BQ Yorkshire Issue 08

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ISSUE EIGHT: SPRING 2011

live debate Growing and maintaining the export momentum moo-ving ahead How Yorkshire is lapping up ice-cream success high street tv Andrew Malcher sells to people who like buying all cut and dried Minding peas and queues in the food industry

ace venturer Peter Harrington develops computer simulation games – for real

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

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BUSINESS QUARTER: SPRING 11: ISSUE EIGHT There’s a distinct foodie feel to this month’s issue. We take a look to see how Symington’s, a dried food producer which can trace its history back more than 180 years, is faring now it is firmly located in Leeds under the guiding hand of food industry stalwart David Salkeld.

From dried food to frozen food, we also consider how the ice cream industry fares in the region. Not the most obvious location for it – and in fact as we find one producer even thinks that’s one reason any Yorkshire ice-cream could never be a national brand. But Europe’s biggest ice-cream manufacturer is still located in this region, as are countless mini suppliers, including husband-and-wife team Yummy Yorkshire.

Dan Curtis knows a thing or two about food, too. His company has been serving it to school kids for many a year. As you might expect, Jamie Oliver isn’t his favourite person, but not for reasons you would think.

Our three other entrepreneurs could readily be described as serial entrepreneurs. Andrew Malcher is currently busy developing his sixth TV channel from offices that used to be occupied by Sky TV. He’s been championing the cause of TV shopping channels since the mid-1990s, and is certainly not afraid to admit to it. Find out why his new company, High Street TV, looks set to make £40m this year.

After a successful career in law, Ian Richardson set up Covenant Healthcare in 2001 and sold it on in 2005 at the height of the boom in the kind of mammoth deal we are unlikely to see repeated for a long time – if ever. But having got bored after just three months in

retirement, he is ready to do it all again with his new venture, SkinCity. We find out what makes him tick, and why he went from one career to another.

Elsewhere in this issue we find out why York University’s new Heslington East development is good news for business. Our second BQ Live event considers how we can get more Yorkshire companies exporting, and we have lunch with Peter Harrington, developer of a business simulation computer game that he thinks could finally transform the way we teach our young people in this country. Enjoy!

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BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

CONTE BUSINESS QUARTER: SPRING 11

LONG DISTANCE VIEW

Features

60 HIGH STREET TV Andrew Malcher on television and shopping with the digital channels

18 LONG DISTANCE VIEW David Twiddle knows a thing or two about balancing

30 LIVE DEBATE Growing and maintaining the export momentum during a recession

36 SUCCESS STORY The University of York’s new campus has settled down and freshened up

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

66 CUT AND DRIED

18 HIGH STREET TV

Symington’s, a well-established food firm, is chipping away at the big boys

69 HEALTH IS CATCHING Entrepreneur Ian Richardson on his second business venture – or third

72 MOO-VING AHEAD Yummy Yorkshire making headway in the competitive ice-cream business

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60

TENTS YORKSHIRE EDITION

FASHION

28 COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

The landmark projects influencing our built environment

42 BUSINESS LUNCH

Regulars

Ace Venturer Peter Harrington spills the beans on computer simulations

52 WINE Mark Hoyland asks a few questions

54 FASHION Salute the aristo movement that Jeremy Hackett created 28 years ago

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ON THE RECORD Our rich, varied approach to business

54 MOTORING

58 EQUIPMENT Porsche Design – and not a car in sight

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NEWS Who’s doing what, where, why and when in Yorkshire

24 AS I SEE IT Sisters can run the banks – for a change

62 MOTORING Bentley’s Continental translation

81 FRANK TOCK Gripping gossip from our backroom boy

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62 BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

ON THE RECORD

SPRING 11

More reasons to use the internet, Northern Foods still look ripe for takeover, a software company counts the costs of Canada, it’s cheerio to Netto, and Yorkshire investors see the results of their shrewedness >> Morrisons jumps into e-commerce Morrisons has invested more than £100m in two dot com retailers in order to jump start the development of its own e-commerce site, which it hopes to have operating by spring next year.

The supermarket giant has acquired kiddicare. com an online baby and infant goods retailer, for £70m. It says the site “offers a truly innovative approach to e-commerce” and operates “an extremely well-built technology platform” which Morrisons now has total control of as part of the deal.

At the same time it has paid £32m to take a 10% stake in FreshDirect, an online retailer serving the York area. As part of the deal, Morrisons gets a seat on the board and an opportunity to embed staff within the company to see how it operates.

The news came on the same day that Morrisons posted a 7% jump in annual turnover to £16.5bm. In the 12 months to the end of January 2011, it also posted a £16m jump in pre-tax profits to £874m, although 2009/10’s figures were boosted by a credit of £91m as a result of moving away from a final salary pension scheme.

Chief executive Dalton Phillips said: “Our plan to make Morrisons ‘different and better than ever’ has great momentum, with store trials under way that are yielding exciting results, our first convenience store sites secured, and important e-commerce investments in FreshDirect and kiddicare.com.”

>> CPP profits up Identity protection group CPP has posted a 60% hike in pre-tax profits on a 12% increase in turnover in its first full-year results as a quoted company.

In 2010 the company, which is also currently York’s biggest private sector employer, made a profit of £39.8m on a turnover of £325.8m.

The company, which runs a range of schemes including credit card and key protection, says

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

>> Endless sells Amco Turnaround house Endless has sold engineering business Amco on to publicly-listed Renew Holdings for £19.8m, just under two years after it acquired the Barnsley business. Since that MBO, the company has focused more on the higher growth energy markets, locking itself into long-term contracts in the rail industry. Turnover for 2010 is expected to be over £75m.

Renew chief executive Brian May said: “The acquisition allows Renew to increase and broaden the scale of its specialist engineering operations.”

The Endless co-founder said the fact that the company was being sold to a publicly-listed company showed the progress that had been made.

“Since the MBO, annual profits have increased more than threefold,” he said.

“The business has expanded its activity across all of its key markets, this at a time when most of its peers have experienced declining turnover and profits.”

Endless and management were advised

by Deloitte and Hill Dickinson; Renew by Brewin Dolphin and DLA Piper, while KPMG carried out due diligence.

the bumper results come on the back of a 12% increase in live policies to 11.2 million, driven by an expansion of packaged accounts in the UK. Its group renewal rate has also remained stable at 75.9%, and it has acquired new business partners including the AA, Banco Sabadell in Spain, Deutsche in Italy and India and Guangdong Development Bank in China.

Group chief executive Eric Woolley said: “This strong performance with revenue growth of 12% has been achieved against a challenging economic backdrop, confirming that our life assistance products are highly valued by our

06

customers who are seeking to safeguard themselves against the anxieties and complexities of modern life.”

>> Greencore backs out of Northern Food producer Greencore has abandoned its bid for Northern Foods.

The Irish-based company said it had only been interested in buying Northern Foods if it could reach agreement on selling parts of the company that it didn’t want to a third party at the same time – but no agreement on such a sale could be reached.

SPRING 11

ON THE RECORD

Greencore’s withdrawal means the way is now clear for a possible takeover of Northern Foods

by Ranjit Boparan.

He claimed to have the support of 70% of Northern’s shareholders for such a move as BQ went to press.

>> Netto takeover approved The Office of Fair Trading has decided not to refer Asda’s takeover of Netto UK to the Competition Commission.

The move paves the way for Asda to take over 147 stores and 1.2m sq ft of space. It is investing £100m to convert the stores to Asda by the end of this year.

Earlier in January, Morrisons agreed to buy 16 old Netto stores from Asda, or 120,000sq ft of space, for £28m.

Including the converted Netto stores, Asda plans to open 168 new stores this year, with a total space of 1.8m sq ft. That makes 2011 the biggest year of growth in the supermarket’s history.

>> Emis leaves Canada EMIS, a supplier of software to GP’s surgeries and other health organisations, has seen its pre-tax profits jump 11% to £16.1m in its maiden full-year results as a listed company.

But the Leeds company, which also saw revenues on continuing operations grow by 8.1% to £62.4m in 2010, has now abandoned its plans to establish a software presence in Canada.

It says exiting from this market could cost it a total of £2.5m this year.

In the UK it is continuing its roll out of its EMIS Web cloud computing system. So far this year it has been installed in 33 GP’s surgeries, with a further 247 scheduled to have it installed.

Chief executive Sean Riddell said the company has already been in discussions with GP’s groups about the Government proposed changes to the way funding in the NHS operates.

“Of the first wave of 52 GP consortia announced, representing 22% of England’s GP practices, 77% are already EMIS users,” he said.

>> Mutuals mutually improve The three largest building societies in Yorkshire have all posted full-year results that are a significant improvement on last year.

The Yorkshire Building Society made a pre-tax profit of £115.4m in 2010, turning around a loss the year before of £12.5m. Chief executive Ian Cornish chose the return to the black to announce that he would be stepping down from a role he has held for eight years, although not until a replacement has been found.

Succession issues look more troubling at the Leeds Building Society, where chief executive Ian Ward (above) has had to postpone his retirement after deputy chief executive David Pickersgill fell ill. The society has even started advertising for a chief executive in case Pickersgill is not able to return.

However the Leeds posted a 33% increase in pre-tax profits to £42.4m in 2010. New lending was up 7% to £984m, and the society welcomed 52,000 new members, bringing its total to a record 684,000. Its cost income ratio dropped from 36% to 34%, which Ward claims is more favourable than any other major building society. Group pre-tax profit at the Skipton Building Society, meanwhile, was £35m for 2010. That’s up from the £18m the society made the year before, once you discount the £40m it got from selling Callcredit Information Group.

The performance was boosted by a £48m profit coming in from Connells, the estate agency it owns, despite the gloom in the housing market. The society also managed down losses within its core mortgage and savings division from £33m to £7m.

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BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

NEWS

SPRING 11

An American accent is preferred, Continental brake-fast in Leeds, pie company is saved, Yorkshire PA comes out on top, Coopers sells coffee, HGV firm drives forward and Harrogate hotel group expands >> Leeds man to lead team

Savant’s Ian Richardson (second left) hands over the business to Naturalife’s Dominic Galvin (second right) and Darragh Hammond (left), watched by Nick Goulding of hlw Commercial Lawyers.

>> Savant goes Irish Leeds-based Savant Distribution, a nutritional oil and dietary supplements supplier, has been acquired by Naturalife Health for an undisclosed sum.

The Irish company intends to use the Savant distribution centre in north Leeds as a springboard for the UK expansion.

It has pledged to boost UK investment and double the existing number of staff within the year.

The company already supplies health products to more than 90% of Ireland’s food stores and pharmacies from its headquarters in County Wicklow.

Naturalife Health director Dominic Galvin said: “Expanding into the UK market is a key element in our growth strategy. Savant is a natural fit – we share the same ethos and we’ve enjoyed a close working relationship with the company for 13 years.

Former Savant shareholders Ian Richardson and Melanie Mascall are exiting the business as part of the deal. Richardson said the sale was “a natural and very positive development for Savant”.

Hlw Commercial Lawyers advised Naturalife Health. Partner Nick Goulding said: “This purchase reinforces that, despite the gloomy economic climate, deals are still being struck that will bring new jobs and investment to Yorkshire.”

>> Guarantee for wind turbine Evoco Energy’s latest wind turbine has gained accreditation with the Microgeneration Certification Scheme, an industry standard.

The Yorkshire company specialises in small-scale wind turbine technology.

The Evoco 10 can produce an energy yield worth up to £14,000 per annum to

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

landowners. The company claims this means it could recover the cost of initial investment in less than four years.

The turbine was subject to stringent testing over ten months to become only one of seven such wind turbines to currently be MCS-accredited, and therefore eligible for Feed-in-Tariffs (FITs) under the UK Government’s clean energy scheme.

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Dermot Callinan, a partner in KPMG’s Leeds office who has led the practice’s northern private client advisory team for 14 years, has been appointed head of the firm’s national practice.

It’s the first time a partner outside of London has held this role.

Callinan, who now heads a team of 150 personal tax professionals, has been a specialist in private client tax and wealth advice since starting practice in 1985.

At the same time, the northern team has recruited Aniella Bodnar from a competitor in London while Hannah Cridland and James Morton have been promoted to manager and consultant respectively.

Callinan said: “I am delighted to take on the national leadership role but am going to do it from Leeds and I am totally committed to remaining here and to servicing our clients in Yorkshire.”

SPRING 11

NEWS

The company’s new premises, which cover 2,450 sq ft, are three times the size of its previous offices and are based in a brand new development at Temple Point.

Matrix, which claims to be the UK’s largest energy consultancy, has made significant investment in the move so far by implementing facilities that include a new IT infrastructure and modern conference facilities.

Regional manager Paul Burroughs said: “The expansion of the Leeds branch will also create new job opportunities.

“We’re looking to fill at least four positions – from sales managers to administrators – in the immediate future, so the move will also have a positive and immediate impact on the local economy.”

>> Bentley Continental GT arrives in Leeds Bentley’s latest model, the new Continental GT, has arrived in Leeds at JCT600 Leodis Court.

With increases in power, torque and fuel efficiency, the new Continental GT’s engine is designed in a unique ‘W’ configuration and is the most compact 12-cylinder engine in the world.

It is capable of running on the latest environmentally-sustainable bio-fuels due to its advanced FlexFuel technology.

It also features a 40:60 front-rear split power ratio, to give better cornering performance, and can reach 60mph in just 4.6 seconds.

“The new Continental GT adds another beautifully designed, prestige car to the iconic Bentley range,” said Michael Carr, general manager of JCT600 Leodis Court. “We’re delighted to be the first showroom in Yorkshire to display this stunning coupe.”

At the same time, JCT600’s Body Clinic in Bradford has won an award from BMW as the top bodyshop in the North of England.

>> Aircon firm invests for training Leeds-based Airedale International Air Conditioning is investing £500,000 in a new training centre.

The centre will feature actual production and test workshops and tooling.

It will help engineers already working in the industry but will also play a key role in the next generation of skilled mechanical and electrical engineers.The company, part of the US-based Modine group of companies, has a further £1.5m earmarked for expansion of its extensive on-site test centre.

Steve Joyce, HR director of the £40m turnover company, said: “A substantial proportion of our 370-strong skilled workforce is aged 55

or over and it is vital we have a strategy in place for replacing those skills.”

“The training centre will also be used to advance skills for existing employees and is already training engineers from other companies, including BT.” Managing director Clive Parkman added: “We are fortunate in having a supportive parent company with the funds to back our educational and training requirements. The new training centre will also allow us to sell more external courses to a wider market.”

>> Matrix moves Energy management company Matrix has expanded its presence in Yorkshire by relocating its offices in Leeds.

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>> Riverford gets into growing Organic vegbox company Riverford is expanding by encouraging people in Yorkshire to grow their own greens.

The company, regionally based in Yorkshire on Home Farm near Northallerton, has launched a “box to grow” scheme involving four different types of boxes.

Each box contains seedlings and a guide with information on how to care for the plants.

Customers can also sign up for regular hints and tips by email.

Peter Richardson, farmer and owner of Home Farm said: “There is something special about growing your own but it can be hard to get started. That’s where our boxes to grow come in.”

Riverford on Home Farm currently delivers organic veg boxes to over 3,000 homes across the North East and Yorkshire every week.

BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

NEWS

SPRING 11

>> YF man goes to PWC Rich Hall, formerly general manager of the University of Hull Logistics Institute, has been appointed by PricewaterhouseCoopers to lead the development of its sustainability and climate change practice across the North.

He has a remit to strengthen PwC’s client offering on climate change strategy and investment, climate risk management and sustainable sourcing and procurement. He brings more than 20 years’ experience to the team.

In his most recent role as director of development at Co2Sense Yorkshire, Yorkshire Forward’s vehicle for sustainable strategy and delivery, he worked on many challenging issues affecting commercial and public sectors including climate change adaptation, value chain impacts, sustainable leadership development, carbon management and carbon trading.

He said: “The sustainability agenda is becoming more and more critical to business success.

While the downturn has seen sustainability efforts focus on the immediate bottom line, increased legislation and stakeholder interest are driving assurance requirements upwards.

“Sound business principles require organisations to be resilient to challenges. Businesses need expert advice to guide them through this complexity.”

>> Plus for Drivers Plus

Councillor Richard Lewis, Leeds City Council’s executive member for development, left, and Simon Nadin, Siemens Leeds general manager at the new Siemens site in Stourton, Leeds

>> Siemens in £1.2m Leeds move Siemens has invested an initial £1.2m in transferring its mechanical drives business from Bradford to brand-new premises on Navigation Park in Stourton, Leeds.

The move is designed to let the £15m operation handle additional and bigger contracts, including work to support the group’s planned major offshore wind turbine manufacturing plant in Hull.

The plant assembles gears, motors and couplings for the rail, utilities and general industry and for the growing renewable energy sector, including wind and wave power.

The new, purpose-built, 50,000 sq ft factory has created 30% more production space, increased height for 25-tonne cranes and allows room to optimise production cell layouts and materials handling flows.

While many of the site’s 54 skilled employees have transferred from Bradford, an apprentice scheme has also been created to help develop a new generation of skilled engineers.

General manager Simon Nadin said: “Siemens is committed to investing in Britain’s industrial future, which is crucial in the current economic climate. Mechanical gears are a key element in production of drive train systems and we aim to continue to invest in and develop our capabilities in this area here at our new site in Leeds.”

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

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Andy Gardner and Jane King have both joined Bradford-based HGV driver recruitment company Drivers Plus as sales and business development managers.

Gardner, 42, joins Drivers Plus from Impress Sport, a sports branding, events and PR company in Halifax where he was a sales and marketing director and held responsibility for the management of several large sponsorship accounts for clients such as Gillette. He was also responsible for looking after the day-to-day running of the business and its continued growth.

Before that, he was a director at commercial travel company ATM, where he was single-handedly responsible for increasing turnover from £750,000 to £2.7m in less than three years.

