressing. And talking of children and descendants, there may be attitudes to risk to uncover. Some of that attitude may be bullish, but not all of it. “They may compartmentalise how much cash they want to set aside for school fees or university education. They may want to set a low level of risk for that type of investment.” Yellops says he has noticed over the 20 years that the average age of his clients has come

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down by a decade to late 40s and early 50s. And because successful entrepreneurs at that age might also want to help out with another start-up, as a mentor, a business angel, or even a co-owner, they may also realise they have other uses for the money that they have made already. “They may also want to hold funds back in cash,” he says. “They may, in short not really know what they want to do. So the last thing they may want to do is tie a lot of money into investments. Often the best advice is to take some time out and think.” One thing that many of the clients he sees are usually interested in is philanthropy, or giving something back. While there are tax advantages to setting up charitable trusts, Yellops doesn’t think that is the only thinking behind such actions. “My gut instinct would be that people do want to give something back,” he says. “These days a lot of the entrepreneurs I am seeing are coming less and less from a family-oriented business, but will instead have built their money up from scratch. That means they won’t have come necessarily from family backgrounds where there is any sense of family duty, and will instead have causes that are close to their heart. It is certainly a trend for people to consider giving to charity as part of their planning. Or to invest into social enterprise that creates wealth and jobs but is still a charitable cause. Certainly he thinks that with the declining age of his client, the old idea that you sell your business and head off into the sunset is becoming less and less real. “Twenty years ago some clients might have bought properties abroad and gone to live there full-time. But the trend now is for that to happen less and less. They may buy a dream car and a lovely holiday home abroad, but fewer are retiring away because they still have connections in the UK. Also the expectation of what that kind of expat lifestyle can bring has changed. As our client’s typical age has come down, they are less willing to play golf every day. It is something they may do with holiday home for a period of time, but they want other opportunities. Particularly in Yorkshire, I find a lot of entrepreneurs are very loyal to the region, and they care passionately about the

SUCCESS STORY

Prospects are brighter now than they have been for a long time

regional economy and employment, and also giving something back by the other roles they take on. That is a fantastic thing.” Whatever they decide, Coutts will have a specialist adviser to help them on such issues as pensions, setting up trusts, and issues to do with family business. Yellops says the bank has deliberately gone down the route of using specialist advisers wherever possible because it is unlikely that one person can cover everything. These advisers will however feed into the individual wealth manager who advises the client, and for that person a key element of their role is being proactive. “Our job is not about delivering advice and waiting for our clients to contact us,” he says. “It is about contacting them if something is changing.” We meet the day after the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, and Yellops says that morning there would already have

been “a number of conversations” with clients about such things as what to do now that the pensions threshold has come down from £1.5m to £1.25m. Personal service is of course something Coutts, by its very nature of being a private bank, is known for. People used to covet the purple cheque books and Mastercards all Coutts account holders were given. Yellops says they are less of a draw now compared with the advice services the bank can offer. Still, it is worth hearing what perks being a Coutts account holder can bring you. People who have a Coutts Mastercard gain access to a special concierge service, and Yellops says that because of that on one occasion when he was setting up the Sheffield office he was asked to liaise with that concierge and see if they could arrange to get tickets for a client at short notice for the Kirov ballet’s New Year’s Eve performance in Russia. “We could facilitate that,” he says. “The concierge service had a Russian speaker who knew how to acquire such tickets on the open market. They are often sold out.” On another occasion, during the Icelandic ash cloud incident, the bank as a whole sent coaches into Europe to pick up customers who it knew were stranded abroad. “One of my clients from Sheffield took advantage of that and had a pleasant trip home including a stop at a vineyard in France,” he says. It all makes Coutts sound like an extended family – a feeling that is reinforced as soon as you enter the bank’s offices in a Georgian building on Park Square in Leeds. You feel as if you are being ushered into someone’s drawing room. So it comes as something of a surprise to hear Yellops suggest that, by the time the next significant anniversary comes around, Coutts might have moved out of there. The office he set up in Sheffield, in contrast, is open plan and in a skyscraper. Still, when you hear about his enthusiasm for how he sees the region and his client’s businesses growing in years to come, you begin to understand why it might make sense to face the modern world. “The drive towards manufacturing in hightech industries that this government seems to be keen on is massively in Yorkshire’s favour,” he says. “Prospects are brighter now than they have been for a long time.” n

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ENTREPRENEUR

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ENTREPRENEUR

Poised to take on the countrY

Kevin Hollinrake has just taken his York-based estate agency through a merger that now gives it a national presence. Could this be the time for him to re-enter politics? Peter Baber finds out

Kevin Hollinrake is managing director of Hunters, the York-based estate agency chain. In the past he has also stood as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for a Yorkshire constituency. But if you think this should make him a tub-thumping Eurosceptic who is convinced that government is not a true supporter of business, think again. For one thing, he has every hope for the future of Britain, if the next generation of business people is anything to go by. “A lot of people in their 20s who are working for me now are way more mature than I was at that age,” he says. “I have a lad who at the age of 19 is regularly speaking to people at board level. He is talking mainly about sales, obviously, but you have got to have some technical competence to talk to people with authority, and he certainly has that.” He is modest enough to say that this >>

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ENTREPRENEUR

contrasts very favourably with how he behaved when he was first starting out in business, having dropped out of what was then Sheffield Polytechnic to run a series of market stalls with a friend. “I reckon I have missed making a million at least three or four times in my career,” he sighs. The first time came shortly after the privatisation of BT in the 1980s. He was offered the chance to start selling telephones imported from the USA which retailed at £5 – quite a bargain, when the standard BT phone at the time cost £20. “I should have set up a shop and started selling them,” he says, “but I was just a kid at 21.” Another missed opportunity came shortly afterwards, when he was introduced to the whole concept of mobile phones. He says he was put off the idea of selling them, because at the time mobile phones were so unwieldy they had to carried around in a suitcase. Their £300 retail price also put him off, but he admits now that, had he taken them on, who knows what it might have led to? “I already had a buyer for the first one,” he says. “I could have bought one and sold it on. But I lacked self-discipline. I thought I was doing okay, selling lots of standard phones, and that was it.” He is, fortunately, doing all right for himself now. Hunters’ turnover this year stands at £7m, up from £4m at the height of the recession in 2008. That’s quite an achievement when, he points out, the housing market has effectively stood still for the past four years. “In a normal year there are about 1.2 million transactions in the UK,” he says.

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“But for the past four years the total has stood at around 600,000.” What’s more, Hunters has just completed the takeover of the Bairstow Eves franchise, one of the biggest names in the estate agency sector. The takeover hasn’t been problem-free, but he is very happy about where it has left his business. “We now have a network of 107 branches going up and down the country, with half of those in the south where we weren’t really represented at all before,” he says. “It would have taken us decades to get to that level. We are now the biggest estate agency franchise in the UK, and the sixth biggest estate agency brand in UK. We want to be the biggest within three to four years.” Some performance indeed. But the other way Hollinrake is not like your archetypal free market-loving entrepreneur is that he does not believe current employment law, which gives rights to new employees after just six months, is holding back business at all. “I keep hearing about how we should make it easier to sack people,” he says, “but we have never had a problem moving people on if they are not right. If you have good HR people and a good HR lawyer - not just someone you

only use when you get problems – then you shouldn’t have any issue. I certainly have never been to a tribunal yet. When you think about it, nobody goes to work to do a bad job.” Getting the right people, he says, is the key to getting business right. But while such a process can be time-consuming, he has little time for people who claim they cannot fill vacancies. All you have to do, he says, is make sure you have a good bank of potential people who you have already checked out before the vacancy even arises. “I see people all the time without there being the prospect of any job,” he says. “If a good CV comes across my desk I want to see that person. “I interview all the time without interviewing. Everyone you meet is a potential interview.” And to prove the point, he shows me a list of what looks like over 50 potential candidates he already has stored on his smartphone – stored, I notice, in note form, rather than as contacts that he might accidentally ring. “A lot of people come to us from that route,” he says, “and that is how you get the best people, because you are not just fishing in a pool of what a recruitment agency has got that day.” As for how he chooses the right people, one quality in particular he looks for is their willingness and ability to knuckle down, as long as there is also some fun along the way. That, he says, is what drove him when he set up Hunters in 1992 after nearly a decade of working for other agencies. “I am essentially a lazy person,” he says, “and it is only when you discover that there is no easy way to make money that you start working really hard. When we started this business, we got up earlier, stayed later, and chased every single lead down.” When Hunters was founded it didn’t initially

I keep hearing about how we should make it easier to sack people but we never had a problem moving people on if they are not right