King, 24, joins the company from Bridge Recruitment, where she spent a year working as a recruitment consultant. Before that, she spent six years working in estate agency, where she gained valuable sales and customer service experience.

Established in 2003 and ideally located close to the M62 in Bradford, Drivers Plus specialises in the placement of HGV class 1 and class 2 drivers throughout the north of England.

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ISSUE EIGHT: SPRING 2011

ISSUE ELEVEN: AUTUMN 2010

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ISSUE THREE: SPRING 2011

live debate Growing and maintaining the export momentum

FORD ABILITY Another century of manufacturing, led by example,

the live debate

moo-ving ahead

built by engineers

TICKING TIME BOMB

The prospect of being left behind in the race for regional recognition

Amanda Hamilton’s healthy off-screen life

high street tv Andrew Malcher sells to people who like buying

How Yorkshire is lapping up ice-cream success

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

NORTH EAST EDITION

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Business Quarter Magazine

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YORKSHIRE

tram now standing

Richard Jeffrey, the man tied to Edinburgh’s tracks

NORTH EAST EDITION

NORTH EAST

square root

Blythswood Square is Scotland’s most fashionable hotel – just don’t call it boutique, says Peter Taylor, the man behind it ISSUE THREE: SPRING 2011: SCOTLAND EDITION

SMALLS TALK

A brief encounter with Tallulah Love’s creator covers ribbons and bows, burlesque and business women, top to bottom

Business Quarter Magazine

YORKSHIRE EDITION

The designer with an eye for old movies

THE LIVE DEBATE North East experts agree it pays to look over the horizon ISSUE ELEVEN: AUTUMN 2010: NORTH EAST EDITION

ISSUE EIGHT: SPRING 2011: YORKSHIRE EDITION

YORKSHIRE EDITION

hunt for style

get short shrift

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

queen of detox

FAST TRACKER High ranking in the Legal 500 means moaners

all cut and dried Minding peas and queues in the food industry Peter Harrington develops computer simulation games – for real

Where do Scottish tourists go from here?

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

SCOTLAND EDITION

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Over 30,000 MD’s, CEO’s and Entrepreneurs receive BQ Magazine each quarter. If you are reading this statement then your potential clients will be too. We publish separate editions in Yorkshire, the North East and Scotland.

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

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

SMALLS TALK

and bows, burlesque and business women, top to bottom A brief encounter with Tallulah Love’s creator covers ribbons

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

venturer square 1ace business magazine x 3 regional editions = a great formula to reach new business. simulation games – for real Peter Harrington develops computer

root

don’t call it boutique, says Peter Taylor, the man behind it Blythswood Square is Scotland’s most fashionable hotel – just

THE LIVE DEBATE

North East experts agree it pays to look over the horizon

all cut and information dried now standing For more on how BQ Magazine could work for you across the Northtram of England and Scotland FAST TRACKER high street tv hunt for style call us on 0191 537 5720 or email sales@room501.co.uk TICKING TIME BOMB Minding peas and queues in the food industry

get short shrift High ranking in the Legal 500 means moaners

Andrew Malcher sells to people who like buying

moo-ving ahead

How Yorkshire is lapping up ice-cream success

Richard Jeffrey, the man tied to Edinburgh’s tracks

The designer with an eye for old movies

regional recognition The prospect of being left behind in the race for

queen of detox

Amanda Hamilton’s healthy off-screen life

Growing and maintaining the export momentum

built by engineers Another century of manufacturing, led by example,

Where do Scottish tourists go from here?

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live debate

ISSUE EIGHT: SPRING 2011

FORD ABILITY

ISSUE ELEVEN: AUTUMN 2010

the live debate

ISSUE THREE: SPRING 2011

NEWS

SPRING 11

>> CVL chooses Fantastic Fantastic Media has secured a new client with Leeds-based contract hire and fleet management company Contract Vehicles Limited (CVL), and has already started work on refreshing the company’s brand on and offline.

With more than 20 years in the commercial vehicle industry, CVL is responsible for the management of a fleet in excess of 12,000 vehicles.

A new marketing strategy aims to focus on CVL’s long-term client partnerships and the complete fleet management solution that the company offers.

Eric Burns, sales director at CVL, said: “CVL is a progressive company and we want to stay ahead of the competition.

“Through working with Fantastic and using their experience and expertise we are already seeing great results in terms of increased visits to the website.”

>> First of a kind for VHE Leeds-based land remediation specialist VHE is nearing the end of a contract by Slough Borough Council to carry out remediation and car park construction at Colnbrook Primary School near Slough.

The scheme is believed to be the first education project scheduled under part 2A of the Environmental Protection Act following investigation of the primary school site, which was previously used as a gas works.

The eight-week project is being undertaken while the school is still operational. It involves the removal of contaminated material including Japanese knotweed from areas around the school buildings, as well as gas works waste from areas around and inside three buried former tank structures.

>> Pavers launches shopping channel

Left to right: Lisa Kendrick, marketing director; Richard Doyle, chairman; Matt Holmes, MD; Jon Wright, technical director; Denis Kaye, FD, and Curtis Wright, NED.

>> Liquid wins more funds Cloud accounting specialist Liquid Accounts has successfully secured second-round funding in order to develop its sales.

The new funding coincides with the release of Version 7 of its software, which includes a new optional integrated Payroll module.

The funding was raised from Liquid’s existing consortium of investors which includes chairman Richard Doyle, Ian McNeill, and Curtis Wright, an accountant who is now a non-executive.

As with the first round investment, the private investment was matched by The Aspire Fund – a Government Fund for women-led businesses managed by Capital for Enterprise. The company was eligible because marketing director Lisa Kendrick helped found it.

Managing director Matt Holmes said: “In the past year we’ve done a lot of work on structuring the company for growth and refocusing our sales efforts on building strategic partnerships where Liquid Accounts can be included as part of an offering to small businesses. We have also significantly grown our network of accountancy professionals who are supporting us.”

Liquid Accounts also claims to have become the first cloud company to comply with and sign the Business Application Software Developers’ Association’s cloud vendor charter. This means it can guarantee customers that they can export data from their software whenever they like.

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

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York-based Pavers Shoes is launching what it claims is the world’s first TV shopping channel dedicated solely to selling shoes.

The channel – PaversShoes.tv – will launch on April 6 on Sky channel 659.

The company expects it to increase total sales by 20%, adding around £10m to Paver’s annual turnover. Pavers already has more than 100 retail outlets across the country and a website, but wanted to launch a TV shopping channel to help increase both sales and brand awareness nationally.

Managing director Stuart Paver said: “Pavers has always prided itself on being an innovative retailer – being one of the first footwear specialists to offer size two shoes and a variety of width fittings – and the creation of the world’s first channel dedicated entirely to selling shoes fosters this ethos.

The channel will be presented by Julie Peasgood, best known for appearing on the Alan Titchmarsh Show and Emmerdale; Jane Farnham, another regular on mainstream TV, and Debbie Paver, who has presented regular slots on Ideal World Shopping Channel.

SPRING 11

NEWS

>> STG in Bristol Castleford-based Strategic Team Group has backed up its expansion into the South West by opening a new office in Bristol and employing three new construction professionals to manage the growing number of contracts secured in the area.

The opening of the new office at Clapton in Gordano follows recent contract wins for the firm in South Wales, Devon, Cornwall and Hampshire.

The Bristol office will be run by three former employees of collapsed building company Rok, headed by operations manager, Matt Tyler.

>> Nursery saved, but school goes >> Denby pie company saved Abbeydale Foods has acquired two Yorkshire food brands, including one associated with the world-famous Denby Dale pie, after both companies went into administration in February.

The acquisition of the Denby Dale Pie Company and Scunthorpe-based Country Chef saves 80 jobs which had been threatened.

Denby Dale Pie manufactures a range of own-label frozen pies as well as the iconic Denby Dale pie brand. Country Chef processes potatoes for use by manufacturers of filled potato skins.

Andrew Hayes, who runs Abbeydale with Colin Wright, said: “Abbeydale has been formed to build a substantial food group and both these acquisitions fit our strategy while at the same time saving jobs in the local area. “What’s more, the news from the Food and Drink Federation that UK food and drink exports have broken through the £10bn barrier for the first time means the future of exports for Abbeydale is a promising one.

“We’ve been growing the sales of potato skins in continental Europe over the last two years. In the last two months, we have seen some significant gains in France.”

Grant Thornton and Geldards advised on the deal. Bridie Robinson of Grant Thornton’s Leeds-based corporate finance team, said: “This is a great move by Abbeydale saving two Yorkshire businesses from closure. The food sector is facing a double squeeze from significant input price rises and constrained consumer spending. The Abbeydale deal provides these two businesses with better financial resources and an experienced management team, giving the opportunity to grow and participate in that consolidation.”

>> Henderson creates new division Leeds-based Henderson Insurance has created a new division, Henderson Employee Benefits, based at the Lawnswood former HQ of Denney O’Hara (Life and Pensions) Ltd, acquired by Henderson in spring 2010.

The new HEB division combines the Denney O’Hara business with Henderson’s previous healthcare and employee benefits arm.

Five healthcare staff have moved across from the Leeds corporate office to the new unit, and four more have since been recruited.

“This brings the total number employed in this division to 26, up from the 18 employed at Denney O’Hara at the time of the acquisition,” said Henderson director Ian Dearnley. “The market conditions have seen other firms contracting while Henderson expands, so we have been able to cherrypick the best talent.”

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A child’s day care centre in Honley looking after 114 children has been saved from closure by being bought by Carlin Nurseries.

But a preparatory school linked to it will still be closing.

Jones Day Care Nurseries, trading as Honley Day Care, went into administration in January. Carlin bought the business and assets in February, but Honley Preparatory School was left out of the sale and is being closed due to lack of profitability.

Administrator Chris Brookbank was advised

by Leeds legal firm Clarion on the sale.

He said: “Honley Day Care has a strong reputation in the area and it is pleasing to see this facility continue for local children, as well as jobs being saved.”

>> Salvo’s has new manager Salvo’s Italian restaurant in Headingley has appointed Robert Browes as restaurant manager as it prepares to expand into next-door premises.

Browes has over 26 years experience in the industry including working at the Flying Pizza in Roundhay at Leodis in the centre of Leeds, and at the Old Police Station in Chapel Allerton.

He has also worked at restaurants in Sydney.

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NEWS

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>> Cooper sells up Entrepreneur David Cooper (BQ Yorkshire’s last-but-one front cover star) has sold the coffee wholesale business he launched along with his wife Jacqui from a garage in Leeds 22 years ago to United Coffee for an undisclosed sum.

United Coffee’s brands include Lyons brand, and the company claims to be a market leader in private label retail.

The Coopers were advised by Jo Haigh and hlw Commercial Lawyers. United Coffee was advised by Baker Tilly and Stevens & Bolton.

Elaine Higginson, UK and Ireland managing director for United Coffee, said: “Cooper’s has the same values as United Coffee and an undeniable passion for quality coffee, so it’s the perfect fit.

“Acquiring the company will allow us to grow our Northern base and increase our presence in the growing independent sector.”

David Cooper said: “The expertise, knowledge and passion of the United Coffee team will take the Coopers brand from strength to strength.”

Left to right: Peter Myers, area director, Welcome to Yorkshire; David Jenkins, chairman of Yorkshire Branch of the Institute of Physics; Gillian Cruddas, chief executive of Visit York; Cllr Sue Galloway, Lord Mayor of York; Tony Rogers, Tony Rogers Conference and Events Services Ltd

>> Ambassadors wanted A network of “ambassadors” who will promote York and Scarborough as conference destinations has been launched with support from Welcome to Yorkshire.

York & Scarborough Conferences’ Business Tourism Ambassador Programme aims to increase conference bookings into York and Scarborough by creating a network of informed, motivated and well-connected ambassadors who can promote local conference and events facilities to organisations and societies of whom they are members.

The organisation will support these new ambassadors by offering advice from the initial bid through to the conference itself, including sourcing venues and accommodation.

The focus will initially be on York, with the initiative rolling out to Scarborough later this year.

Professor Tony Robards from the University of York has already signed up along with ten confirmed ambassadors to date.

Laura Freer, business tourism marketing manager for York & Scarborough Conferences said: “We are aiming to recruit 20 key ambassadors in the first year.”

>> Americans buy Harrogate firm Harrogate-based hosted services provider Preferred One Stop Technologies has been acquired

by Intercall, a subsidiary of West Corporation.

Managing director Neil May said the acquisition brings together his company’s technical knowledge of on-premise cloud-based and fully-hosted communications with Intercall’s global infrastructure and client base.

“The combined offering provides clients with unlimited options for designing, deploying and executing on world-class business process and communication integration strategies,” he said.

Harrogate law firm Davidson Large advised the company. Corporate partner Neil Large said: “This was a particularly challenging and complex transaction due to its structure and the fact that we were dealing with a US buyer.”

Corporate finance advice came from Haines Watts. Addleshaw Goddard’s Manchester office advised Intercall, while PricewaterhouseCooper’s Newcastle office carried out tax due diligence.

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INTERVIEW

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NEWS

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>> Win for universities’ PA Marion Lowrence, a PA at Yorkshire Universities, was named Yorkshire PA of the Year in a ceremony at the Queens Hotel in Leeds in February.

The judges, who included Deborah Green, chief executive of Marketing Leeds, Diane Marshman, regional Coordinator of the

Institute of Personal Adminstrators (IPA), and David Kanarens, general manager at The Queens Hotel, were impressed by her enthusiasm to adapt to new challenges and to mentor others.

Other winners included Janet Read of RSA Group (lifetime achievement), Emma Butterfield of Odgers Berndtson (rising star),

Michael Walsh from Yorkshire and Humber Strategic Health Authority (above and beyond Award) and the team at PricewaterhouseCoopers (team award).

>> Glisten owner buys Big Bear Big Bear Group, the company behind Sugar Puffs and Fox’s Glacier and XXX Mints, has been acquired for £82m by Finnish company Raisio, which last year also acquired Leedsbased Glisten.

Big Bear was launched with backing from Investec in 2003, when it acquired a non-core division of Northern Foods. It bought Sugar Puffs from Pepsico in 2005.

Raisio says the deal will give it a foothold in the branded snack and breakfast markets in the UK and make Great Britain the largest market for its food business, with annual sales of 140m-150m euros.

Raisio’s chief executive Matti Rihko said: “Big Bear complements extremely well the earlier acquisition of Glisten and brings the necessary critical mass for the future.”

The deal gives Investec an initial rate of return on its original investment of 37%.

>> Logicalis takes on Elland firm

>> Harrogate hotelier makes two more deals Akkeron Hotels, which operates the Yorkshire Hotel in Harrogate and the Best Western Ardsley House Hotel in Barnsley, has added ten hotels to its existing portfolio of 26.

The group, headed by Harrogate hotelier Matthew Welbourn, has acquired most of the assets and goodwill of Butterfly Hotels from administrators Begbies Traynor.

The new hotels will bring the group turnover to around £57m.

The deal safeguards 200 jobs across the country, and Akkeron will operate all ten additional hotels without interruption to existing or future bookings.

The former Butterfly Hotels venues include a number of Holiday Inn Express, Ramada and Best Western properties from Banbury in Oxfordshire to Kings Lynn in Norfolk.

“The Butterfly Hotels are very good businesses that were constrained by a heavy burden of debt,” said Welbourn. “They dovetail perfectly with our proposition of providing excellent quality, good value, and well-located hotels for the leisure and business traveller.” The company has already outlined plans for further investment in many of the newly-acquired hotels.

Akkeron made its first acquisition of eight hotels, including the Yorkshire Hotel, in December 2009. A year later it bought the 18-strong Forestdale Hotels.

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Telepresence and video conference technology supplier Direct Visual Group Limited (DVGL) has been acquired by multinational communications supplier Logicalis for an undisclosed sum.

DVGL will continue to be based in Elland after the deal, and the company’s founders will continue to work with Logicalis, a division of AIM-listed Datatec, for an agreed term to assist with the handover.

DVGL was advised on the deal by solicitors Chadwick Lawrence and Manchester-based corporate finance adviser Ballard Evans.

Sarah Hemmings of Chadwick Lawrence said: “The deal encompassed several different areas of our expertise, and came together to perfectly suit the business objectives of both parties.”

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ENTREPRENEUR

LONG DISTANCE VIEW Recruitment companies have had to reinvent their sector and job-seekers now think more about visibility. Peter Baber talks to David Twiddle, a man who knows how to balance both

Outplacement is one of those euphemisms modern business life is so full of. Effectively the process involves firing people, although admittedly you also spend time trying to ensure they are quickly coached back into the workplace.

This mismatch between appearance and reality was made much fun of in the recent Hollywood comedy smash Up in the Air. The film saw George Clooney spend all his working

life flying from anonymous US city to anonymous US city relieving people of their jobs. And the plot development was that his company had decided to make his travelling a thing of the past too, by making him fire people via the internet instead. A witty idea indeed, but only the kind of thing that happens in film comedies, surely? No-one would ever do that in real life.

In fact, they are doing so, right here in

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Yorkshire. York-based David Twiddle hasn’t actually seen Up In the Air. “I am glad you mentioned it,” he says, “because somebody told me about that film and I couldn’t remember the title.”

But he reckons distance-based outplacement is going to help his company Renovo recover from a sticky patch brought about by the credit crunch and subsequent recession and go on to even greater things. There is certainly >>

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ENTREPRENEUR a gap in the market for such an approach, he says.

Twiddle is a career recruiter who by the age of 37 had already collected all the money that was due to him from the £24m sale of Morgan McKinley, the first agency he co-founded. Gaps in the market are something he specialises in spotting, and Morgan McKinley was no exception. He and cofounder Steve Grant had noticed that at that time in the mid-1990s the recruitment industry in financial services was missing a trick by not focusing on the mid-market of, say, £60,000pa jobs.

“At that time you had people like Whitehead Mann who only focused on the top of the tree,” he says. “They all had headhunting and selecting businesses, but all they did was retained advertising for which candidates had to apply again and again. Then there were people like Robert Walters which was a consultancy. They did no headhunting at all, but worked on a contingency basis. Then there was what you might call High Street – places you could just walk into.

“Yet we came across people at Morgan Stanley who were looking for equity derivative accountants and claimed there weren’t any in the market. That was ludicrous because they themselves had 80, as did Credit Suisse next door, but they couldn’t get them to move because the industry wasn’t directed at them.

“The big headhunters were not prepared to do the work involved in identifying such people for the fees that were then on offer.

We were, we did it aggressively, and we created huge demand. We were the first pioneers of mid-market search. Now they all do it.”

It was a gap in the market again that persuaded him to re-enter the recruitment market after taking a required year off following the sale of Morgan Mckinley to Imprint in 2005. He had, he says, looked at setting up a business in other industries.

“But they all seemed incredibly difficult compared to recruitment.”

The gap in the market he spotted this time was in specialist skills in regional banking.

“The banks in the regions had never historically needed to recruit,” he says. “But we saw a market that was emerging through

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the sophistication of the products they were selling. They were struggling with the people they had in terms of intellectual ability, and they were being served by accountancy recruiters, which wasn’t always suitable.”

And so Hamilton Caine was born – operating this time out of York, which is you would expect from someone born in Driffield and brought up just outside Malton.

“It took a bit of time to sell the concept,” he says. “Banking in the regions is a tight-knit community where everybody knows everybody. But our model wasn’t always about direct approach, it was about making our presence felt, so people would come to us.

They had begun to take that on board.”

Then, disaster. With the benefit of hindsight, any business that started up in 2005 specifically targeting bankers selling unusual products only had a couple of years to thrive.

Twiddle remembers exactly where he was when the first news of the impending credit crunch came through, on August 7 2007. He was on a beach in Portugal.

“I had a call from one of my directors saying it was looking like Northern Rock was going to go bust,” he says. “I knew that the world had just changed at that point. Northern Rock wasn’t a client, but we knew the impact that would have on the market, particularly when a lot of work we were doing was coming out of the hedge fund market that was packaging dodgy debt. They lost all their liquidity virtually the next day, and as a result we had lost a pipeline of about £500,000 by August 10.”

So what to do? Diversify would certainly be one option. But as Twiddle points out, that is difficult to do in a hurry. So other options rapidly became inevitable. By October 2008 – the period he regards as the peak of the crisis – the company had shrunk from having 18 fee earners to having a staff of just six, including four fee-earners.

“I had to think about getting cost base down,” he says, “so we could get to the right side of the fence each month and stop burning cash.”

It was around this point that moving into outplacement came under scrutiny. It’s a traditional route for recruiters when times are hard, Twiddle says, because it’s effectively “the reverse side of the coin”. As usual, he spotted

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a gap in the market initially in terms of how such services could be delivered.

“We thought, ‘What if we do something edgy and look at the process from a recruiter’s perspective?’” he says. “Given our experience, we could certainly say to people who were looking for work,‘You may not want to hear this, but this is how recruiters work, and once you know that you will have 90% of the job market sewn up.’”

This is not as trivial as it seems, he says. Many people looking for jobs don’t realise how important it is to refresh your CV every week, because of the way recruiters will use search facilities on sites like Monster.

“Recruiters ideally don’t want people who are out of work,” he says. “They want people who are still in work first, and then those who are only just out of work.”

So they will set the search filter to list people who have only recently uploaded or changed their CV first. If your CV has been on the site for nine months and you haven’t changed it, it will be hidden back on the 20th page, which is not a good place to be when recruiters rarely look beyond the first. Twiddle gives a cogent recent example.

“We had someone who had been working for a major building society, effectively as a regional sales manager,” he says. “She had had her CV up on Monster for three months, but had had no calls. The problem was her building society didn’t use the word sales when describing her job, and so neither did she on her CV. But a recruiter looking for a sales person will only look for that. We also told her to refresh her CV every week. After making the changes, she had six calls within a week and was back in work within a fortnight.”

Good for the candidate, then. But the problem for the company, now rechristened Renovo, was that most outplacement is paid for by the company letting people go, and most of them were tied up in five-year contracts with the major industry players such as Penna. You could try approaching soon-to-be-redundant people individually, but Twiddle says the marketing costs of doing that are too high to make it worthwhile.

The other option was finding Governmentfunded work. Surprised at how many

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ENTREPRENEUR

The banks in the regions had never historically needed to recruit. But we saw a gap in the market emerging through the sophistication of their products professionals were coming into Job Centres, in 2008 the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) did launch a scheme to help newlyunemployed professionals. Renovo won the contract to carry out such outplacement work

within North Yorkshire, but such work tended to come in only in dribs and drabs, and the cost of servicing candidates was onerous.

Fortunately over the same period, Twiddle had been having meetings with a technology

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expert he had met on a train who supplied IT into the outplacement industry in the US. “He felt it was a legacy industry that was very slow to change,” he said.

Anyone who could develop the idea of providing services over the internet and by phone instead of face-to-face could bring costs down quite considerably – an important consideration in an industry which has been known to charge up to £5,000 per candidate.

Renovo subsequently developed a career management portal that can provide each candidate with three months unlimited access to a career coach who could also support them over the phone. It also calculated that using such a system it could offer the DWP an outplacement service for just £150 per candidate, provided it was done entirely on a distance basis.

Such a business model would only work with large volumes coming through.

“Someone who uses our services heavily may cost us £2,000,” says Twiddle, “but there will be other people in the same contract who will not use us very much, if at all. So it balances out, but only if there is volume.”

He was surprised at how readily the DWP agreed to his request to start operating nationally with such a service instead of just North Yorkshire, but he suspects it was in a hurry to see results.

Results for Renovo have been impressive.

“Since the summer of 2009 we have supported 20,000 people in this programme,” he says.

“We have accepted referrals from 465 of the 741 Job Centres nationwide. We reckon we own between 10 and 15% of the UK market in this provision.”

Working with MyKnowledgeMap, another York-based company, Renovo has also expanded its portal so that it now includes psychometric tests, links to relevant books and publications, and synchronisation with a wide range of social networks, including Linkedin, which Twiddle says is now a key resource for all recruiters. The company is growing again too.

“We want a £15m turnover and to be employing 150 people in three to five years,” he says. “Although we could do more than that. We certainly want to have 100,000 >>

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phone to these people which is preloaded with our app,” he says. “So if they have any problems they can hit the red button. We expect to do around 10,000 people in the first year.”

He admits that the kind of candidates the company is now dealing with are a world away from the finance professionals it started out targeting – although in recent months its recruitment business, which never disappeared, has started to creep up again.

“Last month we placed a hedge fund manager,” he says, “and at the same time we were running a housing association workshop in Lewisham for gypsy travellers.”

But such a step change, he says, has proved beneficial for him personally.

“I now see that when I set up Hamilton Caine I did it too quickly,” he says. “I rushed straight back into something I knew I could grow quickly, and didn’t set myself a big enough challenge. The net result was that I went home without the passion I knew I always had at Morgan McKinley. This recession has been a great thing, because is has completely reignited my passion.” n

Lee & Priestley’s specialist Entrepreneur Team works with clients as a strategic partner, offering a unique blend of legal, business and entrepreneurial expertise.

people on the programme at any point and time within five years.”

He is confident that such a target can be achieved for two reasons. The first is the forthcoming redundancies in the public sector.

“The public sector hasn’t historically procured outplacement because it hasn’t needed to,” he says, “and now they have really been horrified at the cost of it. I have heard examples of quotes being 20 to 30 times greater than available budget, and for limited support only.”

But just as important are the changes the Government has made in its programme for getting the long-term unemployed back into work. Previously, 13 different employment

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programmes usually aimed to keep such people in a new job for up to 26 weeks, with employment providers paid on a fairly even basis across that time. The New Work Programme will instead be one single project that aims to keep people in employment for two years, and funding will be back-end loaded to encourage employment providers to do everything then can to keep people in work. Twiddle says that as a result employment providers will be looking to work with companies like his to ensure that those newly-employed people have some kind of support. Once again, such support will only be affordable from a distance supplier.

“We may even want to provide a mobile

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Lee & Priestley acts for businesses across a broad range of industries and has a particular reputation for entrepreneurial expertise in the new media, media, internet, technology, creative, leisure, entertainment and healthcare sectors.

Jonathan Oxley, Senior Partner, Lee & Priestley LLP Tel: 0845 129 2300 10-12 East Parade, Leeds, LS1 2AJ www.leepriestley.com

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The University for BUSINESS

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it’s time to dig our heels in It’s becoming obvious that business needs more women in strategic roles. Heather Jackson offers some practical guidance

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The lack of women in British boardrooms has been one of the most hotly debated business issues since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the autumn of 2008. Although at the time I was delighted that it had finally got the attention it deserved, what grated me more than anything was nothing was actually being done to actively address the issue. Some called for mandatory quotas, others voluntary targets and the rest – well, they were happy with their lot and liked the status quo. I wouldn’t say the debate exactly raged but comments such as Harriet Harman’s “If only it had been Lehman

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Sisters running the banks, we would have avoided so much turmoil” dragged the issue out of the long grass and made chairmen, chief executives and others stop and think: “She may have a point.”

Thankfully, it seems one of those who did reflect on what she said was David Cameron.

In October 2010, now safely ensconced in Downing Street, he commissioned former Labour minister Lord Davies of Abersoch not only to examine the numbers but actually dig a little deeper and find out what corporate Britain really thought about women on boards.

The report’s findings, published in February, laid bare where Britain stands. Yes, it reinforced the statistics (only 12.5 % of directors of FTSE 100 companies are women, and half of FTSE 250 companies don’t have a single woman on their board) but because of the crafty remit, it also unearthed a real desire for change. There were of course some who asked Lord Davies:,“What the heck are you doing?” but some people are always going to be stuck in the past.

The recommendations made in the Women on Boards report are great. They’re practical, achievable, promote a meritocracy (something I’m very pleased to see) and are perfectly in tune with the mood of the business community.

Since the report was published, well respected women such as Nicola Horlick and Janet Street-Porter have asked why Lord Davies hasn’t recommended quotas. But I’m glad he didn’t. This isn’t a numbers game, this is about changing attitudes, and we’re already beginning to see cracks in the quota model.

Norway is often held up as the beacon, but their light is dimming with a large number of public companies delisting to avoid the legislation. In Australia, the issue has become a political football being kicked from newspaper to TV studio and from corporate office to state legislature and back again – you’ll agree Yorkshire and British business doesn’t need that right now.

Women are not the economic silver bullet, but better balance certainly is. Research shows that statistically companies who are more gender diverse perform better, and enjoy higher profit margins, greater market share and increased share prices. Better balance also

has a positive effect on corporate behaviour, with better decision-making occurring as a result of directors having a range of experiences and backgrounds.

Trying to spread these messages to as wide an audience as possible is one of the main reasons I set up the Women’s Business Forum (WBF). I wanted to bring women and their organisations together to discuss why women should be aiming for the top jobs, what they should be doing to achieve their goals, and how organisations could change to give women the choice.

The inaugural event in 2010 brought together 500 of the UK’s leading women and a number of high profile male chief executives and chairmen to hear presentations from global business leaders including Andy Hornby, chief executive of Alliance Boots; Craig Jones, global head of diversity for Barclays Wealth, and

WHAT THE DAVIES REPORT RECOMMENDS All heads of FTSE 350 companies should set out the percentage of women they aim to have on their boards in 2013 and 2015 FTSE 100 boards should aim for a minimum of 25% female representation by 2015 Each year, quoted companies should be required to disclose the proportion of women on the board, women in senior executive positions, and female employees in the whole organisation Company bosses should disclose meaningful information about their firms’ appointment processes and how they address diversity in annual reports Recruitment firms should draw up a voluntary code of conduct addressing gender diversity and best practice covering FTSE 350 board level appointments

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AS I SEE IT

Nancy Staisey, vice-president at IBM. WBF is now regarded as the most significant forum on the issue of women in business in the UK and planning is already well under way for this September’s event. WBF 2011 (on September 29 at Rudding Park, outside Harrogate) will be even bigger and even better. I can’t announce the line-up quite yet but let’s just say it blows last year’s out the water!

As with any issue some organisations, sectors and regions move faster than others. What’s been great to see is that Yorkshire companies are once again leading the UK. Retail giant Morrisons is one such example.

They have set themselves a target of 30% female representation for their top executive team – the senior management group – to be achieved within three years. The figure is currently 13%, so to get to 30% is quite a jump. But I have absolutely no doubt they will do it, especially with their director of academy and talent, Toni Eastwood as the driving force.

The motivation behind such a move? Not “a nice thing to do” but a chance to improve business performance. Morrisons wants to create a bigger talent pool so its senior management team and its workforce reflect its customers better, a move the company and I believe will reap huge dividends.

Changes are definitely on the horizon, but the hard work starts now. The Davies Report is a great carrot and one I hope companies respond to. Because otherwise the stick of quotas will strike.

Doing all this work I’m often reminded of something President Kennedy once said: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”

For Yorkshire and Britain to prosper economically in the next decade we need to change. We don’t need Lehman Sisters ruling the boardroom; we need Lehman Brothers and Lehman Sisters working together. Now that’s a potent business compound! n Heather Jackson’s company An Inspirational Journey offers a proactive and collaborative programme aimed at addressing the lack of women on boards and in senior management teams of British companies.

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COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

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Metal expands, Water runs into a hotel, new appointments make a significant contribution, Town Centre fills up, Network Rail moves in and a business park built from straw bales gets the go-ahead >> Metal firm doubles site

First purchase: NoI Leeds

>> King sturge at No1 King Sturge is to join Knight Frank in marketing the 122,000 sq ft of office space at No1 Leeds, One Whitehall Road.

The joint agency bid comes not long after developers BAM, working on behalf of owner IVG, secured planning permission at the ten-acre site for a second, 115,000 sq ft seven-storey office building next to No1 Leeds.

IVG acquired the building in 2007.

Richard Thornton of King Sturge said: “The building offers floor plates of 15,000 sq ft and with part floors from 6,000 sq ft. No1 Leeds is ideally placed to capitalise on the various occupier break clauses and lease expiries we have identified this year. It provides occupiers with affordable first-class accommodation on flexible lease terms.”

Robert Rankin of IVG, which is best known for owning the “Gherkin” in London, said: “We very much welcome King Sturge aboard to maximise the letting potential of No1 Leeds which represents, without doubt, the best office space currently available in the Leeds market. IVG works regionally across the UK and has holdings in all main UK cities, but this is our first purchase in Leeds.”

Alex Duckett of Knight Frank said: “With King Sturge on board, No1 Leeds we hope to build a stronger positive representation of the building.”

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ASD metal services has more than doubled the size of its facility in Leeds by taking out a 15-year lease on an adjoining 215,000 sq ft premises.

The deal gives the company, a division of Klöckner & Co multi-metal distribution, a combined facility of 400,000 sq ft at the site in Valley Farm Road, Stourton.

It also allows it to centralise it structural steel portfolio.

Chief executive Kaha Avaliani said: “The acquisition of the adjoining premises will enable us to centralise our stock-holding activities and increase efficiencies within our distribution chain.

“The new facility will also allow us to carry a greater range of stock items and through the installation of new machinery offer a new service to our existing and future customer base”.

Edward Symmons acted on behalf of the company, while Gent Visick represented the landlord, Threadneedle Property Investments.

Andrew Gent from Gent Visick said: “The unit is well suited to ASD metal services’ operational requirements having been purpose built for steel stockholding operations.”

>> Yorkshire Water building to be hotel Broadacre House, the former Yorkshire Water offices in the centre of Bradford, is to become a Premier Inn following a £5m refurbishment by Leeds-based main contractor GMI. Leeds-based Gregory Property Group bought the property from Keyland Developments.

The proposed hotel has already been forward purchased by a private client of Steadman Brierley for around £6.1m, reflecting an initial yield of around 6%.

Gregory Group is retaining ownership of a

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proposed 9,200 sq ft of office space within the development, but has let this to Foundation Housing on a 15-year lease.

The 50,000 sq ft building on Vicar Lane on the eastern side of the city centre was built by Yorkshire Water in the 1970s to provide customer service and technology space.

Gregory Property Group’s Richard Tovey said: “This inward investment will contribute to Bradford city centre’s renaissance. Broadacre House has become tired and we are delighted to find an alternative use for the tower.

“By attracting a quality occupier, this has enabled a full refurbishment to be viable.

Bradford centre is also currently short of hotel space.”

Work should be completed by the end of October 2011. The Premier Inn will open by the end of November 2011.

Premier Inn has signed 25-year lease and the deal represents a £4.9m commitment

by Premier Inn’s owner, Whitbread.

Kevin Murray, northern acquisition manager (North) for Whitbread Hotels & Restaurants, said the new hotel would create 70 new jobs for Bradford.

Leeds law firm Shulmans advised the Gregory Group. King Sturge acted for Gregory in the investment sale.

>> Two promotions at Savills Savills Commercial’s Leeds office has promoted Stephen Henderson to be director for retail and Josh Sadgrove to be associate director in building and project consultancy.

Paul Fairhurst, head of Savills Commercial in Leeds, said: “Stephen and Josh’s contributions to their respective teams have been outstanding. The retail team in particular has benefited from a strong performance having just been recognised as the most active agent in Yorkshire.”

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COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

>> 5Rise needs eatery

>> Morris to lead St James development drive St James Securities, the award-winning Leeds-based developers, has appointed Paul Morris to spearhead the company’s development drive.

Morris was formerly director and head of development and agency at Lambert Smith Hampton in Leeds, but has also more recently run his own property company.

He qualified as a chartered surveyor in 1992 and has been practising in the development and agency fields within Yorkshire and the North East of England for over 20 years.

Roland Stross, director of St James Securities, said: “After a couple of years of concentrating on our existing development portfolio we are now back on the acquisition and development trail. Paul’s appointment is a significant step forward for the company. He has the vision, commitment and drive to source and deliver development opportunities and we are already working together on a number of large scale mainly retail-led regeneration projects.”