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ENTREPRENEUR look the most promising of starts. For one thing, although Hollinrake says he had always intended to set up an agency on his own, his most recent experience within the estate agency sector had involved getting fired from a leading nationwide chain. His immediate manager, miffed about some comments he had made about the restructuring it was then going through, had found out that he was still co-owner of a video shop business in York. Having any other business interests outside the agency was strictly against company policy. Fortunately he had made friends on his first day as an estate agent with John Waterhouse, who also had many years’ experience, and it wasn’t long before they decided the time was now right to branch out on their own. But that decision wasn’t great for another reason. Hunters opened in March 1992. And just six months later, Black Wednesday saw sterling exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and interest rates shoot up, virtually overnight well into double figures. Not a great time to start trying to persuade people to buy a house. “We had negotiated an overdraft of £30,000 with the banks,” he says, “and by the end of September that had got to £66,000, and they did return a couple of cheques to our key suppliers, such as the Yorkshire Post and the York Evening Press. We were totally on a knife edge. But we were determined to get through it. I believe that in life 10% is about what happens to you, and 90% is about what you do about it. So we sold a couple of houses to keep ourselves going.” Fortunately by early 1993 things began to pick up. “I had started recording in the back of my diary how many sales we had done,” he says. “To begin with it was usually one or two per week. But suddenly I remember John saying we had 11. By 1994 things had improved sufficiently for us to open our second office. We were then on a growth path that was really exciting. We had 14 to 15 really good years, which is twice the length of the normal property cycle.” In fact by the time the next recession hit, the company had expanded to have 10 branches it managed itself, and from 2005 it had started a franchise business that within three years was 15 branches strong. >>

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ENTREPRENEUR Looking back, Hollinrake says he wished he had realised that they were good times, because he would have relaxed and enjoyed them more. Because when the crunch came in 2008, it hit hard. “We probably thought we were on a gravy train that would never end,” he says, “or end in a different way with a gradual slowdown. But it was simply wham!” He says the decisions the company had made in the months running up to the crash, such as spending £500,000 on a new department selling mortgages or £3m on a new head office (which has now been rented out), did not help. He and Waterhouse were also still paying off his brother, who had opened the second office for them but had left the business in 2004. As a result, they had to take drastic action. A headcount of 220 had to be cut down to 60 virtually overnight. “It was a very difficult time, seeing people almost as they were on a conveyor belt,” he says. And even then the rumours kept circulating. “We even had the BBC ringing, saying: ‘Have you gone into receivership?’” he says. “That kind of rumour really pervades your organisation, because they don’t ring you, they ring the office.” Other agencies were already stitching up prepack deals, but that was something Hollinrake was determined that Hunters would not do. “You only have one reputation with your suppliers and your staff, and I could never have looked at them in the face again if we had done that,” he says. Instead he behaved exactly as he had done in 1992. “We kept on and said: ‘We are going to get through this,’” he says. “We didn’t have anyone leave us voluntarily because they were worried about their job.” Now, further away from the worst of it, he can see that one development that helped the company was his decision in 2008 to start offering franchises based on territory, rather than offices. This certainly proved attractive to franchisees, not least because the start-up costs were around £30,000, compared with overheads of around £120,000 involved in setting up an office. One of the first people to take up such an offer was a manager the company was having to make redundant. “He

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That kind of rumour really pervades your organisation, because they don’t ring you they ring the office

now has net earnings of around £160,000 to £170,000, about six times what he would have earned as a manager,” says Hollinrake. It was the wish to extend this growing franchise network that persuaded him to make a bid for the Bairstow Eves franchise, which he heard was potentially for sale, during a corporate day at the races. It was a risky move. No such franchise takeover had been attempted before.

“The only comparable deal was when Halifax closed down its estate agency and it became Reeds Rains or YourMove,” he says. But in that situation the Halifax name completely disappeared. Bairstow Eves, on the other hand, is still a functioning brand name thanks to the branches that former franchise owner Countrywide still operates directly. Many of the franchisees were none too chuffed about being taken over by a north of England-based agency few of them had heard of. Some 50 of them, out of a total of 86, went to court to try to stop the deal. Although they did not win, as a result of the court action Hunters did renegotiate the deal with Countrywide to extend the deadline for when the change of name had to take place. “There were some things we found out through the legal process that we hadn’t been totally clear about when we bought the franchise,” says Hollinrake. “Next time I would do a bit more due diligence. But we have now rebranded just over 50 of the franchises.” All that means the agency is now in a healthy position to benefit from what he believes may be an upturn in the market next year – in volume, if not in value. “The important thing is seeing the housing market bottoming out in the US,” he says. “All the problems in the UK originated in the USA, so if things turn around there, there is a good chance they will here.” Will a better performing business entice him to enter politics again? It might do. Having been selected for the Dewsbury seat in July 2007, Hollinrake had to give it up again in October 2008, when the pressure of trying to maintain the business got too much, and then had to watch his successor Simon Reevell win the seat in the 2010 election. “The mistake I made last time was that I hadn’t sufficiently stepped back from this business to make a good run at it,” he says. “There is a problem in UK politics generally that it is logistically virtually impossible for someone who has experience of running a business or any other outside interest such as being a doctor to combine those two roles.” If we are to have as our political leaders people who really can teach the country a thing or two about weathering storms, the powers that be should take heed. n

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COMPANY PROFILE

North Yorkshire businesses set to outpace the competition with superfast broadband A new package of support has been agreed to help North Yorkshire businesses boost their sales orders, accelerate their growth and increase productivity. Superfast North Yorkshire is delivering next generation broadband to consumers and businesses across the whole of the county and York. Broadband speeds of greater than 25Mbs per second will become a reality for a high proportion of businesses during the rollout of this project. NYNet is leading the project on behalf of North Yorkshire County Council. Funding has been secured from Department for Communities and Local Government, the European Regional Development Fund, and BT. BT is the selected provider and will be installing next generation infrastructure until the end of 2014. As part of the project, businesses in North Yorkshire and York will have access to a range of free supplementary support services to ensure they take full advantage of increased internet connectivity. This will include intensive face to face support, training workshops, skills masterclasses, and business development events. The programme will show businesses how faster broadband connections can develop new sales and increase profit levels by maximising efficiency and productivity.

Superfast North Yorkshire is an exciting programme which will bring huge benefits to communities across the County. The new infrastructure being installed will open up opportunities for residents and businesses alike.

to communities across the County. The new infrastructure being installed will open up opportunities for residents and businesses alike. Our contract with BE Group is the final piece of the jigsaw, enabling companies to get the right advice to gain most from the new technology”. Tracey Watson, Project Manager for BE Group, commented “BE Group is delighted to be joining the Superfast North Yorkshire project. We are ready to help businesses increase their profile, win more business, and accelerate their growth. No businesses are the same, so our priority will be understanding particular company objectives before recommending practical steps to drive sustainable growth”.

Tracey Watson, Senior Project Manager, BE Group; and John Moore, Chief Executive Officer, NYNet

The business support will be led by BE Group, a national business improvement specialist, with a local delivery team based at Roecliffe, near Boroughbridge. Business Advisors will be available to meet face to face with eligible companies to understand their requirements and present practical solutions. Expert trainers will run a series of skills masterclasses covering topics such as e-commerce, digital marketing, social media, and winning public procurement and supply chain contracts. John Moore, Chief Executive of NYNet said “Superfast North Yorkshire is an exciting programme which will bring huge benefits

BE Group is delighted to be joining the Superfast North Yorkshire project. We are ready to help businesses increase their profile, win more business, and accelerate their growth.

Tel: 0845 002 0021 or email: enquiries@sfny.co.uk www.superfastnorthyorkshire.com

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BUSINESS LUNCH

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Starting up again Over lunch at Swinton Park, Barry Dodd, chairman of the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Enterprise Partnership, tells Peter Baber that he sees running his organisation as very much like running the many companies he has started up in his career

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Waiting for Barry Dodd, chairman of the North Yorkshire LEP, to arrive for our lunch meeting at the restaurant at Swinton Park Hotel, I look out the window, notice a helicopter circling, and wonder if itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s him. He later tells me that that he does in fact frequently fly his own helicopter, has on occasion flown it to Swinton Park before, only on this occasion he chose to come by car. The helicopter is really because his main business interest, GSM Group, the automotive engineering company he set up from scratch, now has four main units around the UK, none of which are in Yorkshire. As he also explains, the company has come together through 15 acquisitions over the years, so there are actually plenty of branch offices that he does need to drop into. But the helicopter could also just as usefully be used in his job with the LEP. Because the York, North Yorkshire and East Riding Enterprise Partnership, to give it its full name, covers a vast area â&#x20AC;&#x201C; everywhere from Skipton in the