Paul Morris said: “I am thrilled to be joining a property company with the reputation of St James Securities. Developments such as The Light, Electric Press and The Round Foundry in Leeds, Wakefield Waterfront and St Paul’s Place in Sheffield have regenerated their communities and deservedly won a host of awards. We are already at an advanced stage of securing a number of retail and mixed use led schemes with an end value of over £100m and we hope to be in a position to submit planning on at least three of these during the next 12 months.”

The owner of the recently refurbished 5Rise shopping centre in Bingley is actively targeting restaurant operators to occupy a unit at the scheme in the hope that it can bring a much-needed high quality eatery for local residents.

5Rise, on the site of the former Myrtle Walk shopping centre, currently has 70% of units already let to occupiers including Co-operative Food, Home Bargains, Boots and Santander.

Currently only five units remain vacant.

But owner 4Urban wants to bring in a new dining experience to complement the retail offer.

4Urban director Richard Holmes said: “I live in Bingley myself and it has been some time since we have had a good quality restaurant on our doorstep. There are some pleasant places to eat out but Christopher’s was really the only high quality experience and that closed some time ago.

“Bingley has a direct catchment of nearly 29,000 residents. Due to its excellent road and rail links it is a desirable place to live having more wealthy executives and flourishing families than the Yorkshire and Humber average. The town is prime for a leisure operation akin to what we see in places like Chapel Allerton in Leeds.”

>> Knight Frank adds new partner Knight Frank has appointed Elizabeth Ridler as a partner in its Yorkshire office agency team.

Ridler joins the Leeds office after a two-year break from commercial property. She was previously with King Sturge in Leeds for 14 years.

She graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in 1994 with a first in Urban Land Economics and joined King Sturge in 1994.

Alex Munro, the head of commercial agency development at Knight Frank in Leeds, said: “Lizzie is known throughout Yorkshire for her ability to work hard and to deliver under pressure. She is one of the very best office agents of her generation and is a very significant addition to our team.”

Elizabeth Ridler said: “I always said it had to be an exceptional job opportunity to tempt me back to work and this is that opportunity. I have already experienced working in a challenging economic environment in the 1990s and understand the value of providing a top-quality service to our clients.”

The agency has also appointed Andrew Harrison as a senior investment surveyor.

He graduated in law from Sheffield University in 2006 and subsequently graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a Masters Distinction in real estate management.

To date he has already advised clients directly on more than £8m worth of transactions.

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COMMERCIAL PROPERTY >> More room at Millshaw Park Millshaw Park Industrial Estate in Leeds has just completed a £1.3m refurbishment.

Owned by joint venture partners Evans Property Group and Land Securities, the 480,000 sq ft park sits by the Leeds Outer Ring Road and is half-a-mile from Junction 1 of the M621.

It was built in the 1970s and tenants include HSBC, Alliance Healthcare and Harrow Green.

Knight Frank will be marketing the remaining vacant units alongside DTZ. Around 150,000 sq ft is available in units ranging from 2,275 to 49,584 sq ft.

The larger units rentals are priced at around £3.75 per sq ft.

Owen Holder, partner in charge of industrial property at Knight Frank in Leeds, said: “Millshaw Park is one of the largest and most successful inner city industrial estates in Leeds. It is superbly located, fronting the outer ring road and close to Yorkshire’s excellent motorway network.”

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Lane would be a great asset for the district as we look to develop our digital and other growth sectors to create new jobs over the coming years.

“We have a number of companies based in Bradford that are looking to expand and Buck Lane would give us sites that allow that to happen. The district already has a reputation for being home to leading technology companies, such as Pace and Filtronic.”

Andy Duley, the University of Bradford’s head of enterprise and commercialisation, said: “This project would be a welcome contribution to innovation in Bradford and would complement the investment that the university has made in our city centre technology incubator facilities.”

>> Former bathroom factory sold

>> Baildon Park moves closer Plans for a new science and technology park in Baildon near Bradford, which could create up to 720 jobs, have taken another step forward.

Bradford Council’s proposed 170,000 sq ft site at Buck Lane has been granted outline planning permission.

The proposal currently includes three manufacturing plants, an office complex and business centre, a selection of live-work units, a hotel, restaurant and small shop.

The scheme forms a major part of the council’s Airedale Masterplan and could become one of the biggest commercial property developments in the District.

A steering group – with members including Bradford Council, the University of Bradford and Knight Frank – is leading the project.

Coun David Green, Bradford Council’s executive member for regeneration and economy, said: “The technology park at Buck

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lease to run concurrent with their first lease.

First Locate managing director Darren Guest said: “First Locate has been established for over ten years and our move to Town Centre House has enabled us to expand our business.

We specialise in providing revenue, customer and payment processing services to the utility sectors. The move to Town Centre House enabled us to expand our customer base with new media and telephony clients. The latest premises expansion will enable further growth in our call centre services.”

Tom Brammeld from Jones Lang LaSalle said: “Increasing volumes of enquiries for office space in the sub 5,000 sq ft size bracket shows there is a degree of business confidence returning along with a clear demand for quality space on flexible terms.”

Town Centre House offers more than 40,000 sq ft of high quality offices over six storeys and was the first refurbished office building in the city centre to achieve a BREEAM “excellent” rating. Existing tenants in the building also include Hoare Lea, Gleeds and Thomson Directories. Joint leasing agents are Jones Lang LaSalle and Sanderson Weatherall.

One left: Town Centre House

>> First Locate expands Payment processing service provider First Locate has expanded its presence in Town Centre House in Leeds in a deal which leaves one suite remaining in the building that is also Town Centre Securities’ own headquarters.

First Locate, which moved into the landmark building at the start of 2010, has taken an additional 2,000 sq ft office wing on the first floor in a deal which means it now occupies almost 6,600 sq ft of space.

In a deal advised by Jones Lang LaSalle, the company has signed an additional nine-year

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Shires Bathrooms’ former headquarters and factory in Bradford has been sold to a private investor.

The industrial agency team at Colliers International in Leeds, who led the deal, were acting on behalf of receivers.

The 11.24-acre site, also known as Beckside Works, was formerly the headquarters and factory for Shires Bathrooms before it was closed in April 2009.

Situated on Beckside Road to the south west of the city, the existing building accommodates a warehouse, together with a four-storey office building and ground floor showrooms.

Colliers International director Simon Rhodes said the buyer’s intentions were not yet known.

But, he added: “It is encouraging to see that interest in such sites still remains.”

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Brownfield site: Inspire Bradford

>> Straw bale record for Bradford Work is to start in April on a £4m business park in Bradford that will include Europe’s largest straw bale-constructed buildings.

Inspire Bradford will be built on a brownfield site close to Eccleshill Community Hospital in the east of the city.

It will comprise two buildings totalling 30,000 sq ft housing 14 serviced offices and 14 managed workspaces.

The aim is for each of the two buildings to achieve a BREEAM “excellent” rating, and plans include using thermally efficient, one metre thick straw bale wall panels.

Other sustainable features include a ground-source heat pump and a rainwater catchment reservoir which will supply lavatories and water for plants within the building. Photovoltaic cells in the roof will also create energy while wooden fittings and carpets will be made from recycled material.

The park, which should be completed next year, will be owned and managed by the Newlands Community Association (NCA), which will also make its home there.

Tony Holdich, NCA chief executive, said: “We want the business park to inspire both the local community and those businesses that locate here, so the name of the development reflects that objective. By redefining what a business park is, we are implementing a blueprint for commerce and community to coexist and to promote enterprise from both.”

The park will also include an onsite café and digital media centre. Individuals and businesses will also be able to hire any of four meeting rooms by the hour or the day.

Funding for the development has included £1.019m of European Union investment from the European Regional Development Fund

COMMERCIAL PROPERTY

(ERDF) programme in Yorkshire and The Humber, £1m from the Communitybuilders Fund and £990,000 from Bradford Council’s Local Enterprise Growth Initiative (LEGI). NCA also secured a £1m mortgage from The Charity Bank.

Coun David Green, Bradford Council’s executive member for Regeneration and Economy, said: “We have a thriving enterprise culture in Bradford, with more than 1,200 new businesses being launched over the past five years, and this business park will further support the creation of new jobs and bolster the local economy.”

The offices range in price from £2,600 to £5,200 per year on fully inclusive terms while all managed work spaces will be £6,000 per year with separate metered utility bills.

Available offices range in size from 108 sq ft to 409 sq ft and the work spaces are 689 sq ft with a 366 sq ft mezzanine floor.

>> Humber site sold Colliers International’s industrial agency in Leeds has sold 139,000 sq ft of industrial and distribution premises at Elsham Wold Industrial Estate in North Lincolnshire to local investors.

The 6.7-acre site, which includes three large warehouse units providing between 38,000 and 51,000 sq ft of accommodation together with a single storey office building, has been bought for an undisclosed sum.

The property would be suitable for letting units individually or as a whole.

The site was formerly occupied by CEVA Logistics and forms part of the Elsham Wold Industrial Estate which lies on the site of a former RAF base on the A15 between the M180 and the Humber Bridge.

>> Next door move for Network Rail Managed office provider Instant Offices has taken a two-year lease out on 30,706 sq ft of space at Hudson House in Toft Green in York, in a deal advised by Jones Lang LaSalle.

Following total refurbishment, the space will be sublet to Network Rail.

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This will allow Network Rail, which already occupies 40,000 sq ft in the building, to relocate some of its workforce while refurbishment of its existing office at George Stephenson House next door is carried out.

Jeff Pearey from Jones Lang LaSalle said: “Hudson House is the perfect fit for Network Rail’s requirements during their temporary relocation due to the location, quality and flexibility of the office space. Their move into the building makes this one of the largest office lettings in York for the last three years.”

Hudson House, which is owned by Quintain Estates and Development, comprises 110,000 sq ft of space and is also home to Thales Properties and Olivers of York. Joint leasing agents are Jones Lang LaSalle and Sanderson Weatherall.

>> Two come into Shulmans Leeds law firm Shulmans has made two new appointments in its construction and property litigation division.

Susan Barrington-Binns joins Shulmans bringing with her over ten years’ experience in construction law. She most recently worked as senior attorney at Misick and Stanbrook, a law firm in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Michael Grant, called to the Bar in 2009 as a non-practising barrister and a specialist in landlord and tenant litigation matters, has been appointed to the firm’s property litigation team.

Michael Watson, partner at Shulmans said, “The demands for both property litigation and construction services at Shulmans have increased markedly in the past 12 months.

The appointment of Susan and Michael will serve to strengthen our expertise in these areas.”

>> Two more at 49a St Paul’s Property consultancy Watts and financial adviser Prosperis have become the latest tenants to sign up for space at 49a St Paul’s Street in Leeds. Both have taken three-year leases. The new lettings mean 6,000 sq ft of space now remains in the building, which is owned by Kelly & Co solicitors.

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in association with

The issue: How can we maximise the potential growth opportunities created by export trade and encourage companies to consider exporting as a means of sustaining and increasing trading momentum in the current economic climate?

Need to improve When it comes to British and more particularly Yorkshire companies, the old school report “could do better” springs most readily to mind. Or at least it did to many of the business leaders who assembled for the second BQ Live debate to be held in Yorkshire; this time at the New Ellington Hotel in Leeds.

The event, jointly sponsored by Grant Thornton and Eversheds, and hosted by Caroline Theobald of the Bridge Club, certainly threw up some promising signs.

Mark Vines, regional commercial director for HSBC, said: “Out of all the start-ups our bank backed this year, 50% said they had chosen HSBC because they were going to export in the first year.”

Yet he did concede that this may well have been because companies looking to export would be more likely to choose HSBC in the first place, given its presence in 86 countries worldwide.

“It says a lot about our brand,” he said.

But many in the discussion were more inclined to side with Paul Cotton, currently partner and, from May 1 this year, senior partner at Eversheds’ Leeds office. He warned that

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currently only 2% of small businesses were looking to export.

“A lot of our clients are talking about export,” he said. “I am bowled over with what UKTI has to offer, but few of our clients are aware of what they do.”

Joe Mclean, partner at Grant Thornton, said that even among those companies that were exporting, their strategy was often not well thought through. There was a reason why Chancellor George Osborne had been so keen to help in the bail-out of the Irish economy earlier this year, he said. Despite all the coverage there had been in the press about the BRIC group of countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – Britain still exported more to the Republic of Ireland than to all four of those countries combined.

“Those four countries have a combined population of nearly three billion,” he said. “So why is Britain, one of the most sophisticated countries, with a seat at the UN Security Council, relying on a country with 4.5 million people just across the sea? This really is a wake-up call.”

He added that globally there was going to be a shift in population and demography over the next 40 years that would have a profound effect on British business.

“Look at countries with growing working age populations,” he said. “Such populations in

The participants Simon Bedford, regional specialist adviser, UKTI Graham Bowland, chief executive, Surgical Innovations Chris Clegg, managing director, Endless Paul Cotton, senior office partner, Eversheds Hannah Kendrick, partner, Eversheds John McDonnell, managing director, Harvard Industries Joe Mclean, partner, Grant Thornton Kevin Parkin, turnaround specialist, former managing director of Davy Markham Richard Paxman, operations director, Paxman Coolers Matthew Stroh, director, Grant Thonrton Andrew Taylor, business development manager, Craftwork Cards Mark Vines, regional commercial director, HSBC In the chair: Caroline Theobald, Bridge Club Venue: The New Ellington, Leeds BQ is highly regarded as a leading independent commentator on business issues, many of which have a bearing on the current and future success of the region’s business economy. BQ Live is a series of informative debates designed to further contribute to the success and prosperity of our regional economy through the debate, discussion and feedback of a range of key business topics and issues.

Europe excluding Britain will fall by 60 million.

That’s like taking Britain or Germany out of the EU. The US’s working age population, meanwhile, will grow by 67 million over the next 40 years. So, between Europe and America there will be a swing of 127 million.

Also India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh together will grow by one billion in the next 40 years. You really have to direct your effort carefully.”

Vines added that there was now a second tier of countries to rival the BRIC group emerging.

“HSBC now talks about the CIVETS group, made up of Columbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa,” he said.

Why is Britain, one of the most sophisticated countries, with a seat at the UN Security Council, relying on a country with 4.5 million people?

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DEBATE

A broad brush: Delegates listened to factual information and anecdotal evidence on the whys and wherefores of exporting But don’t jump in Hannah Kendrick, a partner at Eversheds, conceded that strategy was important. She had witnessed companies grow their export market from zero to 15% without any strategy at all. Yet, she said, you had to be careful and realistic about what exporting might achieve.

“Exporting isn’t for the short term. It’s not something you can easily pick up quickly if there are problems in your home market.

You also shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction about where you need to go. You need to talk with advisers about where there is going to be a differentiator.”

Many certainly concurred with such a warning, particularly when it came down to dealing with bureaucracy overseas. Kevin Parkin, who has recently stepped down from being managing director of steel producer Davy Markham, said on paper Pakistan looked like an excellent country to export to.

“But getting through customs there is

a nightmare,” he said. “It is all to do with money.”

Graham Bowland, chief executive of publiclyquoted surgical equipment supplier Surgical Innovations, said he felt the same about Brazil.

He and many other similar British businesses had once decided to go to the Hospitalar trade show in Sao Paulo, which is now one of the biggest of such exhibitions in the world. But many of them had been stopped at customs and had their samples impounded.

“We later discovered that the cost in licensing alone was £70,000 per product,” he said. That made him decide not to bother – especially when he later found out that some less scrupulous companies were trying to get around this problem by trying a back door route via Miami.

The right people Parkin said such stories were an example of why you “can’t do it all from a back street

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in Yorkshire”. “You have got to have a local agent who knows all these tricks,” he said.

John McDonnell, managing director of street lighting supplier Harvard Industries, agreed that such local contact was vital, and was incredibly hard to pin down.

“We have now been running in the UK for so long that we know who we shouldn’t deal with,” he said. “It is very difficult to get that kind of information overseas. In fact it’s almost impossible, especially when you don’t speak the language.”

Although his company is pressing ahead with plans to expand into France, he said these had recently hit an obstacle when a French industry stalwart who had agreed to come and work for them changed his mind at the last minute because the contract “wasn’t French enough for him”.

Richard Paxman, operations director for family firm Paxman Coolers which makes hair loss prevention equipment for chemotherapy >>

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DEBATE

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Never easy: The export question was debated by companies which were already involved overseas, plus some that felt they should – but how? patients, said that although there were only two companies in the world that were in competition with his.

“The problem for us has been finding the right partner overseas who is willing to take the time and invest until it starts making sales,” he said. The company is currently looking to bolster sales in the crucial US market.

Parkin agreed that in his experience, “getting into export is never easy”. “You haven’t a chance unless you have qualifications or reputation,” he said. “Sometimes it’s easier to take over another company, because it can take you 10 years to get those qualifications, and very often someone has got there before you. You should find someone with some working capital issues, who is already there with an established market and supply chain.”

Innovate, innovate However, Bowland said it was possible to make your mark in a new market if you

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could show you were innovative. That way you could compete quite easily with much bigger companies.

“In the USA we meet huge $50bn turnover companies,” he said. “They are very lazy, and are not investing in R&D. One company showed me around their plant, where they claimed to have 500 people in R&D. Not one of them actually was in R&D, they were in product support. The company came to us because we own the intellectual property (IP) and they couldn’t get into our space. We now work with them, but we will not let them own the IP. That’s why we will never go to China.

We were even advised by the Chinese not to come for that reason.”

Andrew Taylor, business development director of Craftwork Cards which supplies the greeting cards industry and has just started exporting to the US with the help of UKTI’s Passport to Export scheme, said the company was going in on the strength

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of one innovative product.

“It’s a product that has been established over here for five years, and is a replacement for something well established in the US,” he said.

The amount of Harvard Industries’ turnover that comes from exporting recently peaked at 30%, but McDonnell agreed that getting the product absolutely right was critical.

“In fact if your product isn’t the best in the market you don’t have a chance,” he said. “In years gone by we have done better in the UK because we can leverage customer service on back of product that perhaps wasn’t quite as good as our competitors’. That wasn’t possible to pull off in overseas markets. Now we do have world-class products that we can take forward. Britain now leads the world in street lighting, for example.”

Mclean commended McDonnell for such honesty, and said the story illustrated how important it was to “get to market with something that is irresistible to the market”.

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DEBATE

Join up, thinking: One significant point that came up during the debate was that companies should set up export clubs “You want to be selling items that people want at a price you can afford,” he said.

One improvement Discussion chair Caroline Theobald at one stage asked the group whether they could suggest one thing that would urge more Yorkshire companies to export.

Chris Clegg, managing director at turnaround fund Endless, certainly had one idea. He said his fund, which looked at 640 opportunities last year, came across many companies which were in trouble because they had failed to innovate, including some that were exporting.

That, he said, was why they had been left behind. He felt exporters doing more to publicise their achievements was a good idea.

Nothing would give a company director more incentive than reading about a competitor doing something they were not, and fearing that they would be taken to task over it.

Bowland saw opportunities in setting up best

practice networks. His sector has a group called Medilink, which he said he had used along with UKTI’s Passport to Export scheme, and like that, had found it fantastic.

“Medilink helped set up export clubs,” he said. “We also had a group of 15 manufacturing companies together. Everyone was different, so we could talk about the transfer of technology. I even found I have some medical devices that could be used for a motoring company, which was useful cross-pollination. Medilink has been Yorkshire Forward-funded, but they have known that

was ending for some time, and so have made strong attempts to be more commercial. I use their PR service two days a week. We also all go to Medicare, which is a big trade show held in 17 aircraft hangars. Everybody likes it because it’s the trade body that organises it.”

He was keen to see such networks set up on a more informal footing. “There are 470 medical companies in Yorkshire, with 170 medical device companies in Leeds alone,” he said.

“That’s a huge opportunity. I would gladly get every medical device company in the area over to us, to show them the benefit >>

In the USA we meet huge $500bn turnover companies. One company claimed to have 500 people in R&D – not one of them actually was

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DEBATE

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of exporting and what it has done for us.”

Paxman said his company had benefited from just such a visit. But Paxman Cooler’s sister company Brewfitt, which supplies beer coolers, had found much less co-operation within the drinks industry.

“People don’t seem to engage there,” he said.

“There is a trade body, but it’s not the same.”

Reflections on the discussion The BQ Live debate confirmed Grant Thornton’s view that the nature of doing business is changing: trade will be cross-territory as a matter of course and so we will think of exporting overseas in the way we currently do about selling to different regions of the UK. If UK businesses don’t do it, then the competition will, but with only 2% of SMEs exporting currently, the enormity of the challenge is clear.

However, exporting can appear daunting.

Choosing the right market is key, and unfortunately it is rarely the most local and then there is the added complication of culture and competition. Getting to know the people you will be doing business is still critical and there is still no substitute for doing business face-to-face. The debate identified some innovative approaches, such as working with international MBA students with an insight of their home country and links to business networks. It was clear that businesses are willing to share their experiences, which is going to be important with the change in the public sector support available, and facilitating this should be on the LEP’s agenda in the export arena.

The advice we give our clients is to ensure that they have a clear strategy for export; they need to research their chosen market; and draw on support and good professional advice: we are represented in over 100 countries and can therefore draw on our network to help businesses at the critical phase of embarking on export.

Matt Stroh, director, Grant Thonrton

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McDonnell said he had found the same lack of co-operation within the lighting industry.

Harvard Industries makes power supplies for lighting, but all the other members of the Lighting Industry Federation were lamp suppliers competing against each other.

Cotton said that that might be where professionals could step in.

“Some sectors are well represented by trade bodies, but some are not,” he said. “We need to give them the same opportunities.”

Other stumbling blocks that needed sorting included getting credit.

Matt Stroh, a director at Grant Thornton, said: “The fear of credit has hit exporting; the big question about whether you are going to get paid.”

He said such concerns had been addressed in the past by the Government’s Export Credits Guaranteed Department (ECGD), although the power and efficacy of this insurance scheme had been whittled away, and it was now

under threat as part of the public sector cuts.

Simon Bedford, regional specialist adviser at UKTI, said new initiatives aimed at helping small businesses in a manner similar to ECGD have been outlined in the Government’s new Trade White Paper. He is also working with Business Link on 20 events across the region in the next few months, urging companies to come and see if they were ready to export.

Bowland welcomed such an initiative, but reminded potential exporters that, while it was lucrative, exporting was something that you did for the long term, and you had to keep plugging away at it.

“You have got to be resilient, and you have got to go and go,” he said. “I have got nearly one million Air Miles now, but then I have flown to the US for a meeting and got in the same plane coming back again. They want you there; Skype isn’t good enough. They have to see the whites of your eyes. You have to keep going, but the rewards are there.” n

Maximizing the potential growth opportunities created by export trade The importance of export speaks for itself: Recent surveys conducted by the UKTI and others shows that companies are 11% more likely to survive if they export.

However, it is clear that more needs to be done as only one in 25 British companies export. It is clear that a more proactive approach needs to be taken. There are a number of obvious measures: n The Government needs to continue to work at removing barriers to export. In this regard we applaud the Government’s White Paper. n There needs to be a campaign to increase the awareness of the benefits of export. A poll by the British Chamber of Commerce showed that 10% of companies said they would export if they had more help. In this respect there is a role there for LEPs who must get the focus right and engage with the business community. There is a clear role for UKTI in educating businesses on the opportunities and the facilities that it can provide. There is also a role for regional professional firms who are experienced in dealing with the companies that export.

For example, Eversheds have set up a dedicated consulting arm, Eversheds Consulting, that is able to provide advice and assistance to all those companies looking to export into new markets for the first time. The advice is drawn from years of experience in dealing with companies that export, barriers to export, legal documentation and identifying the right markets for the right products. n There is an enhanced role for key bodies such as the UKTI, the trade promotion agencies and the Export Credit Guarantee Department.

Exports currently account for 60% of UK productivity growth – British companies cannot afford to miss any opportunity to increase productivity and measures like the ones detailed above must be implemented sooner rather than later.

Paul Cotton, senior office partner, Eversheds LLP, 0845 4984745.

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unilateral assent York University’s new campus has not been without its controversial moments but it appears to be settling down and is getting the credit it deserves from teaching and research bodies. Peter Baber reports

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SUCCESS STORY

Suitable: York’s heritage buildings were taken into consideration at the design stage.

Universities haven’t exactly been having a good ride in terms of publicity at the moment.

There was all the rage about the London School of Economics’ rather too close ties with the Gaddaffi regime in Libya. That followed hot on the heels of student protests about tuition fees, and an ever-increasing number of universities which have already announced that they are going to charge the highest fees they can as soon as they are able to.

So it is gratifying to discover that one development at a university in Yorkshire – the University of York’s Heslington East campus – appears to be bedding down well towards the end of its first full year of operation.

Not that the site – a near-doubling of the university’s campus that has so far cost £500m and could in the end amount to £750m – has been without controversy.

When plans were first mooted there was vocal opposition from local villagers and some councillors – although the council as a whole was in favour. Although the land on which the site sits had been designated as suitable for university expansion in what amounts to York’s local development plan since the 1960s, villagers feared the new development would cause traffic chaos, and would impinge on the green belt. As a result the proposed development went to a public inquiry,

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although then secretary of state Ruth Kelly approved the plans in May 2007.

Just over three years on, in October last year, the doors were opened on the first buildings of the new campus at the end of a building project which had come in on time and, unusually for academia, under budget.

“That was very important for us because of all the adverse publicity there has been in recent months about other large projects going way over budget,” says Elizabeth Heaps, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for estates and strategic projects.

The project has been over eight years in the planning. “In 2003 we first started a >>

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Even after the new campus is completed we will still be one of the UK’s smaller unversities with 14,000 students. Yet we are constantly coming in among the top ten universities in the country for both teaching and research

debate about where the university was going in terms not just of how we were perceived but also size,” says Heaps. “Even after the new campus is completed, we will still be one of the UK’s smaller universities with 14,000 students. Yet we are constantly coming in among the top ten universities in the country both for teaching and research.”

In total so far the new campus includes a business hub named after former vicechancellor Ron Cooke, an associated business catalyst building, a new building for a new Theatre, Film and Television department, a new Computer Sciences building, and a building shared by the six-year-old School of Management and the School of Law, whose first undergraduates are due to sit their finals this June.

Heaps says these areas were chosen after the university took consideration of what it was already strong in, and undertook market research in where outsiders felt it should go.

There were aesthetic considerations to take on board as well. Thanks in part to it being founded in 1963, the existing university had become rather too well known within academic circles for its brutalist architecture, something that sits incongruously with the city’s medieval origins. So architecture practice BDP was appointed to come up with a plan that would be suitably different.

“We were aware that the eyes of the world would be on us, and we wanted to make a statement,” says Heaps.

The result is a development with adventurous use of timber and glass – including a cinema

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auditorium that juts out into the sky – and more curves instead of hard concrete edges.

There’s a commitment to sustainability too.

Plans are underfoot to build a biomass plant to help power the new facilities – although as with the campus itself these plans have not gone without local opposition.

There has been a huge amount of public investment in the scheme. Most of the funding has come from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and Science City York. As a result, some tough targets have been set for all of the departments that have relocated here to justify such spending. And much of these revolve around business – both increasing the university’s links with business, and fostering more business start-ups. The School of Management, for example, has been charged with engendering 178 business inputs – or interventions to help businesses – in two years, and engendering 20 business start-ups over the same period.

So, how have these intentions been playing out in the first few months of existence?

Perhaps the first place to start would be the Ron Cooke Hub. This has been designed very much with intermingling in mind. Apart from the usual cafés and meeting areas the building includes a dedicated island of interaction complete with whiteboards and bean bags where anyone can come together for an impromptu brainstorming. The York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis has academics from different disciplines coming together to spark

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ideas off each other and work on joint research. It has taken space in the hub.

Business manager Grahame Brown is perhaps most impressed with the space and facilities within the Springboard, a section of the building designed for start-ups. This includes 15 private offices which are rented out on a sliding scale starting at £100 a month, and 15 spaces in shared accommodation.

“We’ve only been open six months but the private offices are already full,” says Brown.

(See panel for who is in the hub.)

But he is equally excited about the whole package available for wannabe entrepreneurs.

The university already has what it claims is the largest student entrepreneur’s club in the country, with 1,400 members. A recent mock Dragon’s Den event it held attracted Julie Meyer, one of the real dragons off TV, as a judge. Those who want to take their ideas further can make use of an applications lab to try their ideas out, and can then move through the Springboard as they develop into a company.

Once they have grown too large for that – and ideally Brown wants to move the businesses out over a year – they can make use of the nearby Catalyst building to develop themselves as a company more formally. Brown, who has a background both in academia (horticulture) and business, says he had a good look around other universities and similar business incubator organisations in the UK to see what was out there before coming to York in October.

“But I couldn’t find anywhere that had the complete package from student clubs through research to setting up a business,” he says.

Nor are links with existing business forgotten.

The university has a strong audio research department and it has been involved in setting up a demonstration space, tentatively called the Cave, where you can demonstrate your product in a sealed off room on 360° projections, in 3D if need be, and with 28-speaker surround sound. Events too, are in the offing. At the end of March the hub is hosting an evening event sponsored by JWPCreers, a local accountancy firm, featuring an economic forecast from Peter Smith, the university’s professor of economics and finance.

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Over at the School of Management, business co-ordinator Gill Cutting says the school’s move into one new building makes a huge change from the old days when it was scattered over several different buildings. This certainly matters when the student intake keeps increasing – up to 260 this year – and many are now paying full fees.

As for links with business, her Centre for Business Collaboration has already been engaged in developing a virtual learning environment for the Minster Veterinary Practice, a five-brand veterinary surgery company, to help with training. The closer links with computer sciences fostered by the new campus have helped here. The centre has also been running consultancy work with Batley-based Meritmill, a floor covering supplier. This has led to the company reversing its decision to move all remaining production to China.

“They’ve even started moving some production back here,” she says.

Most recently, she has been getting students actively engaged in helping the Greater Ripon Improvement Partnership, a 70-member local regeneration network, come up with ways to regenerate the town, taking into account the new era of very limited, even non-existent, central funding. As a result of such work, she has now launched a portal where businesses can log requests for assistance (www.york. ac.uk/management/business/student-projects).

“When I joined last year this school wasn’t really outward facing at all,” she says.

“It was partly because they were busy with a staff to student ratio of 29 to 1. This is quite a turnaround.”

Although the computer science department dates back to 1977, department head professor John McDermid says: “This is the first time in the 24 years I have been here that we have been in a building with empty offices.”

That’s an important consideration when it comes to fostering spin-outs. Successful spin-outs in the past have included Rapita, a consultancy that develops tools to reduce the cost and time involved in measuring a system’s performance. Another company that produced systems for predicting failure within car engine control units has since been >>

SUCCESS STORY

Statement: The development includes adventurous use of timber and glass and more curves instead of hard concrete edges. Photographs: British Gypsum and Hall Image Photography

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SUCCESS STORY snapped up by multinational consultancy ETAS. Current spin-outs the department is working on include one that has developed a system for providing infinitely different scenarios in computer games – so that, say, when you’re playing Assassin’s Creed you won’t always meet the same member of the Borgia family in the same piazza whenever you play.

In its new building the department itself has a target of creating 125 new jobs between now and 2013.

“We are already about half way, having created just over 60 so far,” says McDermid.

But his 140 staff also have to help create ten new spin-outs or spin-ins – companies that come in to make use of its research – in that time.

And McDermid is concerned that its targets on making greater connections with local small businesses may be much more challenging now that central government has abolished an innovation voucher scheme, under which such businesses could get grants of up to £3,700 for such work.

“That helped to lubricate the introductions,” he says. “Otherwise we are not as easily geared up for interaction in that way. I am hoping the new local enterprise partnerships will be able to help out in this.”

Last but not least, the Theatre, Film and Television Department is still part-way through taking its first undergraduates through their first year. But commercial manager Carole Dove says the production companies she has shown around have already been impressed with the fully accessible TV studios, theatre and 150-seat digital cinema on offer.

She says many of them claim what is on offer at the university is superior to anything in the north – the BBC’s Media City included. The department is already in discussions with Kudos, the production company behind TV’s Spooks, about using its facilities – and that, she says, should be good for students seeking internships.

She says: “We aim to train students in the best that’s available. Then you can scale down. If you have only ever done single camera work, for example, it’s hard to scale up.”

Not long after the new campus was opened,

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the university was also named University of the Year in the Times Higher Education Awards.

Among other things, the judges were particularly impressed with the university’s ability to combine academic excellence with social inclusion.

Heaps says the need to keep in touch with the local community is very much part of the

university’s ethos. It’s why, for example, unlike other universities, York has not been so actively engaged in fostering strong links, and sometimes departments, overseas.

“There wouldn’t be any point in doing all this if we didn’t think it was going to benefit local people,” she says. “Our core belief has been trying to do that.”

Who’s in the hub

These three businesses are months old and located in the Spingboard Hub Renewables Ben Byrom was already running a separate consultancy at the York Science Park when he heard about the Hub and thought it would be a good place to launch a separate consultancy for renewable energy. He wants Hub Renewables to be a consultancy where developers can come for impartial advice on what kind of renewable energy plant would be best suited for their site. At the moment, he says, wind turbine experts will only promote wind turbines, solar panel suppliers will only talk about the sun, and so on. So far he has been working on providing an anaerobic digester for a farmer in Nun Monkton whose farm includes 90,000 laying hens.

“Energy secretary Chris Huhne has actually increased the cash incentives for these kind of digesters,” he says. He also claims to have had meaningful discussions with multi-millionaire developer Sir Robert Ogden about working together on projects. He says the advantages of the Hub are the “personalities” you meet there and the fact that it is open 24/7 – an important consideration for a man with two small businesses to run.

The Law Wizard Co-founded by Tom Hiskey, a former lawyer at Winston Solicitors in Leeds, and Rob Blake, the Law Wizard aims to provide the general public with an easy and cheaper way of completing relatively straightforward legal processes. The company, whose site is yet to go fully live, is

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starting with probate, but hopes to move on to conveyancing and even divorce. Hiskey says it is an ideal time to start such a service as the Legal Services Act, which should deregulate much of the profession, comes into force in October this year. He hopes even current lawyers may make use of the company’s service. He and Blake first heard about the Hub through Twitter, and think it is “better than being in a spare room”.

Hands on: Left to right Chris Etheridge, Matthew Freckelton and Rick Taylor

Yatterbox The only one of our three started up by York students, Yatterbox aims to track every comment made by any of Britain’s 650 MPs on any of the main social network sites and Hansard. Chris Etheridge, one of five founders, says they are still working on the commercialisation of the site, but this could include providing services for lobbying companies or designing a smartphone app version of the site. Etheridge, who is currently doing an MA in politics, says the best thing about the Hub is the ability to work with other disciplines there.

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ENTREPRENEUR

SPRING 11

SHOPPING: AS SEEN ON HIGH STREET TV Combining digital channels and shopping has been highly profitable for Yorkshire entrepreneur Andrew Malcher, as Peter Baber finds out

Andrew Malcher is showing me around the plush new offices in Harrogate that his current company, High Street TV, has taken over. The premises were vacated by Skybet, part of BSkyB, which has relocated to Leeds. The office block itself is certainly impressive, as it comes with its own health club in the basement. That’s appropriate for Malcher’s company that largely sells health - and fitness-related products.

But its when he tells me that this whole operation, which already employs 28 people and is soon to take on another 30, used to be located in “one of my barns” at his house nearby, that I realise just how well he must have done for himself so far. Very well for a man who started work as a YTS trainee in the Bradford branch of Pickfords Travel in 1986 at the age of 15.