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west to Scarborough on the coast. And unlike the three other LEPs operating in the Yorkshire region, it doesn’t really have a city region – civil servants’ and economic planners’ favourite new buzzword – to hang itself around. Dodd would be the first to admit that businesses in Scarborough probably don’t have much to do with businesses in York, a 40-mile drive away, let alone businesses further west. Some might see that as a weakness. Dodd, however, insists the partnership is more one of similar economies, rather than distances. And it is an economy that, in the week that we are talking, has been given a big boost by the Chancellor in his Autumn Statement. In it the Chancellor promised £314m to upgrade the A1 between Leeming and Barton to a threelane highway, and announced that York would be allowed to share in the £50m fund the government is making available in its Super Connected Cities programme to deliver high speed broadband to key centres. He also talked more about bringing LEPs like Dodd’s to the fore in decision making and allocating funds. For Dodd himself the statement was a great shot in the arm, as he admits that up until that point he still had not been convinced about the government’s real desire to support him in a role that, as a former board member of Yorkshire Forward, was asked to take on – he never put himself forward. “Until that statement it was a case of back us or sack us,” he says. “Unless you give organisations the resources to be successful, it is very difficult to succeed. When I was on the Yorkshire Forward board, when you went to any discussion there was always an awful lot of money coming to the table so the discussions were very serious, whereas to date the money behind LEPs has not been substantial so they have not been taken seriously. But now the Chancellor has said that in the future the LEPs as representatives of business will be the front and centre of economic development. I am not sure what infrastructure and skills funds will be put through LEP, but it will be significant funds.” As for the city region idea, Dodd can actually see that it has some merit. “City regions are an interesting concept,” he says, “and as I travel around the world I see they are

BUSINESS LUNCH

prominent in other countries. Atlanta is a very successful one. So too is Dallas/Fort Worth, a region that wasn’t great at one time, but is now. What is interesting is that all of these places have a major international airport.” But he is keen to stress that such city regions

We will have the opportunity to attract people into the supply chain and we can use a rifle shot approach to attract potential suppliers evolve themselves. “You can’t invent them,” he says. “They happen for a reason, and economic geography is not determined by any town boundaries. “It is determined by the economics of the area. They will happen over a period of time. Successful city regions always grow.” This need for fluidity is one of the reasons why he is perfectly happy for parts of his LEP area – Craven, for example, and in particular the East Riding – to belong to other LEPs as well. “The LEP on Humberside is doing something

different to us, which is to concentrate on the Siemens development, an enterprise zone, and offshore wind. The East Riding hasn’t swapped sides, but if it is advantageous for businesses in that area to be in the other LEP, then they should be. It should not be about geographical boundaries, but about what works best for business. At the same time, the Leeds City Region and our LEP can exist independently and be still be complementary because they are very different economically.” As for his LEP area, he sees a number of “seriously exciting projects” providing the immediate focus. The first is the York Potash Project, the £2bn potash mine that Sirius Minerals is hoping to develop in an environmentally sensitive way in the North York Moors. “We are negotiating with them to reach an agreement to have 60% local content in construction of that mine,” he says. “That’s content in terms of value. We will then have the opportunity to attract people into the supply chain. We can use a rifle shot approach to attract potential suppliers.” He dismisses arguments from some environmental campaigners that the main part of the York Potash plan that makes it seemingly environmentally friendly – an underground pipeline to carry the mined potash to Teesside to be shipped away – has never been tested before, and so isn’t workable. “The argument about it not being tested before is technically correct,” he says, “but it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny. It is perfectly normal to take ores of a different type, liquidise them and pump them through. The only reason why this hasn’t been done before is that there are not many potash mines in the world.” Another favoured development is the Food and Environment Research Agency site outside York – not least, says Dodd, because there are some 55,000 people working in food manufacturing jobs in Yorkshire, many of them in his LEP’s area. “We hope to turn some of that site into an innovation and enterprise zone,” he says, “not by asking for special dispensation from central government, but just by negotiating with the local authority to have simplified a planning agreement so that it is much easier to get businesses in >>

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BUSINESS LUNCH

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We have to get our tourism businesses to be more innovative and service oriented

there. There are already 600 scientists and 800 people working there. That business is capable of expanding and attracting inward investors by virtue of its scientific base. We are working with DEFRA to make that happen.” The final specific area of focus he says is the carbon capture project the Drax power station and other bodies are working on to have the carbon it produces captured and pumped into storage caverns beneath the North Sea. “Drax is another great opportunity for us,” he says, “and we are talking at highest level about how we put together a supply chain of services they need as they vastly expand their plant.” He sees this as particularly important

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because the only existing pipeline he knows of which is currently carrying carbon off in such a way – a pipeline in Washington state – has proved to be a magnet for companies who want to use carbon. “This is another huge inward investment opportunity,” he says. “There are all sorts of industrial processes where carbon is a benefit. That is why, while some people see this as a project really just to pipe the carbon out, I see it as a different opportunity entirely.” Once again, he uses the “rifle shot” image to describe the way in which the LEP will go about attracting these companies. This, he says, is the new way of attracting inward

investment. “If you are still going to an exhibition and putting up posters, then that is the old way,” he says. “This is the new, more effective way to target specific industries who you already know will be interested in investing.” But putting an emphasis on such projects is not to detract from the other issues that need addressing, he says. The first of those is tourism. “Tourism is obviously really important right across the patch,” he says. “But we have to get our tourism businesses to be more innovative and service oriented, because future looks different to the past.” Such businesses will be helped, he says, by the arrival of super fast broadband in the area – and the LEP can help in “designing the business support package”. Tourism businesses need to realise, he says, just how broadband could transform their business plan. “If you are a farm shop and you have visitors and you attract them to buy, there is no reason why their new favourite food can’t be sold to them via an internet shop when they go home to, say, Essex. Wouldn’t it be great if all the farm shops could be online and retain their customer base? Obviously such an arrangement needs to be networked so a fulfilment service is put together. But that’s the kind of thing the LEP could help with too.” The other area of concern is skills development. Dodd agrees that it is appalling that this subject seems to keep coming up again and again. “I think it is because more and more kids have been pushed towards financial services rather than manufacturing,

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because that is seen as where you can make more money. Manufacturing has been out of favour with the government. But that is not the case now. People realise that an industrial economy like Germany is good.” He is not saying going into financial services is wrong. Such an assertion, in an area where Aviva and CPP are still major employers, would be rash. “We need financial services,” he says, “but we also need a more balanced economy.” That is why one thing the LEP is doing is trying to appoint a “business ambassador” from a local successful business for every school in its area who can go in and preach to the pupils the value of apprenticeships. You rather get the feeling that this project might be in its infancy, however, as when I ask him how many schools there are in such a vast area, he can only answer “lots”. But he also believes the LEP has a role to play in teaching leadership skills to the higher than average number of SMEs in the area. So, given his Yorkshire Forward background, is he happy with the new set up? Does he not think Yorkshire would have been better off if the regional development agency had been retained? “Yorkshire Forward was too expensive and had grown too big,” he says. “My preference would have been to cut it down to size, because there is always a delay when you set up new things, and the delay we had was exactly at the time when the economy was bombing. “However, I have learned as an entrepreneur that in any set of circumstances there is an opportunity. You will always spot an opportunity, and that is what we have done. We are just like any other start-up company that I have done in my working life. We are a start-up business. “And that also means we are learning. We don’t get everything right first time.” Then he adds a bit more, drily. “In the public sector generally nothing ever fails. In real life you need to know when to can things. With the LEPs now we have a way of working together as a public/private partnership that really works and is democratically accountable. It would be foolish to have any competition between public and private.” n

BUSINESS LUNCH

Swinton Park To many readers of this magazine, Swinton Park probably needs no introduction. The mostly Victorian house was once the home of the Cunliffe-Lister family, with connections both to Lister Mill in Bradford and to former Tory Home secretary Lord Whitelaw. (He was current proprietor Felicity Cunliffe-Lister’s grandfather-in-law.) In the ten years since the family bought it back after a couple of decades where it had served as a management training centre, they have turned it into one of Yorkshire’s best loved country house hotels. Come for a weekend here and you can enjoy the comforts of the house itself (as the characters in the Syndicate, the recent TV drama about supermarket workers winning the Lottery, did) or you can enjoy any of the 200 acres of the estate, going right up onto the moors, where if you want you can order a picnic which you can enjoy in one of the estate’s bothies. You can also enjoy, as Dodd and I did, a sumptuous lunch in the elegant restaurant served by attentive but not imposing staff. We were treated to a pre-Christmas menu put together by executive chef Simon Crannage. An amuse bouche of home made crackling with apple sauce, where the crackling was just crunchy enough without being so solid you had to chase it around the plate, was followed by a starter of trout caught on the estate with watercress from Pickering and pickled vegetables. The main course was venison, sometimes a heavy option for lunch, but here tender enough and joined with pressed potato, celeriac puree, then an interesting but successful combination of pears and walnut caramel. The crown prince pumpkin desert was a pumpkin and seed cake with a zingy tangerine sorbet that Dodd, with his American connections, particularly enjoyed. He was fascinated too by the variety of crockery the food was served on – particularly the main course, which came on plates just the colour of roasted aubergines. There are changes afoot at the hotel too which should make it worth a visit, even if you feel you know it well. Rosemary Shrager, the celebrity chef at the estate’s famous cookery school, has now left, taking the school head chef with her, but they have been replaced by Stephen Bulmer, a Yorkshireman who did part of his training at the Box Tree in Ilkley but has over 20 years’ experience at Michelin level restaurants including several years at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons, where Raymond Blanc described him as “a great craftsman”. Tom Lewis, recently appointed general manager at Swinton Park, hails from the same stable. And Felicity Cunliffe-Lister says the next couple of years should see more developments, including an extension to increase the number of bedrooms from its present total of 31, and to enlarge the spa. Catch it all while you can.