What’s perhaps even more remarkable is that this fortune comes on the back of building up and selling off a series of TV companies that

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seem curiously out of place in a world of Twitter and ever-shorter marketing messages.

Malcher’s TV companies have all been shopping channels, where the same product can be plugged for anything up to 30 minutes.

Yes, he believes there is a time and a place for the short, succinct advertising message – such as “Have a break, have a KitKat”.

“But how do you explain in 15 seconds how Nike Plus works?” he asks, “or why should you buy a particular fitness product? Products have changed, people have changed. Products

are now more innovative than ever. You are not buying just a pair of trainers any more.”

In case anyone doubts him, this eternally positive and optimistic man has a case to prove his point. Five years ago, when he was running one of his earlier companies, the Golf TV Pro Shop, he went to JJB Sports to suggest he could help the company out over a problem it was having with the Slazenger brand it had acquired.

While Slazenger may be viewed as a high-end brand in tennis circles, he reasons, it is >>

At one time QVC in the US was doing £2bn. It’s now doing £4bn. This was even before the digital revolution had started here. I realised change was coming

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ENTREPRENEUR

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ENTREPRENEUR seen as distinctly downmarket by keen golfers.

“JJB had struggled to sell even 2,000 drivers in a year across 450 stores,” he says.

At the time his company had developed its own golf driver, initially called the K1 Speed Driver. Malcher suggested to then JJB owner Dave Whelan that this could be given the Slazenger brand, and then promoted on his TV channel where viewers would be encouraged to go and buy it at their nearest JJB. “They had been pricing their golf drivers at £69,” he says. “We ended up selling 37,000 drivers at £169, and it became best selling golf driver of 2006 in the UK. We used Sam Torrance to do what was in effect a high-end infomercial.”

Whelan was so impressed with the result that he went on to buy the whole TV channel – perhaps an early example of the kind of diversifying that JJB has subsequently been criticised for by its long-suffering investors.

Malcher, however, is permanently optimistic about what his TV channels have to offer.

Surely, I say, in this era of information overload, expecting a hardened channel surfer to stay hooked on one TV selling proposition for 30 minutes is expecting too much.

Well yes, he concedes it is – but that’s why the messages on his channels are tailored the way they are.

“Repetition builds reputation,” he says – one of a number of aphorisms he throws at me right the way through the interview.

“We have three calls to action within a 30-minute section,” he says. “Our programme has to be captivating but also quite repetitive within those 30 minutes. If they catch it at minute three, they might stay to minute 12, but by then the price is on screen, and they have had pretty much the pitch.”

TV shopping, he keeps on insisting, is an idea whose time has really come, thanks in part to the internet.

“Consumers now have access to more information than they have ever had in history,” he says. “The internet works because it allows them in their time to access what information is relevant to them. In one of our 30-minute segments we anticipate all the information they would be looking for. And what’s more there is no salesman in front of them.” And here comes another intentionally

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Lights, camera, action: Television remains the main focus for entrepreneur Andrew Malcher killer quote. “As Brits we don’t like to be sold to,” he says, “but boy do we like buying.”

TV shopping could also prove a useful tool in a recession to hard-pressed retailers. And that is why High Street TV, unlike most of his previous TV shopping channels – and certainly unlike his main rival QVC – is actively courting links with retailers.

The aim is to have a dedicated “As Seen on High Street TV” aisle within stores selling products that have been promoted on the channel. The two-year-old company has already signed deals with 22 retailers, including John Lewis, Argos, Next and Tesco.

It currently has 1,748 active locations where you can view High Street TV products, and aims to have 5,000 by the end of next year.

Such a success, Malcher says, is partly down to what they managed to achieve with the Slazenger driver. That, he says, is their “Big Mac recipe”.

“Hard times mean retailers need to reach consumers wherever they are at a different level than ever before,” he says. “They may not have been using this format of communication before, but they want to now.

We are effectively a wholesaler. Tesco and the others create space in their stores. No payment

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is exchanged for doing that. We source the products, and only give the products we know are selling well, because we test them on our channel. We currently have the top fitness selling products in Argos and Next – we even outsold their iPod in January. Just in January alone we supplied more than 160,000 units of fitness products into our retail supply chain.

They all sold out in the month.”

Malcher first realised the power of TV shopping during the many business trips he made to America during the 1990s. He was sales director of the Thomas Cook Group by the age of 25.

“At time QVC in the US was doing £2bn,” he says. “It’s now doing £4bn. This was even before the digital channel revolution had started here. The US had 600 channels, while in the UK we had Sky analogue with 23. But I realised change was coming. I realised I was not going to get the wealth I was looking for in the travel industry. I was very ambitious and I saw that if I didn’t bring this format to the UK somebody else would.”

He took advantage of an Ofcom ruling that allows all conventional channels to give up to three hours a day to TV shopping, and bought slots on what was then called Sky Cinema at

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4am. “Everyone laughed at me,” he says.

But fortunately for him the product he chose to sell was the Atkins diet, still unheard of in the UK at the time but something he had seen in the US. “I found it,” he says, “and put together a 30-minute TV show about it that had already been partly recorded in the States.

“I outsourced a call centre and a fulfilment centre, and initially did everything part-time in the back bedroom. But it wasn’t long before the phone lines were queuing. The two revelations I had were that people were watching, even at 4am, and buying this stuff.

Very quickly I started buying other bits of airtime. Even today on High Street TV we have all the airtime for the Sky Sports channels and the Discovery Channel.”

He founded his first full-time channel in 1999 with an office in Canal Road in Bradford. It was called the American Shopping Network – a title he says was deliberately used as a selling point. Malcher is vehemently pro-American.

“There is a general perception in Britain that a lot of products start in America and eventually come here,” he says.

But even he concedes that some “polishing” had to be done before the programmes could be shown in Blighty.

“We took out a lot of the American voiceover,” he says. “Particularly when it came to showing you how you buy the product. It was subtle but significant.”

That channel and its spin-off were sold to Northern & Shell in 2002. Malcher then moved to Florida for a year, got into golf, and soon had a a licence to launch the American channel Golf TV – a dedicated 24-hour channel showing nothing but golf with some TV shopping – in the UK and Europe.

“Worldwide they were a well-known brand,” he says, “but weren’t in Europe, and certainly weren’t in UK.” The Golf TV Pro Shop channel was launched independently by Malcher on the back of this, as a way of getting revenue that would fall entirely outside his deal with the Americans.

JJB Sports was just one of a number of retailers which by 2006 had started approaching the channel looking to do some kind of tie-up because so many customers

ENTREPRENEUR

were coming into their stores looking for products that were then sold only through it.

That got Malcher thinking, so that when JJB eventually bought both golf channels, and Malcher was made head of its TV division for a year after that, he launched JJB Sports TV as a sort of trial run for what would follow.

“I did it specifically because we knew we were going to do this for other retailers,” he says.

“As an entrepreneur I wasn’t going to work for anyone else full-time. They knew that.”

Once that year was up, Malcher, plus managing director Jim Coleman and creative director John Denny – a team that has stayed with him since the beginning – got together again and launched High Street TV in 2008.

With sales roughly 50/50 on the high street and via the TV, the company turned over just short of £20m last year, and, according to Malcher, stands to make £40m this year.

Much of this has been achieved by reinvesting the proceeds of previous sales. While some people might think you need the resources of Rupert Murdoch to launch your own TV channel, Malcher says the reality is somewhat different.

“You would think running a TV channel like this is high cost,” he says, “but it isn’t necessarily. Each show we have has been on air for two years, so it has a long lifespan. So content doesn’t need to be changed as much as you think. Also we are not a live transmission. That makes a difference.”

That is why, he says, his business model can stand well against internet product sites which you would think have lower overheads.

“TV also does something in terms of perception,” he says, “and perception is reality in many cases. If a consumer sees something on TV there’s credibility in that, particularly

when it’s linked with the likes of John Lewis.

It’s a very effective model. There’s a relatively low cost in production, and our products have good high margins that cover those costs. We can also operate 24 hours a day. We don’t have any lunch breaks or closures, or bad weather affecting us. So we trade non-stop with your best salesperson constantly at the front door selling. What other retail business has that?”

The company has even started sourcing products for its retail partners, independently of what is shown on TV – although Malcher says TV will remain its key focus. The tie-up with retailers means “consumers can do that very important thing, which is touch and feel”.

He adds too that it means they can “buy from a name that they might think is more trusted”.

But he insists this in no way devalues what TV shopping channels have achieved. If they are cheesy, he says, there is nothing wrong with that.

“That cheese sells £400m a year in this country,” he says, “so I would be quite interested in that brand of cheese. Yes it is cheesy, but to a degree you don’t want to take that away. We are never going to sell to everybody. Customers know John Lewis doesn’t sell cheese.”

Nor is John Lewis the only big name that is seeing High Street TV’s attractions. Marketing agency BBH – the name behind adverts for Levi 501s and Audi – has done all the branding for two new subdivisions the company has launched. It’s taken a very small stake in the TV company too. And celebrities like Alex Gerrard and Danielle Lineker are queuing up to be presenters. A second High Street TV channel is launching at the end of this year.

You might want to watch out for it. n

Just in January alone we supplied more than 160,000 units of fitness products into the supply chain. They sold out in the month

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BUSINESS LUNCH

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BUSINESS LUNCH

ACE VENTURER

What’s this popping through the door? A start-your-own-business computer simulation game? Another one? Surely there can’t be a need for that? After all, we already have Capitalism 1, 2 and 3, Rollercoaster Tycoon and all its spin-offs. Not to mention all the things you can do on the Sims and Animal Crossing

Ah, but the Yorkshire entrepreneur behind this particular game – SimVenture – claims it is different. And many significant people – including multinational organisations such as BMW, more than 100 business schools and universities around the world, Grant Thornton, and even a prison – would appear to agree with him. Because they have signed up for it.

When I meet up with Peter Harrington for lunch at the Grill Room at Cedar Court Grand in York, he readily admits that the track record

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of business simulation games so far has not been good.

And he is keen to tell me why. But only after making our choices from an extensive menu – chicken liver parfait and smoked salmon roulade to start, with both of us choosing as a main venison cooked on a tender bed of red cabbage. Peter’s whole business career has been based in York. He founded QA Research, straight out of university in 1989 and based just the other side of the city walls from >>

BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

BUSINESS LUNCH where we are now. So he must be familiar with the city’s eating establishments. And it is clear he thinks this one, with its elegant and restrained décor, quiet background music and ever-attentive waiter, is a real step up in the books. “This venison is absolutely perfect,” he says.

But back to computer gaming. “No-one is doing business simulation games like we are,” he says, “and if they are, the kind of business they present is not true. Such games are not authentic. You will play them and make a million pounds and you will not know why.

You could even argue that playing such games is quite dangerous, because if you follow that you will screw up.”

I have to say I agree. Having played a fair bit of the simulation games that are out there, I am always amazed at how quickly you either fail or, much more commonly, succeed. And how simplistic such games are. Harrington says he knows why.

“Most simulations are based on global industrial giants,” he says, “even though the number of people employed in corporate culture is declining all the time.”

So, what’s different about SimVenture? After a short time playing it at home, I can say complexity is one thing. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The game literally takes you through every thought process you would be likely to go through when you start up a business. It’s not just a case of setting your turnover target for a year, clicking on go and seeing the graphics whirl past.

Harrington said that in 2008 when the game won a BETT award – a key goal for anyone involved in educational software – the game was praised because of its detail.

He says: “It shows you, for example, that if you are going to choose to use a consultant to help you with a direct marketing campaign based on what you know, then these are going to be your experiences. All this is based on years and years of experience of doing these sorts of things in different agencies, rather than on some academic model which isn’t true. Another thing is recruitment. When you try and recruit staff in our game, it makes you aware of how long it genuinely takes to recruit. New staff don’t suddenly appear at their desk the next morning as they do on

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No-one is doing business simulation games like we are and if they are the kind of business they present is not true. Such games are not authentic

other simulations. There will be lead times, and even if you do interview people, that doesn’t mean they will accept the job. Even now, it’s not necessarily a seller’s market.”

The game takes account of your state of mind as a business owner too. A little face in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen lets you know whether you are happy or sad.

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And the more stressed you are, the longer everything takes to do on the game.”

Teams of four students from more than150 schools will experience all this for real in June when they play SimVenture to win an inaugural Umph award. The event, at the Galpharm Stadium in Huddersfield on June 16, is being sponsored by Sainsbury’s, Huddersfield Town Football Club and the University of Huddersfield. Harrington hopes it will rapidly become an annual event.

“We’re aiming for an event that will really attract people,” he says. “I hope those 150 students who come will have not only a great day, but will remember what they did for a long time to come. Although each member of the winning team will get an iPad, the net winners should be everyone.”

So far the auspices look good. Harrington and his two other colleagues at SimVenture worked with four universities – Leeds Met, Lancaster, Nottingham and, for a limited time, Derby – to trial the game. It was also tested on pupils at Tadcaster Grammar School and York College.

“One group of 15-year-olds would not put their laptops down when they were playing it,” he says. “Even though strictly speaking they were not our target market.”

This should be a personal thrill to him, because his motivation in moving away from QA Ventures – where he is now only a one-day-amonth chairman – and starting up SimVenture was a passion. A passion to help other people learn about business in a way that was more stimulating than the way he was taught at school. It’s a passion into which he has himself invested £250,000, after getting the cold shoulder from Yorkshire Forward.

Harrington says he scraped into St John’s University in York because he “screwed up his A-levels”. But that, he says, is because he is an “active learner”. “I like to learn by doing, but A-levels is all about memory,” he says.

Nonetheless, thanks in part to a highly effective mentor at the college – one Romano Zavaroni, a “hard working Italian” who was Lena Zavaroni’s uncle – he felt confident enough to set up his own business as soon as he finished college.

“I realised the early 1990s recession was starting, and it wasn’t going to be easy to >>

Entrepreneur teaching got hijacked by academia and that led to endless papers about how we do it in the NHS or in Mogadishu

BUSINESS LUNCH get a job,” he says. “So I set up my own business, a full service agency still going today.

I did my apprenticeship teaching myself at the coalface.”

Over the years of building the business too, he realised that what he enjoyed most about running a company was developing the talents of his staff.

“I liked to see people joining us at one point and developing as a person,” he says. “They might possibly be people who struggled getting a break elsewhere who I saw some raw talent in, who had to be nurtured or sometimes just calmed down.”

At the same time he was often being called to give speeches at schools and colleges in the region, or to judge business competitions due to his success in building up the business. And yet when he looked to see just how the students on these courses were being taught, he was immensely disheartened.

“Someone said, ‘You are the star turn of the course’,” he says, “and I thought, ‘If I am the star turn what is the course like? After all, I am here for an hour, maybe two.’ When they told me about the course, which was largely teacher telling them, I realised it would bore me rigid.”

He also feels there has to be something fundamentally wrong with the way people are introduced to the idea of running a business in this country because of the number of times people have said to him: “If only I knew then what I know now”.

“That’s a really common phrase I hear,” he says. “They often go on to say, “I would be richer, would not have wasted so much time, might actually be in business now.’ It’s a pretty desperate situation for them emotionally.”

He thinks the problem with education in general and business education in particular is precisely this hand-me-down nature of teaching. He likens it to the way he imagines many young children are taught to dive from a 10m high board, eager to match the success of Tom Daley, the 16-year-old diving champion from Plymouth.

“We sit you on the side of the pool,” he says.

“We talk to you, get you to wave your legs, do a little bit in the water, perhaps get someone else to talk to you about what it’s like to dive from such a board, then perhaps have a case

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Businesses don’t fail because they don’t know how to make a chair or run a taxi service. They fail over cashflow and poor sales and marketing

study, then suddenly tell you to dive off with no practice. Some people hurt themselves really badly that way, even if some do well. It’s all either no metres or 10m. What about giving people 2m and 5m on the way up?”

The 2m on the way up, he says, is what simulation is.

“Don’t get me wrong, a lot of mentors do a brilliant job,” he says. “But people don’t know what questions to ask. We need ways that allow people to get into their future, and simulation is the answer.”

He takes some inspiration from Sir Ken Robinson, the former professor of education at Warwick University whose 2006 speech on why current education kills creativity became

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one of the most widely-circulated speeches ever posted on the internet.

“Sir Ken says our existing educational model is based on Victorian industrial principles,” he says. “We process people in batches in a way that doesn’t inspire, and a lot of people kick back. We need a more agricultural model, where we learn in a more organic way. You don’t learn about business by only doing sales and marketing, because you don’t understand the relationships.”

Harrington clearly has some issues with academics. He deplores the way academia hived off much of the money that was poured into entrepreneurship training at the start of the century after Gordon Brown

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said the UK needed to improve survival rates.

“Entrepreneurship teaching got hijacked by academia,” he says, “and that led to endless papers about how we do it in the NHS or in Mogadishu.”

In fact, having promoted SimVenture in many parts of the world – including slums in Nairobi, – he is frequently appalled at the way some western organisations have sought to bring such education to the Third World.

“Teachers have been sent out at huge expense and then bugger off – all right, I take that back, they leave. In such cases that knowledge withers on the vine.”

Nevertheless, he insists SimVenture does not exclude teachers, or make them obsolete.

“We are actually freeing the teacher up from being the focus of attention, so they can see what people are doing, use their teaching skills,” he says. “We want these learners to carry on their journey of enquiry after they finish the game.”

He is keen, too, that the game should appeal to students who are not doing business studies as well.

He says: “Loughborough University has just bought a site licence not just for the business school, but for the whole campus, and that’s great. This is about helping you if you are doing pottery, or woodwork. Those courses will teach you how to do those things, but they won’t teach you how to turn it into something that could be commercial. After all, businesses don’t fail because they don’t know how to make a chair or run a taxi service. They fail over cashflow, poor sales and marketing, and poor people management.”

In that case, the final question has to be: Peter Harrington, do you believe entrepreneurship can actually be taught? There’s been endless discussion on this nature/nurture debate, and he pauses before answering.