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WINE

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THOMPSON ON WINE

winter warmers

Matthew Thompson, from law firm Lupton Fawcett Lee & Priestley, uncorks two wines sure to bring a splash of sunshine to the winter nights

It is fair to say that I am an undisputed amateur in the field of wine tasting, so to be asked to critique two fine wines took me somewhat by surprise. But as a sucker for a challenge and the chance to sample quality wines, it appeared to be too good an opportunity to pass up. As with all wine novices, I started my review with the wine labels. The Niepoort 2011 Duoro Branco is sold in 18 different countries, all with different names and labels. The UK version of the label was designed to celebrate the London Olympics and is, in the main, littered with images of syncronised swimmers. But it’s the words “Drink Me” which draw my attention, no doubt inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Needless to say, I had no hesitation in obliging. Dirk van der Niepoort is one of Portugal’s most famous winemakers and the 2011 Duoro is the white wine version of his extremely successful red Duoro. I am partial to the excellent range of Sauvignon Blanc wines produced in New Zealand, so this wine took me whole heartedly out of my comfort zone. It has a strong citric aroma and on the palate is refreshing acidic with intense fruity flavours, working extremely well with my chicken starter. After the wine has long since disappeared, you are left with a long and salty aftertaste and the ultimate desire to come back for more. And now to the Torres Celeste Crianza and, again, the label doesn’t disappoint. It is dominated with detailed images of the night sky – from Ursa Minor to Cassiopeia - apparently due to fact that the vineyard is located 895m above sea level, in a place where one can “touch the stars and shape the clouds”. The Torres family has been making wine in the ancient Catalán town of Vilafranca

del Penedès since the 17th Century, but this is the family’s first foray into Spain’s Ribera del Duero region. The wine is made from 100% Tempranillo grape and is aged in French and American oak barrels for 12 months. In the glass, the wine has a deep blackberry colour as well as a spicy intense nose with blackberry scent. In the mouth, this is a fruity robust wine with a spicy finish and a perfect companion for my boeuf bourguignon – although it would equally compliment a Sunday roast. I struggle to distinguish my Merlots from my Malbecs but this tasting experience has only reinforced my view that the world of wine is a place of unadulterated pleasure. n The wines provided were Torres Celeste, priced on offer at £9.99 at the time of writing, and Niepoort Drink Me Branco, priced at £11.99, both available at Lewis & Cooper, which has stores in Northallerton, Harrogate and Yarm. www.lewisandcooper.co.uk

Torres Celeste The Ribera del Duero in Spain makes wonderfully pure, dark-fruited reds from Tempranillo. Intense blackberry colour. Fruity with ripened, smooth tannins. Persistent and full bodied. Celeste is an opulent wine brimming with fruit, body and colour. It is utterly amazing with roast leg of lamb. If this wine was a person, it would surely be Sophia Loren.

Niepoort Drink Me Branco If you love the Redoma Branco, you will fall head over heels for this little beauty. Like Redoma but without the oak. The first released label illustrates the idea of Dominique Goblet and Kai Pfeiffer of synchronized swimming meeting good Douro wines. Citrus coloured wine, with intense mineral character citric, peach and flower aromas. Beautifully balanced and complex with juicy stone fruit flavours, and a refreshing acidity. Very long and salty aftertaste. This wine has been slipping itself into my house (and glass), regularly since first being bowled over by it.

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MOTORING

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A drive fit for the silver screen Gary Verity, chief executive of tourism agency Welcome to Yorkshire, fulfills a boyhood dream by taking a Porsche 911 for a spin. As he reports, he enjoys an experience straight out of Hollywood

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Driving a Porsche 911 is the type of stuff you dream about as a kid – cruising along the street in one of the most recognisable cars on the road, past and present, is every boy’s fantasy. So to be asked to test drive one by Business Quarter was a chance to fulfil something I’d long wished to do. I had an open mind as I approached the car park to get behind the wheel of the new Porsche 911 Carrera 4S – which was provided thanks to the good folk at JCT 600. And after spying it parked alongside the regular staples of most car parks, it certainly stood out from the crowd. For a tall chap like me, getting into this sleek, low number is definitely not something I’d fancy trying with stiff legs after a run. But once inside, you feel like you’ve dropped into a cockpit rather than a car. That’s no bad thing mind you, and this is all part of the experience in what is by no means an ordinary car. Staring out from behind the dashboard, you can’t help but feel you’re part of the set of some Hollywood movie - despite being a cold day in northern England – especially given the historic profile of the 911. I may be biased, but Yorkshire is certainly the perfect backdrop for the striking looks that the 911 shows off and our beautiful county is home to pretty much every kind of road you can possibly conjure up. So it’s perfect for putting the car through its paces. Getting down to details, the raised central console certainly adds to the comfort and ease of operating the numerous buttons which wouldn’t look out of place on some interplanetary spacecraft. The large central screen was also clear and easy to navigate through, including when I attached my Blackberry to its Bluetooth-ready system. The easy-to-operate touch screen added to the smooth user experience. But, while these are all nice elements to have to have in a car, the key question is how did it drive? Well the answer, in a nutshell, is; quick. The responsive four wheel drive means the fatser you go (staying within the speed limits of course), the more the engine kicks in as the car grips to the road like glue. As I mentioned, here in Yorkshire we have

MOTORING

Yorkshire is certainly the perfect backdrop for the striking looks that the 911 shows off

some of the most varied roads in the UK, and the Porsche took the hills, bends and dips all in its elegant stride. The acceleration was excellent and smooth too, continually holding the road well. As you’d expect from Porsche, it’s aesthetically pleasing and comfortable even for a tall chap like me. A neat touch is the parking sensors too. If you’ve invested several thousand pounds of your hard earned cash, the last thing you want to do is prang it while trying to squeeze into a parking space. Ultimately, the Porsche reminded me of our

very own county – amazing to look at and instantly memorable and hard to leave behind. n The Porsche 911 C4S Coupe Gary Verity of Welcome to Yorkshire drove was supplied by Porsche Centre Leeds, The Boulevard, City One West Business Park, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS12 6BG, Tel: 0844 844 3355, info@porscheleeds.co.uk, www.porsche.co.uk/leeds The Porsche 911 (991) C4S Coupe is priced from £88,500

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new breed is born What happens if you cross the swagger of a super-car with the practicality of an SUV, asks Josh Sims

When Eterniti launched in the UK in November, its debut car design not only turned heads but raised eyebrows. At £210,000 and, should the buyer want it, almost entirely bespoke-built, here was another super-car. But this one, the Artemis, was different. Neither a dust-gathering track car nor a lumbering limo, here was the first of a new breed: the super SUV. “It’s certainly a quirky idea,” says brand director Mark Carbery. “You could call it schizophrenic, or all things to all men. But the reality is that most super cars are no use in the city, and road quality is often not >>

good enough anyway, while a limo-type car, such as a Bentley, is well-appointed but lacks the thrills. The super SUV is practical, luxurious, but also very high performance. It will do a lot of what both super car and limo can do but in a car you can actually drive.” Bentley, by the way, will launch its own super SUV in 2013, with Maserati also having one on the cards for next year. All follow in the huge success of the more mass-market Porsche Cayenne, which after initial scepticism, proved the market was there: indeed, it now accounts for some 50% of Porsche volumes worldwide. The Eterniti Artemis certainly has the right credentials, not least being engineered by Alastair Macqueen, who has three wins at Le Mans and the building of the JCB land speed record car under his belt. It has a 4.8 litre, twin-turbo V8 giving 600 bph and a top speed of 180 mph, 0 to 62mph in 4.5 seconds, with a ride that doesn’t rattle your organs about in your rib cage and a cabin interior that is more stately home - or at least a stately home owned by a rock star. It is a very modern luxury vehicle - and, what is more, from a British company, “for a customer

Most of the ideas we have come from the gut and polarise opinion. We’re out to provoke new ways of thinking

who appreciates the British track record of being very good at cars with small volume production, or who just want to deal with a company in London rather than Stuttgart,â&#x20AC;? says Carbury. And nor is it alone. With the big guns of the super car world - the likes of Ferrari and Lamborghini - so entwined in their prestigious histories they rarely produce cars that feel like a genuine break with the past (which is a boon or a hindrance, depending on your view), the benefit of being a young company is that you can, as it were, think out of the gearbox. â&#x20AC;&#x153;We have the space to do something interesting,â&#x20AC;? as Carbury has it. Noble Cars, also British, also run by men with a racing background - Peter Boutwood, its managing director, is a one-time Formula 3 driver and worked in Formula 1 with Damon Hill - has gone down a similarly left-field road. While Eterniti has got a head start in a new category by piling on the rather pleasant surroundings and the common sense, Noble has, in a way, gone back to race car roots, stripping its M600 back to make a car that demands to be driven, rather than to do all the driving for you. Indeed, capable >>

of 0 to 60mph in just three seconds and with a top speed of 225mph, the M600 might be so much more the typical very powerful car were it not for the fact that it has a six-speed manual gearstick and no ABS braking. The dashboard gives minimal information because, really, this is a car in which the eyes really, really need to be on the road. With Noble a small company, based near Leicester, it too takes the full bespoke option to the limits, with the design team ready to work up a new interior design in order to fit in your music system of choice, if that is what you want. That also explains why only around 12 cars are built a year, with each taking three months to complete. Bravely for times in which cars seems as much about posing as getting anywhere, Boutwood says that, for all of the smooth lines of the M600’s carbon fibre shell, this is a car that is not about good looks. Rather, it is about the drive. And that’s drive, not dive. If being less wellknown rather than a household name, if a certain oddness or particularity and is the

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unexpected are all assets increasingly sought by the car fanatic - “the few with the money and passion for cars are ready to go off piste and buy a more interesting car,” says Carbury - then perhaps the concept cars from Swiss company Rinspeed are to their taste too; and not least the sQuba, a car that really can go underwater. Road car turns submersible. Among founder Frank Rinderknecht’s other visionary vehicles - and these are actually designed, built and tested, existing on the road not just on paper - are the Presto and the iChange, both extendable cars; the Bedouin - convertible to a pick-up, not to mention being the world’s fastest natural gas-powered car; the Senso - with a bio-metric interior that detects and responds to driver mood detection; the eXasis - its floor and body made from a transparent, high-tech plastic; and, for speed freaks, the Advantige Rone - the first supercar to be powered by a biofuel made from kitchen waste. Along the way Rinderknecht has devised windscreens with scratch-proof coatings, rust-proof plastic composite bodies, as well as

inventing the steering wheel mounted controls now common to many cars. Like Eterniti and Noble, the similarly small and independent Rinspeed kicks against the predictable, in Rinspeed’s case in aiming to predict where car design may go next. “Most of the ideas we have come from the gut and a lot of them polarise opinion - but that’s ok, we’re more agent provocateurs, out to provoke new ways of thinking,” says Rinderknecht, with a sentiment no doubt shared by the bosses of the other brands too. “But big car companies are not structured to allow emotions to lead,” he adds. “That corporate structure isn’t flexible enough. The industry is hampered by its size, and the brands by their need to maintain an image. “Of course, you have to be realistic about what has commercial potential and what doesn’t - even if it’s important for touching hearts, for being a provocative idea, about making it possible even if nobody really needs it. After all, it’s easy to do a nice little sportscar, no. 742. But, you know, so what?” n

Head turner: The fiercely independent Rinspeed iSpeed model

FASHION

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age-old italian brand loro piana is an exclusive club in which luxury, above all else, is what matters, as JOSh SIMS finds Some €3000 for a jacket might seem like a lot, but when only 20 could be made, it is presented in a lacquered box and, most incredibly of all, it is woven from lotus leaves, the price tag seems less bank-breaking. “In fact,” says Pier Luigi Loro Piana, joint-CEO of the Loro Piana family business and Italian luxury goods label, “in the end I don’t care how much the resulting jacket might cost. Of course, long-term we have profit in mind. But right now this is more about keeping alive an artisan community making something unique, about saving a very antique tradition from being lost.” That antique tradition happens to be an ageold and little-known craft on the shores of Lake Inle in Burma, where fibres are extracted from lotus leaves by hand and then woven within 24 hours before deterioration sets in. This produces just 120gm of a raw silk-like yarn. Small wonder then that the esoteric and labour-intensive craft is on the point of dying out. Or that Lora Piana, when it heard about it, decided to back and buy the community’s entire output for the foreseeable future. After all, super-exclusive fabrics are its metier. This is the same global company - formed in Valsesia in 1924 by Pietro Loro Piana, taken over by his nephew in 1941 and now based in Milan and run by his sons Pier Luigi and Sergio - that a few years ago acquired 2,000 hectares in Peru to convert into a private reservation for vicuna, the once endangered

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lama-like creature whose coat provides the so-called ‘fibre of the gods’. Or the company that, as the world’s biggest cashmere producer, convinced Chinese and Mongolian breeders to set aside small quantities of ‘baby cashmere’, the super-soft under-fleece taken from a kid’s coat on its first (and only on its first) combing, 19 kids’ worth being required to make a single sweater. Unsurprisingly, such a sweater does not come cheap. “But there is now a consumer with experience in wealth - and I don’t mean ‘old money’ - who is looking for something more, who finds pleasure less in showing off as in the quality of what they buy,” argues Sergio Loro Piana, whose name, since it now adorns some 19 stores across Italy alone, has become something of a national byword for serious luxury. “The fact is that we’ve never put a logo on anything and that hasn’t prevented the company from growing. For those who are in the club, the product alone is recognisable enough, even if it’s invisible to others. “And that is not an easy position to duplicate - if you’ve sold to a segment of the market on the back of branding, it’s very hard to leave that behind to sell to the very top end of the luxury market...” Loro Piana’s position - and its verticallyintegrated operation, unusual in the fashion industry - has certainly paid off. Sergio Loro Piana attributes this in part to being a family company - this allows projects to be progressed at their own pace, rather than in a rush to meet shareholder expectations. Its baby cashmere operation has been years in development, the kind of plan that guardians of the bottom line might condemn as extravagant. Sergio, three years Pier Luigi’s senior, jokes how his brother (with >>

We’ve never put a logo on anything but that hasn’t prevented the company from growing

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FASHION

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whom, unusually, he swaps seats to lead the company every three years) only started using email a few years ago - and then only when he realised that decisions were being made without his involvement because he never checked his in-box. But this bubble-like existence certainly works. The E500m company has seen its revenues grow to ten times what it was just a decade ago. And it has slowly extended its remit beyond clothing made from top textiles to bags, shoes, specialist outerwear (developing techniques to allow natural fibres to be as protective as technical synthetics), and interior decoration fabrics. Its latest product line, sunglasses, similarly strives to meet its ‘best of the best’ philosophy - they are made with the thinnest optical glass in the world, which also contain a secret combination of rare earth elements to provide extreme levels of contrast and clarity, with a celluloid frame polished over days by tumbling amid chips of beech and birch. That perhaps explains their £600 ticket. Still, Sergio Lora Piana, a keen pilot, is very pleased with his. “They are, of course, just a pair of sunglasses and the world doesn’t need another pair of sunglasses,” he says. “But as vicuna is to knitwear, so these are to sunglasses...” Indeed, part of the appeal of Loro Piana is that it could put its name to almost anything, as other ‘luxury’ goods companies have, but chooses not to. Expansion, the company says, will come from more stores and emerging markets, “whereas give your name to a licensee and they want to sell as much of everything as possible,” he says, “which is good for making money - but only in the short-term. But we’re not really into ‘brand extension’,” Sergio Loro Piana adds. “We did shoes, for example, only because I needed some to sail in and someone thought the ones we made were so good we should put them in production. And the sunglasses came about because we didn’t want to use somebody else’s in a fashion shoot we were doing. You do a fragrance and next thing you know you’re making toilet bowls. We just want to use the best raw materials to make things in Italy with a bit of good taste.” n www.loropiana.com