“The problem is that people try to teach it in business schools without ever having been entrepreneurs themselves,” he says, “Their emotional attachment is zero. This is silly, because in medical school, for example, those people teaching you have practised professionally. You can tell straight away when an academic has been an entrepreneur. But for most people it’s not about teaching; it’s about helping them to learn.” n

BUSINESS LUNCH

Grill Room at the Grand With views overlooking York Minster and the city walls, the Grill Room at the Grand is just part of the £25m plan to turn what was the “palace of business” for the North Eastern Railway into York’s first five-star hotel.

The lavish restoration of the building which we featured previously in BQ, means hotel guests today are surrounded by Belgian marble, Ancaster and Portland stone, Roman mosaic detailing, and other design flourishes not just in the Grill Room itself but also in the neighbouring cosy whisky lounge.

A grill room is a feature at many of the great five-star hotels in Europe, and the classic menu at the Grill Room at the Grand has been designed with that tradition very much in mind. Apart from the venison we had, other options on the sample menu currently include roasted belly of pork, pan-fried loin of pork and poached galantine of pork with a root vegetable puree, stir-fried greens and noisettes of apple and red potato finished with a calvados cream sauce. Or you could go for pan-fried sea bass fillet with ginger-scented spaghetti vegetables.

The Grand also offers private dining in its HQ room – an atmospheric wood-panelled suite also overlooking the York walls. Culinary temptation of a different kind is at hand with The Grand’s Afternoon Tea. Best of all, you don’t actually need to be a guest at the hotel to benefit from any of this.

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BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

HOYLAND ON WINE

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PROTECTED SPECIES Mark Hoyland, general manager, Ramada Leeds Parkway in Otley Road, not only enjoyed his tasting session, he posed a few questions gauchos off with rich, red meat dishes – perhaps a slow-cooked beef casserole or game pie.

Another quiz question: In which country would you expect to find a tuatara? It’s a native New Zealand reptile – also known as spinyback – which inhabits Stephens Island, off Nelson in New Zealand. One point for New Zealand and a bonus for Stephens Island.

The admittedly rather ugly, prehistoric-looking creature is celebrated with Waimea Estates’

Here’s a quiz question: What is the world’s fourth-largest wine producing country? Italy – no. Spain – sorry. New Zealand – wrong again. It’s Argentina, and if Pascual Toso 2009 Malbec (14% abv) is an example of the aromas and flavours that this nation’s winemakers can achieve, it’s no great surprise that it sits so high in the league table.

It is possibly one of the darkest red wines I’ve ever seen in a glass – deep plummy in appearance with a perfumed nose. The plum allusion seems to follow it through the flavour although the first sip reminds me of dark chocolate; you know, when it has an almost coffee touch.

The wine keeps on shifting gear, developing and changing through ripe blackberries and blackcurrant – and what I recall as fresh tobacco (in the days when tobacco didn’t come with a social stigma), then mixed spice and lingering oak.

I confess to having sampled this on its own, simply enjoying one or two early evening relaxing moments, but I imagine it working its

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Spinyback Sauvignon Blanc (12.5% abv) and a percentage of the profits from each bottle goes into a scheme to protect it. The area around Nelson isn’t as famed for its wine as other parts of the country are – it’s on the cool side – so winemakers have to use all their skills and ingenuity to produce something out of the ordinary. And how these people have.

The wine fills the glass with a very attractive, slightly lime green tinge which prepares you for the aromas which are sharp and fruity with gooseberry notes.

Perhaps because I already know this is from New Zealand, I’m tasting kiwi fruit, but I’ll try another glass to confirm that. There’s crisp, concentrated fresh apple in the flavour, too, with the acidity of lime and a definite kick of alcohol. It’s very stylish with an appetising grip – one I’d open and share to impress.

We had it – completely unplanned – with a Thai chicken and red sauce curry and they accompanied one another brilliantly well, particularly the coconut-infused meat and fresh mangetout, but also with the fragrant rice which had been prepared with fresh lemon grass.

The wine is superb on its own (though dare I say, a touch aggressive?) but I’d guess it was made to accompany food, especially delicately flavoured dishes. (And, yes, the following glass still had the kiwi nuances.)

Another quiz question: Who said, “Please Sir, can I have some more?” n Malbec, Pascual Toso, £17, Sauvignon Blanc, Spinyback by Waimea, £21.

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Wines supplied by Lazy Lounge, Leeds, 0113 244 6055.

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HOYLAND ON WINE

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BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

FASHION

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The clothing brand associated with Aston Martin, rowing, rugger and Oxbridge started life on a French fleamarket barrow. Chris Porter delves into Hackett

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

SALUTE THE ARISTO MOVEMENT

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Jeremy Hackett can recall when “vintage” clothing was still called “second-hand”.

“Although the rarity of the clothing was appreciated even then, it was still known as ‘second hand’,” says the habitué of market stalls. “Call it ‘vintage’ and you can add another nought. I recently found a pair of white British naval trousers with a kind of side fastener I’ve never seen before and of which, I thought, ‘that’s nice, we’ll copy those’.”

“Although copying old clothes is not like going into a modern menswear store and buying something and copying it. I can’t really do that anyway, they all know me in the shops,” he jokes.

Hackett’s own name graces the front of some 60 shops globally (including Edinburgh and York), now generators of a $100m annual turnover and outlets for the quintessential English style that the brand promotes – an Englishness so hyper-real as to have done for the sartorial traditions of the tweed suit, the city stripe, Sloaney weekend sweaters and loud socks as Ralph Lauren has done for Americana. Lauren, indeed, was a customer of Hackett when he and his then business partner Ashley Lloyd-Jennings were running their own market stall in London’s Portobello during the booming 80s.

The duo, both salesmen on Savile Row at the time, had visited Paris’s Clignancourt flea-market one weekend, finding a trader doing a roaring trade in the old hunting, shooting and fishing clothing of the traditional English gent. The trader hired the duo to supply him from London, but they soon found that they had a market for it themselves – selling old but clean, repaired, properly displayed and hand-made suits to the well-to-do but not quite well-heeled. Soon their little store at the wrong end of Chelsea’s Kings Road became something of a destination – thus fulfilling the prophetic warning of Hackett’s father that, unless the boy pulled his stripy socks up, he would end up working in a shop.

“We weren’t really selling vintage as fashion then, as it is widely sold now,” Hackett adds.

“We were selling to young City guys who would rather buy a good second-hand suit than one for the same price from a high-street retailer. We’d get old ladies calling to tell us >>

their husbands had died and would we clean out their wardrobes. Sometimes those wardrobes were absolutely fantastic. We cleared out the brother of the singer Jack Buchanan and this guy was the perfect size 42L. We bought 50 suits at £10 each, and each pair of trousers had braces on them.

We sold the braces for £10 each and the suits for £100 each. Sometimes we’d be told that the departed was tall and slim and we’d get there and clearly he had been a short fat man.

We went through quite a lot of dead men’s wardrobes.”

But there were not enough dead men.

Demand soon outstripped supply, so Hackett and Lloyd-Jennings had clothes made in the style of their second-hand pieces. And a brand was born. One, indeed, whose potential was noted by the Richemont luxury goods group, which bought it less than a decade later, selling it five years onto the Pepe Jeans Group.

And one that would actually come to be appreciated by the full social spectrum of thrusting, late 20th century England, from young aristos on the razz in Fulham to lads on the football terraces during Euro 2000, the latter drawn to Hackett’s somewhat prescient re-appreciation of then still sadly nationalistic St George cross (“becoming what was perceived as a hooligan brand, well, we sold a lot of polo shirts but it’s not very aspirational is it? Not unless you’re a hooligan,” Hackett quips).

But whether your estate is council or populated by deer, the Hackett image has, the man concedes, a welcome touch of fantasy about it. Many think the brand has been passed down through the generations, but the Hackett of long associations with Aston Martin and rowing, rugby and polo is only 28 years old. It is sponsor of the British Army team, and also, less well known, of the Sussex Spaniel Association, with Jeremy Hackett’s own spaniels having appeared in the company’s ad campaigns since they were puppies.

“And, what is more, I don’t play polo or rugby, I don’t row and I don’t have an Aston Martin,” says Hackett.

This is the Hackett of Eton and Harrow house colours and the blazers of the Oxbridge boat race – an event Hackett also sponsors – although Hackett the man did not have those

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privileged beginnings either. He left school and went to work at 16.

There is, he explains, a certain appeal to the English look – it is more comfortable classics than high style; decidedly male when fashion likes to play with gender; it is tailored and dependable. It is also a formula that is working worldwide – the company is now expanding into the Far and Middle East, launching in Australia and pushing into the US. If Ralph Lauren has been selling his own idea of Englishness, here is a company from over the pond to show how it is done.

“I think we’ve probably romanced that English look a bit, because otherwise a plain grey suit is just a plain grey suit, with nothing to get much excited by,” admits Hackett, who recently redesigned the company logo as a fun take on the skull and cross bones, only now with a bowler hat and crossed umbrellas.

“Yet if that English look doesn’t really exist as it’s imagined then people certainly like it, extraordinarily so. In fact, it’s a look that’s probably worn much more outside of England than inside it. After all, Italians are the best-dressed Englishmen there are. Distance lends enchantment, I suppose. I mean, we all love Armani and Prada over here in Britain.

Well I don’t – but you see what I mean...” n

I think we’ve probably romanced that English look a bit, otherwise a plain grey suit is just a plain grey suit

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EQUIPMENT

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a dash of genius It’s a name that spells everything that’s stylish about style. Chris Porter reports on Porsche Design, a company interested in more than just cars With its elegant lines, white, composite plastic case and serrated bulb, one would be forgiven for thinking that it was some kind of concept communications tool. Look closer, however, and the name on its side, Porsche Design, suggests that maybe this is some form of ignition key, or a car door handle. It is, in fact, a pipe.

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That a name like Porsche – all speed and sex – should produce anything as prosaic, sedentary and old-mannish as a pipe might at first prompt thoughts of returning your Carrera to the nearest dealer. This would be a mistake. While design studios typically remain anonymous, letting the brand selling the product take the credit, Porsche Design is an

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exception – part back-room creators, part status name, it is true that its founder, Ferdinand Alexander Porsche designed the car company’s masterpiece, the 911. But then, coming up to 40 years ago, he went on to establish an independent studio that would turn its attention to the perfecting not only of cranes, trams and even dental chairs for other

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companies – more recently a super-yacht for Royal Falcon and furniture for Poltrona Frau – but would launch the cream of its design thinking under its own name.

“Of course, the first part of our name creates a certain awareness,” says Juergen Gessler, the CEO of Porsche Design, based in Zell Am See in Austria. “But there has to be design integrity and quality to convince anyone to buy one of our products and we’re selling mostly to people who do not own a Porsche.

They’re people who appreciate a very modern, very puristic design language – it is a classic ‘form follows function’ approach.”

It is also, Gessler concedes, an especially masculine style – austere, minimalistic, with lots of black and white, like the contents of a dream bachelor pad.

“Or at least it’s masculine if you define the curved form as being feminine,” he jokes.

“We don’t do many curves. But really it’s a look that appeals to a certain type of person who tends to have a knowledge of design and places a lot of importance in it. They are into the technique and materials of a design rather than the brand on it.”

That rigour is one of the characteristics that makes the brand unusual – an unwillingness to add pop colours or pretty graphics to make a product stand out, preferring understatement that is almost monastic.

“Bold is OK,” says Gessler, whose industrial design career started out with Mercedes and BMW. “It’s just not for us.”

The second is its readiness to launch only those products where the design team feels it has made a genuine improvement on what is already available. And, not exactly a compliment to the wider design community, the third is the diversity of products in which it has found improvements to make. Luggage comes with stain-resistant coating and silent-running wheels; pens come in anti-corrode materials and with flexible barrels; its spectacles fold almost completely flat; its mobile phone is milled from a single aluminium block; its desk lamp was among the first to use LED lighting. Fashion, footwear and watches offer some smart ideas too.

Recent products have included sunglasses with a unique lens replacement system (swap the lenses according to the ideal light >>

EQUIPMENT

Really it’s a look that appeals to a certain type of person who tends to have a knowledge of design and places a lot of importance in it Awareness: Juergen Gessler believes totally in design integrity and quality

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BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

EQUIPMENT

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conditions for the activity at hand), a fountain pen with a system that prevents the nib from drying out and a briefcase designed following research to understand exactly what typical users might want to carry with them and how, rather than providing a design with endless compartments, none of them the right size for good use. And as for that pipe... The ribbed effect is actually an integrated cooling system – akin to that used in motorcycle engines – to ensure the body is always comfortable to hold but the optimum temperature for the tobacco is maintained... Such thinking has won the company more than 120 prestigious Red Dot and ADI Milan design awards. New luggage lines, as well as small leather goods and

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

additional watches are on the sketchpad.

Indeed, Gessler argues that it is precisely because Porsche Design’s designers are not specialists in any one field, but are ready to cross-fertilise ideas from other design disciplines, that its products are innovative. “(That way of working) has a very inspiring effect,” he says. “Rather than working on one kind of product all the time our designers jump from one product world to the next.

Today it’s a new watch, tomorrow the interior of a business jet. ‘Porsche Design style’ is more a way of thinking. And a timely one – design is set to play a much more important part in buying decisions for consumers.”

It is certainly a thinking that has appeal – Porsche AG, the car company that shares the name, finally recognised a good thing in 2003 when it joined with Porsche Design to create the Porsche Design Group, launched to maximise the car brand’s potential beyond the auto industry. Gessler’s Porsche Design, meanwhile, has some 500 points-of-sale around the world, as well as 106 of of its own stores, and expects to open a further 150 or so shops over the next five years – essential, Gessler suggests, to allow consumers to experience what he calls the Porsche Design world.

“There is certainly scope for more design studios to become brands in their own right, although that was never Ferdinand Porsche’s intention,” he adds. “Most of our design work is still anonymous for third party companies and that remains important in terms of generating ideas. But the fact is that there is power in creating your own products too...”

Are there, in fact, any product categories to which Porsche Design would not turn its sharpened pencil and CAD software? There is one it has considered repeatedly, Gessler admits, although never quite committed to – laptops. Why? Because laptops have never

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Rather than working on one kind of product all the time, our designers jump from one product world to the next been regarded as means of expressing their user’s personality.

“They have simply been devices,” says Gessler.

“But, people use to say that about mobile phones and they are now important status items. And the laptop market seems to be going that way too. So maybe...”

Watch out Apple. ■

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MOTORING

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

SPRING 11

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SPRING 11

MOTORING

CONTINENTAL TRANSLATION

Andy Hobson, Fantastic Media, is impressed by the Bentley Continental GT he took out on the road >>

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BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

MOTORING

SPRING 11

I was intrigued to review the new Bentley Continental GT. As someone who eats, sleeps and breathes brands, you can’t fail to hold Bentley in high esteem. For me it’s always been synonymous with quality and luxury based on the history and heritage of Bentley, so I was hoping the new model would live up to my expectations.

The Continental GT has some very subtle upgrades to its appearance. The wider stance, more chiselled crease lines and aggressive tailgate are the giveaways that this model has evolved. I’m pleased however that VW haven’t strayed too far away from Bentley’s original looks and values.

The elegant interior can’t fail to impress, with the smell of the soft leather seats – beautifully stitched – you really get the impression that this is a hand-made car, individually built just for you. The comfort can’t be questioned as the GT really does wrap itself around you and envelop you in luxury.

Once I finally got out onto the road the tightness of the handling made the drive enjoyable and exhilarating. I have to admit I wasn’t prepared for the sportiness and unbelievable power of the GT. The quietness of the engine lulls you into a false sense that the drive will be sedate and composed, whereas in actual fact it is dynamic, commanding, and sleek.

I was informed that the GT has the biggest

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production brakes of any car currently on the market, and on a drive which took in Holme Moss, Snake Pass and a sharp right to Dumford Bridge, I tested these out in the real world. Again the GT handled nicely, the brakes were responsive yet smooth and the experience didn’t disappoint.

The car certainly causes a stir in town with the older generation stopping to look; as if reminded of when Bentley meant the best of British engineering, and younger admirers stealing an envious glance as the GT glides quietly by.

On the whole I felt that the GT is appealing for a number of reasons: It’s an accessible option, to be considered with other luxury cars where Bentley was once out of reach to anyone other that the elite. It’s sophisticated yet aggressive and deceptively powerful. For me, the main draw of the Continental GT is that by buying this car you are, in essence, buying a piece of British history and helping to uphold the values of an historic British brand – not forgetting it is now owned by VW! n

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You really get the impression that this is a hand-made car, individually built just for you

Andy Hobson, Managing Director of Fantastic Media test drove the Bentley Continental GT, from £135,760 on the road, supplied by Bentley Leeds, 102 Gelderd Road, Leeds, West Yorkshire, LS12 6BY, 0844 844 3117

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SUCCESS STORY

SPRING 11

ALL CUT AND DRIED The food supply industry can be calculated in billions but one Yorkshire firm is competing head on with the big boys, as Peter Baber discovers

In an overlooked corner of south Leeds there is a manufacturer that can trace its history back to 1827. Yet Symington’s today seems more than focused on growing its market share in dried food even in the height of the recession – partly with the help of a brand made famous

by Andy Warhol.

In November last year the £120m company secured £10m in additional backing from Yorkshire Bank, existing management and Hermes private equity to fund further growth, which included new product development and its first entry into the gravy market with its Aunt Bessie’s brand.

The Andy Warhol connection is Campbell’s Soup – but not the soup tin made famous by

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

the Pop artist; the dried version. The company has entered into a 10-year joint venture with Campbell’s Inc of the US to produce it.

The first products from this range were launched in January.