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ENTREPRENEUR

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Turnkey talent

BUSINESS QUARTER | WINTER 12

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ENTREPRENEUR

Richard Grafton believes his new interiors business is a step change from the companies he has been running for the past two decades. He tells Peter Baber why There may be many a successful Yorkshire entrepreneur who, having reached the point where they can take a step back from their business, feels they can finally enjoy the finer things in life. That enjoyment might include at least getting involved in doing up their pad – more than likely with the help of their partner. And they or their partner might even employ the services of an interior designer, someone well spoken who will show up at their house weighed down with swatches and wallpaper sample books and spend many an hour discussing the finer points of William Morris versus Coloroll (well, perhaps). Richard Grafton, managing director of Richard Grafton Interiors, which opened in Harrogate earlier this year, knows such a person all too well. “The trouble is that soloists like that usually only have a library,” he says. “Working like that is actually quite a dull experience. You can have the best library, but if you don’t have knowledge and skill of how to use the books, the recipe is not complete.” The shop he has opened, he insists, is quite different. Customers who come into it will, of course, get the full interior design service, but they will also be able to have some idea of how the finished project will actually look, because the upper floors have been turned into sample rooms. On the day BQ visited there was a comfortable living room decked out in classic country style but with modern additions such as a glass side table. There was a kitchen fitted with all mod cons in a tone of

wood chosen to match the upholstery. And there was a wet room bathroom of the kind that most of us can only dream of. (It is no surprise to discover that Grafton is currently helping a client fit out a new bathroom to a budget of £70,000). I say the rooms were like this because there is every chance, dear reader, should you wish to visit, that by the time you come the look will have changed again. The showrooms have already been through one refurbishment in their first nine months, a refurbishment which saw the original pink check of the sofa, perfect for a spring season, turn into something more autumnal. “We have turned our rooms into real life rooms,” says Grafton, who insists his new shop is pretty much unique in the Harrogate area, if not in Yorkshire. Other retailers might disagree, but Grafton explains further. “Other shops might do interiors, but they would not get into kitchens and bathrooms, at least not to the extent that we do. You might find this kind of operation in London, but it is very unique here. That’s the feeling we are

getting from customers anyway.” He should in any case know, because Grafton, now 46, is not exactly new to this game. He says he has been interested in property and doing it up since he was in his teens. Having left school at 17, he went to work for the family’s curtain business based not in genteel Harrogate but in much more “where there’s muck there’s brass” Castleford. He ended up managing it for seven years. “Castleford may be a different town,” he says, “but they are still very houseproud there. They were a great bunch of people. They tell you what they think, and don’t think about what they are going to tell you, so a spade is definitely a spade.” He then came back to Harrogate to run a similar family business in the town. “That business was more of a gift and accessories shop, with an interior service, but one that would never have got involved with fireplaces and sound, like we do now,” he says. Somewhere in the middle of all of this he also managed to find time to work on individual projects both in the UK and further afield >>

I decided that everybody has ideas about what they want to do. Somebody wants to turn right, I want to turn left, so the most obvious thing was to set up on my own

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ENTREPRENEUR

that included fitting out two Michelin-starred restaurants. The turning point came last year. “I decided that everybody has ideas about what they want to do,” he says. “Somebody wants to turn right, I want to turn left, so the most obvious thing to do was to set up on my own. I wanted to have a go and see what I could do, because I had worked under the umbrella of a family, but really with all the experience and knowledge that I had gathered I wanted to see if there was a market for what I was doing.” So far, it seems, so good. The economy may still be in trouble, and the weather on a day like the day we met may be most unlikely to encourage anyone to come out and peruse, but Grafton says that he is

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already 46% of where he planned to be in turnover terms by this time, and has every confidence that by the end of his year the business will be doing £1m. One thing that’s good about moving to the turnkey-style service that he is now offering, he says, is that business keeps the company busy throughout the year. “Historically in retail the last three months of the year were always big,” he says, “and that was the difference between having cream or no cream.” And he already has plans for further expansion. He says his ultimate aim, even if it is some years off, is to develop a Richard Grafton brand, initially with furniture but gradually extending to other areas as well.

Although his store includes some top names within the world of interior furnishings, such as Mulberry and Colefax & Fowler, he says he has no worries about what his suppliers might think about such a plan. “Many of them have actually been incredibly supportive,” he says. “And when it comes to the cloth and textiles suppliers, there are many other things to do first before we would be any threat to them. We might use their cloth for upholstery, but it’s the shape and the build quality that would make our brand.” The more immediate future includes launching a joint venture known as Grafton Freestone with Andrew Freestone, a Leeds-based designer who has also worked for a bespoke staircase company based in Helmsley.

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The joint venture will deliver all the bedroom, bathroom and wet room installations for Richard Grafton Interiors. But by offering his service, isn’t he depriving his customers of some of the joys they may find in putting together such interior schemes themselves? After all, in the market he is operating in, there are bound to be people who think their background, not to mention their wallet, entitles them to be as discerning and choosy as he is likely to be. Grafton agrees that there is a delicate balance to be weighed up. That’s why he thinks what his business does is more akin to advising than selling. “It’s just creating passion, and if people like what you are doing they generally want to buy it,” he says. He uses a recent transaction to illustrate the point. “A lady came in earlier today, who like many customers was tending to look at things in isolation. She was effectively trying to choose a wallpaper, but you can’t choose a wallpaper if you don’t know what colour the stone floor you are intending to use is, and vice versa. We offer a full design service, so we have now arranged an appointment to go and visit her. My analogy with her is that she was looking at the top left hand part of the jigsaw, but had forgotten about the other three quarters. You really need a vision for the house from the front door. If she likes what we proposed hopefully she’ll then come back in and revisit. And by that time we may have a presentation ready, we may be able to say: ‘Look at the kitchen we propose, and the wall colour, chairs, accessories.’ That creates a visual sense. “When it comes to interiors, people tend to look at elements, rather than the whole, because if fazes them,” he says. “But here we have an absolute process that works. It sounds totally stupid at the beginning, but at the end it works. It’s a similar situation with the glassware we supply. To my mind, glassware is glassware. A lot of it is down to presentation. You could have all these components and have it done badly. What we do is create room sets with items within them that look beautiful. The skills needed to do this is one reason why he favours a more vertical expansion – through creating his own brand, running spin-off companies and eventually taking some control

ENTREPRENEUR

over manufacturing – than a geographical expansion. He can see that his business model would work in other towns and cities – “Bath, Cheltenham, Edinburgh, say, towns with spas, say, or places like them” – but he says the really crucial issue in a business like his is recruiting the right people. You can’t, he says, just walk in to an interior design business straight after leaving school. “You can’t do this job at 19,” he says. “You can do a course, but that doesn’t mean to say that from a communications and knowledge point of view that you can do the job. It’s almost like actors trying to get an Equity card: you can’t get the card without the experience, and you can’t get the experience without the card. “This business is really a permanent learn. You start out as an office junior.” That’s one reason why he finds that being in your mid to late 40s is not too late to start thinking about starting out on your own. “What happens in this business is that you still have to serve an apprenticeship. You almost have to learn for 20 years to get the knowledge and skills which create confidence to see the opportunity.” Nor is he really convinced that good interior design is really a skill that can be taught, despite the publication of many books that seem designed to tell you otherwise. “I think you either can or you can’t,” he adds. “It’s just like your job as a journalist. It’s just like what you are doing. I wouldn’t presume to be able to do it.” Nevertheless, he has managed to recruit a select few like-minded people to work with him, to the point where his staff now numbers seven. The newest recruit is Janet Sandles, who had been running her own interior design business since 2009. “Janet really has a wealth of experience,” he says.

He insists that, despite what he might say about getting the right staff, the business is not elitist. He is actually a fan of IKEA. “Their marketing is fantastic,” he says. His shop, he says, has “something for everybody”. “Our ideal customers are the As and Bs, but with this shop you can come into what appears to be a grand environment and spend” – he stops to check the price of a candle on a nearby table – “just £4. We want to be aspirational, but I have always had idea of affordable luxury. We are dealing with some fabrics that are over £100 per metre, but you can use them just for the cushion, rather than the whole sofa. “For example, when we came to recover this sofa for this autumn, we backed the cushions in a different fabric to make it affordable. In fact all we have done is recover the sofa and change the accent colours in this room, but it still looks like a new room.” And on the contracting side, unlike many in his industry, he is interested in projects that may bring in as little as £100. It is precisely by doing that, he says, that word spreads about his business. “We get loads of repeat business. I always think that if you are served very well for coffee, you might want to go back for the meal. In our terms that means a customer might want us to come and look at their holiday home in Northumberland, which we have done.” As for his wider family, he says he hasn’t asked them directly, but “would like to think they are proud”. Overall, he says, he views the business at the moment as an “education hub”. “It sounds philanthropic,” he says, “but I like the idea of helping people. I want eventually to get to £10m turnover. “But in the past I have often got involved in five year plans, and they change. Here we can make decisions really quickly.” n

You almost have to learn for 20 years to get the knowledge and skills which create confidence to see the opportunity

BUSINESS QUARTER |WINTER 12

SUCCESS STORY

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SUCCESS STORY

Oiling the way

The first man to have a telex machine in Bedale went on to create an £80m business. Peter Baber profiles the Kerfoot Group as its co-founder, David Kerfoot, prepares to step down after 33 years If you were to start a trading business, one that relied to a very large extent on having excellent connections to other parts of the world, where would you start it? Rotterdam maybe, Europe’s largest port? Somewhere in the middle of Europe, perhaps, like the Ruhr? Possibly not Northallerton. North Yorkshire’s county town may be only minutes away from the A1 trunk road, but it could hardly be described as being at the centre of European trade. And yet there is trading business there, an edible oil trading and now manufacturing business, that has been a remarkable success story. Having started out in 1980 as just one

man in the bedroom of his bungalow in nearby Morton-on-Swale, the Kerfoot Group has now grown to be a mid-size corporate business employing over 100 people that looks set to turn over £80m this year.

To be fair, the edible oils business is not just based in Northallerton. It has production and warehouse facilities some 50 miles away at the port of Goole, and has in fact just spent around £1m >>

I thought it was a really good business deal with a good cashflow but, at 26, the bank clearly thought ‘who is this bloke?’

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SUCCESS STORY

in extending these. But the company’s headquarters are in the town, and David Kerfoot, who founded it with his wife Elizabeth and has how finally decided to move upstairs from chief executive to chairman in April this year, clearly has strong ties with the town, including a number of outside charitable interests. Founding the company in Northallerton, he says, was really driven by necessity.

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Back then he had just given up a job as a commodities broker for the multinational Cargill Group – a post for which, he says, he was given an exceptionally good training and grounding in the oils business – to come back home to Yorkshire to work for a logistics firm. But he soon found out that many of the assurances that had been made to him about the company were not true, and within months he had fallen out with the

management so badly that he and they parted company. He is clearly not someone to let a setback like that stand in his way, however. “I left the company on Monday, and by Wednesday I was thinking: ‘What shall I do?’,” he says. “In our bungalow I thought: ‘Maybe there is a place for me in this oil market back in the UK.’ I knew quite a lot of people in the UK. At that time the UK oil industry was dominated by British producers, and oil importation wasn’t a wide market. But I could see we had competition within the EU. That presented me with opportunity to encourage continental producers to look at the UK market, which they didn’t know that well.” So he set out as an oil trader, never actually owning any oil but taking the financial risk of selling it and taking a commission once each batch was sold. “One of my first clients was the Co-op for their margarine factory near Manchester,” he says. “They were very decent to me.” He remembers the early days of trying to at least give the appearance of looking like a viable business very well. Back in the early 1980s email had not even been invented, of course, and what every commodity trading business needed was a telex machine. Not to talk to clients and buyers – the telephone was all right for that – but to confirm orders. “In the early days I couldn’t afford a telex,” he says. “But there was a chemical company in Northallerton that had one. So I did a little deal with them, so that I could come in at 5.30pm and sit and do all my telexing that day in return for a fee. I really did sit there each day from at 6.00pm to 8.00pm doing telex. We had started the business with only £300, but we soon realised we needed a little bit more space. So I took a little office in Bedale, and by then I could afford a telex. I was in fact the first person in Bedale to have a telex machine, but it was a monstrous size. On the day it arrived there was a queue of people outside wanting to look at it. And pretty soon some of them were asking what I had asked the chemical company. Just as they had done, I could offset costs by allowing them to use it. It was a big cost.” He then wanted to expand the business into a position where he could store the oil

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SUCCESS STORY In our bungalow I thought, maybe there is a place for me in this oil market back in the UK

if necessary, and he remembers trawling up and down Bedale high street trying to get a £10,000 loan from the local banks. “Not one bank manager would loan me £10,000,” he says. “I thought it was a really good business deal, with a good cashflow – as did my wife, who had a background as an accountant. But at 26 they clearly thought: ‘Who is this bloke?’” Eventually through a contact of a contact

he was introduced to a banker in Hull who would lend him the money – but at a price. “The base rate then was 17%,” he says, “and he lent me it at 6% over base, so that was 23%. I had to give the bungalow as collateral, and I made a mistake when he asked if I had any other assets. I said I had a few shares my grandfather had left me. ‘I’ll have those too,’” he said. Fortunately two months later Thatcher brought interest rates down by 2%. I

remember going out into Bedale and having a very heavy Friday night.” Notwithstanding such high jinks, he clearly had an eye for the margins, because he soon worked out that there was money to be made in transporting the oil too. He might charge a client in the region of £45 to transport a £500 load from the Ruhr to Glasgow, for example, but by negotiating a more stringent deal with the individual drivers, he says, he could usually get a decent margin out of that. This, he says, is something he learned from his training at Cargill. He says the one thing he hoped to differentiate his company on was personal service. Lots of people say that, but with the Kerfoot Group it does seem to ring true. Even today, the company produces a daily newsletter called the Oily Rag which it sends out at around midday to every one of its serious clients. “This includes a synopsis of the overnight Chicago and Kuala Lumpur markets, a bit about currency exchange and petroleum prices, and then our view of where we see cash prices today. Our guys build a view of the market in the morning from the people they speak to, the brokers and banks, and by midday they can say whether rapeseed is up, soya bean is down, palm oil is steady, sunflower oil is flying, or whatever.” >>

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SUCCESS STORY A monthly newsletter written in more laymen’s terms, called the Oily Owl, is also sent out to every single client on the database. But personal standards pervade the group’s selling style too. “I’ve told my guys that if you feel the market is going down, it is never any good selling that product,” he says. “You should really say to the client: ‘Don’t buy it today, let’s review it tomorrow.’ Perhaps it’s the weather forecast, or the Ukrainians are dumping a huge amount of sunflower oil in Black Sea ports. But three days later it could be back up again, and then you are okay.” That, he says, is the way you build trust with customers. And yes, the markets the company trades in really are that volatile. “I first saw that when the Shah of Iran was deposed,” he says. “The Iranians had been massive buyers of US farm products. But when that happened the US just panicked.” It might be modesty, but Kerfoot insists that while the company has grown well, it has really only grown in a way that he can be proud of in the past ten years. “The business let me put three kids through private education which I am very proud of,” he says. “We saw that as important and it was potentially part of the success of the business. But there is so much I wish I could redo again.” One thing, he says, was his attitude to credit control. His training at Cargill should have cured him, he says, but for 20 years he had a far too wayward approach to managing risk. “We are now very strong on risk analysis,” he says. “Our risk controller assesses risk with different insurance bodies to see what is a viable credit rating.” Another problem was his approach to people management. Essentially, he says, the business was too focused on him. “I always saw people as important, and a lot of people have been here for 10 years plus, so we must be doing something right. But the kind of things I see our HR doing now about skills assessments and putting the right people in the right roles – I wish we had done that then.” He also maintains that his business planning was completely dreamlike, but if so, plans that have been implemented in the immediate past ten years have met with very real success. One was to broaden the company out to go

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I’ve told my guys that if you feel the market is going down, it is never any good selling that product

into more speciality oils, where again there is more margin, and where the company is now selling to the cosmetics industry as well as the food industry. Another more recent scheme was actually going into manufacturing the oils. The company has contracted 30ha outside Bedale to grow speciality seed, and is currently negotiating to take on some more farming land. “If we make the oil, process it and ship it onto the cosmetics manufacturer, we have virtual control of the chain,” he says, “and that gives us more margin. And a big winner for us is that if you have a big food conglomerate like Northern Foods, their buying strategy more and more is to be more consolidated. So if we can offer them bulk tankers of rape and sunflower, packed blended product and toasted sesame delivered to a bakery once a fortnight, that is quite an attractive proposition.” Another benefit he hadn’t anticipated was the enormous amount of cross-fertilisation and cross selling the business has been able to partake in thanks to the new products it can deliver. Customers, he says, are forever ringing up to say that they have heard the company has taken on a new type of oil and can they try it. The cosmetics market is always keen for anything new,” he says. “This last year we have pressed tomato seeds and apple seeds too.” The obvious next step to become a truly vertical organisation would be to go into retail too. That is the direction Kerfoot’s daughter Jennifer, who is currently the company’s group people director, clearly wants to take the company in when she takes over as chief executive in April. But you get the feeling Kerfoot himself is still not sure. “The older people on the board like me aren’t convinced because we haven’t seen the margins. “It has previously been company policy that on the food side we only sell to food manufacturers. On the cosmetics side we sell to retailers, but that is to go into their own products.” Nevertheless, he has agreed to make tentative steps, and Kerfoot oils are now sold in the bakery department at wholesaler chain Costco. And David himself has no doubts that his

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daughter will take such a business and “fly” with it. “The good lord looked upon me in a good way,” he says. “My children are amazing. I do not have to kick arse to get things moving. They know what the value of a pound is. And the value of education and experience. When Jennifer was in the sixth form she was passionate about Spain. “So I sent her to an olive oil producer who was a friend. She worked on the cooperative, worked on the refinery, worked in the office, went on to do Spanish and Economics at St Andrews, and then did a year in Spain at the Bilbao School of Management.” His son Tom also works in the company, as commercial director for speciality oils. And his other daughter, Ellie, is menswear buyer for

SUCCESS STORY

Crew Clothing. So they have certainly all succeeded. The only question to ask is what David himself will do now that he is stepping down at the still relatively young age of 59. He is excited about his local Pendragon Community Trust, which is developing care facilities for local disable people. “It’s about to buy its first property after 10 years of fundraising,” he says. Much to his chagrin he has been relieved of his duties as a prison monitor – something he has done for 26 years - because of his age. This does seem unfair when you consider the age that judges are allowed to carry on working to. Kerfoot won’t comment on that. But what he really wants to do is get more

involved in the local enterprise partnership, where he is deputy chairman. He feels people who are trying to start out like he was 30 years ago are being given a raw deal today. “Whatever I might say about the banker from Hull, back then there was always a bank willing to take a risk with its money on an idea - but obviously at a cost. Now that just does not happen. At least when I started I could get that £10,000, yet now all banks are completely risk averse. “At the end of the day you might just have to take risks, otherwise how are we going to get growth? It’s just like us as a business. Why do we invest £1m in a factory site? Because we believe we can export more products and employ more people that way.” Some bankers out there must surely be listening. n

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BIT OF A CHAT

with Frank Tock >> Sweet retreat We’re all familiar with the “smoker’s mafia” in the office, and the sense of well connectedness and confidence it brings to those of your staff who still can’t get through the day without a tobacco fix. But how do you engender the same sort of feelings among those of us who would rather keep our lungs pink? Larry Gould, chief executive of Leeds-based translation company The Big Word, thinks he has found the answer. He is offering his non-smoking colleagues a similar seven to eight minute break by a sweet and fruit counter instead. What’s more those who wish to take up the service don’t have to suffer the same sort of pain to their wallets that ardent smokers do. They can have what the want for free, although they are asked to consider making a donation to the company’s chosen charity, Martin House Hospice. It all sounds perfect. I just wonder which will go first – the fruit or the sweets? If I know anything about office staff, I can only guess. One person who might well benefit from this is the local dentist.

>> Rarer than space travel He may have long since gone south to the Big Smoke, but Yorkshireman Dan Howie knows who to come to when he’s seeking sponsorship money – those good old business people in God’s own county. Dan, currently working for chartered surveying firm Edgerley Simpson Howe in London, is hoping to race

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across the Atlantic in December 2013 with his friend Will North. Yes, the pair will not be the first to do it. James Cracknell and Ben Fogle (who, contrary to popular myth, were also not the first) have already lent Dan and Will their ‘Spirit of EDF’ boat for promotional use. But it is still the case that more people have travelled in space than rowed across the pond. Dan and Will, who have been inspired by the courage of their fathers, both of whom have been diagnosed with cancer, and by the sudden death of one of their friends last year in the middle of another challenge, are hoping to raise £200,000 for cancer charities and small charity St Anna’s, which houses and schools underprivileged children in Ghana. www.atlanticrow2013.com.

wire companies in 1948 in recognition of the help given by the American wire industry to its British counterparts in World War Two. Every autumn since then a British wire industry professional has crossed the Atlantic to wind the clock up, so it can keep running for another 400 days. [Not to remind our American cousins to be on time for the next war, surely? Ed]. Three of these august individuals, have, like John, worked for Sidall & Hilton. However it was a particularly poignant journey for John, because on his return he retired from the wire products company. As they say in clockmaking, they don’t make them like they used to.

>> Ajazzing it up

John Swain and his wife Wendy

>> Time for a spin When a Yorkshireman like, say, John Swain, sales and marketing consultant with Brighouse-based Siddall & Hilton Products, says something, he means it. So when he says he will cross the Atlantic to carry out an important duty, one that has been required for the past 64 years, then he’ll damn well do it, and he won’t let something like a mere hurricane stand in his way. Even if the duty in question is nothing more than winding a clock. So it was that our very own John made it to the headquarters of Wire Association International in Guilford, Connecticut, to wind up the said clock, even if Hurricane Sandy was raging all around the US east coast. The clock in question is an elegant eight foot specimen which was given to the company by a group of 32 British

One long-standing myth that has been doing the rounds for a good decade or so was well and truly demolished this issue. Remember that saying that one third of all the internet traffic in the UK is routed through Leeds? Turns out it’s rubbish. Ajaz Ahmed, founder of Freeserve, says he made up the statistic back in the 1990s when he was trying to promote his Leeds-based ISP. “It’s amazing how many people have spouted it back to me since then,” he told an audience at Marshall’s Mill in Leeds in November. “Including probably me,” his fellow panellist Leeds City council chief executive Tom Riordan quipped. In fact, if you look at the announcement about AQL’s data centre in the commercial property pages of this issue, you will see that such a claim is anything but true. For the past few years, internet traffic in Leeds has been held up by – shock horror! – having to go through London. But it turns out that even back then, Ahmed was right about something. One day he went along to see Terry Duddy, who was then running PC World, to see if he would be interested in backing his Freeserve venture. By all accounts, Duddy said he couldn’t see the point of this internet thing. Fast forward to this year, and Duddy is now chief executive of Home Retail Group, which owns Argos. The store chain has just hired a group of consultants that has told them – guess what? – that they need to be online more. You can forgive Ahmed a wry smile for this.

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JANUARY

26 The Met Club Met Connect. Hotel du Vin, Harrogate, 8.30-10.30am. For more details ring 01423 525622

9 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch. Marriott Hotel, York, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 9 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Restaurant Bar & Grill, Leeds, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622 10 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Pure Networking. Leeds United Football Club, 7.30-9.30am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 14 Harrogate Chamber Meeeting – Harrogate Economic Development Strategy. Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, 5.30-7.45pm. For more details visit www.harrogatechamber.org 15 The Met Club Social Media Seminar. Hotel du Vin, Harrogate, 8.30-10.30am. For more details ring 01423 525622 16 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Pure Networking. Dean Court Hotel, York, 7.30-9.00am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 18 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Construction Lunch. Sandburn Hall, Flaxton, York. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

27 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Cocktail Masterclass & Networking Evening. Revolution Electric Press, Leeds, 5.30-8.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 28 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch at Venturefest. York Racecourse, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 28 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Cedar Court Grand, York, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622

MARCH 4 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Speed Networking. Theatre Royal, York, 5.00-7.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 6 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch. Cairn Hotel, Harrogate, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 7 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Pure Networking. Leeds United Football Club, 7.30-9.30am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

23 The Met Club Met Connect. The Leeds Club, Leeds, 8.30-10.30am. For more details ring 01423 525622 23 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Meet the Leeds Team. Cosmopolitan Hotel, 10.30-11.30am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 23 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch. Cosmopolitan Hotel, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 23 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Meet the Leeds Team. Cosmopolitan Hotel, 10.30-11.30am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 24 The Met Club Networking Lunch. Hotel du Vin, Harrogate, 12.00-1.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622

7 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Hotel du Vin, Harrogate, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622 11 Harrogate Chamber Meeeting – How to make an exhibition of yourself. Pavillions of Harrogate, 5.30-7.45pm. For more details visit www.harrogatechamber.org 12 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce City2City Business Lunch. Weetwood Hall Conference Centre, Leeds, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 13 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Pure Networking. National Railway Museum, York, 7.30-9.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 13 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Doubletree by Hilton, Leeds, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622

24 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Company Visit to the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, University of York. 5.00-7.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 31 The Met Club Leeds Business Lunch. Doubletree by Hilton, Leeds, 12.00-2.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622 31 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Annual Dinner. With Keith Williams, chief executive of British Airways, as guest speaker. Queens Hotel, Leeds, from 6.45pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

FEBRUARY

15 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Meet the Leeds Team. DeVere Oulton Golf Resort & Spa, Leeds, 10.30-11.30am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 15 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch. DeVere Oulton Golf Resort & Spa, Leeds, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 15 The Met Club Ladies Lunch. Blackhouse Grill on the Square, Leeds, 12.00-2.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622 19 The Met Club Social Media Masterclass. The Leeds Club, Leeds, 8.30-10.30am. For more details ring 01423 525622

6 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch. Novotel, York, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

19 The Met Club Networking Lunch. Hotel du Vin, York. 12.00-1.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622

7 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Pure Networking. Leeds United Football Club, 7.30-9.30am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

19 The Met Club Networking Lunch. Malagor Thai, Wakefield. 12.00-1.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622

7 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Hotel du Vin, Harrogate, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622

19 Leeds Media & Techmesh Special, venue tbc, 5.30-8.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

11 Harrogate Chamber Meeeting – Promoting Harrogate. Pannal Golf Club, Harrogate, 5.30-7.45pm. For more details visit www.harrogatechamber.org

21 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Annual Dinner. York Racecourse, from 6.45pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

13 The Met Club Social Media Seminar. The Leeds Club, Leeds, 8.30-10.30am. For more details ring 01423 525622

26 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Property Forum. Royal York Station Hotel, 5.00-7.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

13 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Doubletree by Hilton, Leeds, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622

The diary is updated daily online at www.bq-magazine.co.uk

15 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch. Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, 12.00-2.00pm. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 20 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce Pure Networking. Bedern Hall, Bedern, York, 7.30-9.00am. For more details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

BUSINESS QUARTER | WINTER 12

Please check with contacts beforehand that arrangements have not changed. Events organisers are also asked to notify us at the above email address of any changes or cancellations as soon as they are known.

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