1827 was the year when founder William Symington first moved south from his native Scotland with a desire to continue his plans for producing dried food. The family company developed a process technology to develop pea flour, which in effect was the origins of dried soup. In case anyone should doubt the health benefits of such a way of eating, William himself survived at the head of the company until he died in 1898 – so much for Victorian short lives. By that time, the

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company had become a major supplier of food for the troops in the Crimean War, and not long after Symington died the company was supplying food for many of Captain Scott’s expeditions to the Antarctic. When one of Scott’s food dumps was rediscovered 50 years later, the tin of dried pea soup from Symington’s was still in perfect condition.

To be fair, most of this happened with little or any Yorkshire connection – for much of its history the company was headquartered in the Midlands. It was only as a result of a number of mergers that the company now has its headquarters in Beeston. That was where Brand Partnership, one of Asda’s rice suppliers, was located when it took over Symington’s in

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2002 and decided to use the Symington’s name thereafter.

But significant investment was made into the Leeds operation at the time, particularly into its high-speed soup production technology, and the company has been expanding onto neighbouring sites ever since. The latest plan is to take over a site currently being occupied by a Vodafone factory that is being relocated.

The company, which employs 600 people, has doubled its turnover in three years, and hugely upped production. Three years ago, 260,000 cases a year were coming off the Beeston site, where 500 people work. Now the figure is 630,000. The Campbell’s deal is the latest in a series of deals the company has undertaken in recent years that have seen the percentage of branded goods it produces increase from 35% three years ago to 65% today, with a target to reach 80% branded eventually.

The move towards more branding was started

by Andy Micklethwaite and Tim Robertshaw, the duo who bought the then £17m turnover Brand Partnership in 2000 and led the takeover of Symington’s two years later. The pair had a long track record in the food industry – Micklethwaite had worked in finance for Northern Foods and Sara Lee, while Robertshaw had been sales director at United Biscuits. But current chief executive David Salkeld says they were surprised by the success of the first branding venture they undertook – to produce packet sauces and meals under the name of TV chef Ainsley Harriott.

“They admit they tripped into Ainsley Harriott as a brand,” says Salkeld. “Neither had direct brand experience, and Ainsley worked much better than they had ever anticipated as a brand.”

To be fair, however, much of the country’s most recent dramatic growth has been under the leadership of Salkeld himself. When he took the company over in 2007, it had a turnover of £47m.

Now aged 55, Salkeld started as one of British Steel’s last graduate trainees in industrial relations on Teesside in the early 1980s. Not the most auspicious time – or vocation – as the company went through a protracted steel strike shortly after he joined.

“I went through the picket lines for 13 weeks,” he says.

SUCCESS STORY

Switching then to the food industry, he worked for Findus, Grand Metropolitan and Northern Foods in a career directed partly by his desire never to move south, unless given very lucrative terms. But before Symington’s his career high point was probably being chief executive of what in 2000 became Arla Foods, also based in Leeds. Salkeld says he and Henrik Pade, a Dane who has followed him to Symington’s to be marketing director, can take responsibility for launching Lurpak Spreadable onto the world, and for launching Cravendale as a milk brand.

“A million people told me you couldn’t brand milk,” he says, “but it was my little baby. This was unique technology and Cravendale milk is purer because it goes through five ceramic filters. Purity, life and taste were the three consumer propositions. We brought in the Danish farmers behind Lurpak to come and see what we were doing. We gave them tea or coffee with Cravendale and asked them to guess how many days’ life was in the milk.

They all said between 18 and 20. It was actually 52.” The results for Arla were spectacular.

“When I took it on in 1994 it was losing £27m a year,” he says. “When I handed it over in 2003 it was making £27m a year. That’s a big turnaround.”

Not surprisingly with a success like that Salkeld has been keen to continue Symington’s drive towards producing more branded goods. He has to admit that when he first met Micklethwaite and Robertshaw at a do in Hazlewood Castle and they revealed that they had thought of selling up he had never heard of Symington’s. That might be because in the 1960s the then Symington’s management had decided to move away from producing own-brand materials. The actual Symington’s name had become little more than an endorsement brand, something it remains to this day.

“I had heard of Symington’s table cream,” he says, “but that was because my dad had heard of it, and he’s in his 80s.”

Nevertheless, he and Pade did the maths, and liked what they saw. “The categories were good, the margins were strong, but capable of adding value,” he says. “Neither of us had worked in grocery or dried food before. But

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they didn’t want to sell it to a big corporate.

They wanted to keep it here with people who knew about brands.”

With backing from Hermes, Salkeld bought and took over the company, although as he points out the ownership structure is much more co-operative than you might imagine for this size of company.

“The management and I own 40% of the company, and there are 20-odd managers,” he says. “But we are a very heavyweight management team for this size of business.

Our chairman owns Booths supermarkets, our group operations director was formerly at Arla, Henrik was at Arla, our purchasing director was the UK purchasing director at CadburySchweppes, and our finance director was formerly at Northern Foods.”

Under Salkeld’s stewardship, the move into branding has accelerated, not just with Campbell’s and Aunt Bessie’s but also with dried food under the Crosse & Blackwell and Mug Shot labels, as well as Golden Wonder, which Salkeld is keen to point out was the original instant noodle brand before Unilever came along with Pot Noodle.

There have been more signings with personalities too. The company now produces a dried pudding range under James Martin, and is in talks with Simon Rimmer to produce a vegetarian range. All these personality brandings aren’t just brandings either. Harriott and Martin both work actively with the test kitchen at the Beeston factory, which Salkeld says is peculiarly active for a company this size.

“One of the first things we did when we took over was to double the size of the kitchen,” he says. “A business our size would usually have about four people in product development.

We have 15. Last year alone we launched 234 brand-new products and refreshed 216. In all, we touched more than 450 products.”

Salkeld and his team have been very careful in the way they target their marketing, too. A strategy of challenger brands has been paramount. Salkeld says it is mainly due to the shape of the dried food market.

“In a market of 61 million consumers, you have Nestle making £65bn, Unilever £55bn, and Premier around £4bn, but then nothing until you get to us. That’s a huge chasm. So if you are Tesco, you have a generic instant >>

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SUCCESS STORY noodle market worth, say, £100m, of which Pot Noodle takes up probably £70m, and the rest is own label. So we have the first challenger brand. We are never going to overtake Unilever, but the challenger brand strategy has worked for us in Pot Noodle and we are now taking Batchelors head on with Campbells.

“But we are not a discounting proposition. We don’t come in to undercut the category.

Previously the consumer didn’t have brand choice in noodles, now they do. They didn’t have it in gravy, now they do. They didn’t have a scaled choice in soups, now they do. To make the proposition work we try to ensure retailers get a better margin of between 7% and 10%; find a brand the consumer recognises and loves, and create a better product. It’s a virtuous circle for the business.”

Isn’t he worried about the market leader just adopting another loss leader product to drive him out of business? He shrugs.

“If Unilever wanted to lose money on Pot Noodle we would be sunk,” he says. “But I don’t think their shareholders would be too pleased either.”

In fact, he says, there are other marketing advantages to running a poor but fastgrowing second in the market. First there’s the speed of decision making, which can sometimes mean a new product goes from initial concept to finished article in just four weeks.

“We are not a battleship, but a little speedboat,” says Salkeld.

But there’s more too. He says their marketing judgements and information are of more use to a retailer precisely because of the company’s size.

“Our category insights, because we do own-label as well, would be valuable to a retailer,” he says. “Our views are a little bit more respected.”

It’s a happy story, however, but one that could have been very different. Because in between leaving Arla and taking over Symington’s, Salkeld had another chief executive role at Grampian Foods, then Scotland’s secondbiggest private company and one of Britain’s biggest chicken producers. His major feat during his tenure was to move the company headquarters down to Leeds.

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Our category insights, because we do own-label as well, would be valuable to a retailer. Our views are more respected “I wanted it to be amongst its customers, down here,” he says.

But the move proved understandably controversial for a company that had been one of Scotland’s jewels. And it proved more expensive than forecast. Although turnover grew by £500m to £1.9bn in three years, the company went from posting a £21m profit to having a £40.5m loss.

Salkeld says that in September 2005 Grampian’s chairman Fred Duncan was on the point of agreeing to sell the business to him, with backing from the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The first bird flu scare hit during due diligence, and the bank pulled out. Grampian has since been sold to a Dutch conglomerate.

“It’s very difficult to be heavy in agriculture and in value-added,” he says. “The company had 264 chicken farms, with 3.4 million chickens coming off the farms every week whether the customers wanted them or not.

Furthermore the meat industry is unusual in that value comes when you break things apart, rather than add them together, so the value of what you have left is critical. My thrust at

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Grampian was to be front end. Obviously that created tensions. But I still think having a front end focus on the meat industry is the right one. Look at the success [East Yorkshire pork and animal producer] Cranswick have had.”

His first few weeks at Symington’s began to look rocky, too.

“I had only been in a month when we had waves of raw material cost increases, and I had to deliver the company’s first cost price increase in seven years,” he says. “If you have ever tried to get one of those out of Tesco, you’ll know it’s not an easy task.”

The next challenge came in July 2008 when the company’s distribution partner Macfarlane’s went into administration.

Symington’s has now bought its old site in east Leeds as a distribution depot.

“We still had a huge ambitious development programme,” says Salkeld. “We put our foot on the gas pedal of growth and the factory creaked.”

It certainly has. The company has just delivered its seventh cost price increase in three years.

But few seem to be complaining. n

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ENTREPRENEUR

HEALTH SERVICE Early retirement may be fine for some – but not for serial entrepreneur Ian Richardson, as Peter Baber discovers >>

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ENTREPRENEUR Listening to Ian Richardson detail the latest plans for his new company, you would be hard pushed to remember that entrepreneurialism is not actually in his blood, and that in fact up until he entered his fifth decade he was quite content to remain as one of Leeds’ top corporate lawyers.

This latest venture is actually the 51-year-old’s second go at building up a business, after he and Dr Magdy Ishak sold Covenant Healthcare in a £170m deal in 2005. You could even call it a third go, if you count a casual acquisition he made in between the two to help out a York-based company that was in trouble.

Like Covenant, the new business, SkinCity, is very much geared at the broad healthcare market, only this time it’s an umbrella company focusing on preventive medicine and patient wellbeing.

“Preventative medicine and stress management are two areas that we feel will be incredibly important in years to come,” he says.

The company’s first acquisition was Aromatherapy Associates, a London based spa and aromatherapy products provider, at the end of 2009. But late last year it came back to Richardson’s Leeds roots by buying two companies which jointly run the Leeds Screening Centre. The centre has capitalised on the city’s considerable healthcare expertise by offering, among services, advanced screening for Down’s syndrome in foetuses, and tests for pre-eclampsia. It was previously jointly owned by the Leeds Ultrasound Screening Service (LUSS), founded by Gerald Mason, a consultant in feto-maternal medicine at Leeds General Infirmary, and Genome, founded by Professor Howard Cuckle from Columbia University in the US who is also emeritus professor at the School of Medicine at the University of Leeds. Both men retain a stake in the new business.

“The centre has developed an extremely accurate test for Downs,” says Richardson.

“That is the key test that they do. I couldn’t explain it completely myself, and you would need Howard to go through statistics, but the test they do is significantly more accurate than what is currently available.”

The services provided will of course be private, but Richardson disputes any idea that the

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The NHS has to go more towards prevention. The private sector working with the NHS can be extremely effective

growth of such companies could lead to a two-tier NHS, with only the richer patient being able to afford the kinds of services that the screening centre provides.

“If it is going to keep a lid on its costs the NHS has to go more towards more prevention,” he says. “In fact, the private sector working with the NHS can be extremely effective.”

Nor does have any truck with the view – as espoused by some disability campaigners – that the kind of genetic and pre-birth screening his company is looking to provide is a sinister development in that it could eventually lead to people trying to screen out all perceived abnormalities to create the perfect human being.

“I don’t think that’s a totally silly argument,” he says, “but nobody would want to move towards perfect human being. Genetics is however going to allow us to be given far more information about living a life in a way that will give it a maximum possible span.

Within 20 to 30 years somebody coming into adulthood will have their own personal healthcare mapped out. So, if you are susceptible to heart disease you will have a different lifestyle from someone who is not genetically predisposed to it.

“This is still very young technology. Science has given us an incredible asset, and I don’t think people have worked out how to use it.

But, with an ageing population and increasing costs, we have to move towards preventive rather than reactive medicine.”

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He has hopes that SkinCity will grow quickly.

He thinks it should make around £10m in turnover this year.

“Aromatherapy Associates is looking to go into retail with individual shops,” he says.

“The genetic business is something we want to develop and extend. We are keen to open in other locations.”

As with all umbrella set-ups, he will eventually get some advantages from cross-selling between the two businesses.

“But we have bought two businesses in less than two months,” he says, “so we need to bed them down.”

That won’t just involve him; Richardson is only interested in buying businesses which have a day-to-day general management team he can rely on. But even if things should not go totally to plan, he has experience of dealing with a troubled business as well. In 2007, not long after he had finished his earn-out period and only eight months into what was supposed to be a retirement, he bought York-based travel company Travelscope out of administration and installed Jonathan Wackett – or “Wacko” as he calls him – as managing director.

Wackett was a former head of corporate finance in Europe for Pricewaterhouse Coopers, someone Richardson had done many a deal with during his time as a corporate lawyer in Leeds in the 1990s.

“I had known the former owner of Travelscope since I was seven and we were both at school in Pocklington,” he says. “I knew the business, and got a call from a couple of the managers there. They wanted to know if I could buy certain assets. They were having difficulty selling the business as a whole to a third party because of data issues. A lot of customers were on databases that had come to them through reader offers with newspapers, so it was not an easy situation in terms of intellectual property.

“I decided to back it, and the price was very low,” he says. “I couldn’t turn it down. Wacko was a very well-known guy in corporate finance, very gifted. He’s a bit older than me and had pretty much semi-retired. But he is a guy I have utmost respect for. He has some equity interest in it, and we have made a couple of acquisitions. It will probably turn over between £10m and £11m.”

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Richardson himself remains a hands-off owner of the company. But buying it had clearly had whetted his appetite for more business dealings, this time with his old colleague Dr Ishak who, like Wackett, is also considerably older than him. The retirement plans seem to have gone out the window.

“Just three months into my retirement I had already done all those things I wanted to do,” he says. “I like history, so I had seen many battlefields and visited China and Japan, but I got very bored.”

He adds lightheartedly that his family – his wife and two teenage children who now live in Hertfordshire – were keen to see him back on the road.

“The last thing they wanted me to do was retire,” he says. “Me being away meant I was not bollocking them about their table manners.”

Nevertheless, he says there will be changes this time around from his first business venture.

“I have learned lessons, such as not taking life so seriously,” he says. “When you first set up your own business you tend to over-react to success and failure. Now I am more evenhanded. If you have a bad day it’s not the end of the world, and if you have a good day, tomorrow could be bad.”

There will be differences in management structure too. This time around it is Richardson who is chief executive of SkinCity, with Ishak as chairman. When the two of them ran Covenant Healthcare, Ishak was very much more in the driving seat – and had a higher profile. Richardson remembers how they two initially got together.

“I first came across him in the late 1980s when he became chief executive of Cresta Care,” he says. “He sold out and in 2001 rang me to say, ‘Do you want to start a healthcare business?’. I had been on the board of a couple of listed companies – the Peterhouse Group and Firth Holdings – and I always had an entrepreneurial desire in me. So I thought I would give it a go.”

The company grew rapidly, with backing not just from Ishak himself but also from private equity company Phoenix Ventures and the Bank of Scotland. It was soon running six private hospitals, a cosmetic surgery business, and three psychiatric hospitals.

ENTREPRENEUR

Healthcare market: Ian Richardson “Then in 2005 we received offers we couldn’t turn down,” says Richardson.

That offer came from rival private equity house Cognetas, with over £100m in funding from Bank of Scotland. It has to be said the deal, which at the time was seen as a success story for Bank of Scotland’s then much-vaunted Integrated Finance offering, has not been viewed so favourably in hindsisght. Covenant became hugely indebted as a result of the deal, and when Bank of Scotland was taken over by Lloyds Banking Group, former Lloyds boss Eric Daniels was said to have taken personal responsibility for finding a buyer for the company. It was eventually sold to General Healthcare, Britain’s biggest private hospital operator, in a deal which pretty much wiped out what equity Cognetas had.

However, Richardson is unwilling to suggest it could have been otherwise.

“We are in a different funding environment now,” he says. “At the time, those values didn’t seem silly, now they do. It’s a mistake to make judgements in an environment about things that happened in previous environments. There were not too many people saying the deal was overpriced at the time.”

He does concede to feeling sorry for private equity houses now. “It’s difficult for them because so much of value creation was based around gearing, and there isn’t any gearing any more,” he says. “Nor is there likely to be

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for a couple of years. But in some ways the less money private equity puts in the better. It used to put in 10% of the risk and take 100% of the upside. Now you get to create value with a management team, rather than allow the gearing to create value.”

But the 2005 deal has clearly given him a top-notch lifestyle, and has left both him and Ishak in the enviable position of being able to fund their acquisitions without any recourse to banks.

“We have a preference to control our own destiny,” he says. “It would have to be a good deal for us to want to have outside investors.”

So why risk all that wealth by acquiring companies when nationally there are barely any signs of economic recovery?

“Business is difficult whether you are in a recession or in a boom,” he says. “All that happens is the problems change. In a boom you have problems too that are just as difficult.

You have labour shortages, and difficulty in getting suppliers. In a recession you can buy things much more easily, and get deals much more easily, but it’s more difficult getting paid and surviving. With a boom you have the reverse situation. You can’t get offices or people but when you do you can sell easily.

I would rather have a prosperous environment than a recession, but that isn’t necessarily a dictator.”

That does sound like a true entrepreneur talking. Was it to have such an experience that he gave up corporate law? After all, by 2001 he had been senior partner at what became Eversheds.

“When I made the move most people thought I was barking mad,” he says. “Law is hard work but is very well remunerated, and is relatively risk-free. But as a lawyer you have a shelf life. It’s a very gruelling job, reading lots of documents. All lawyers fancy themselves as entrepreneurs.”

For the moment, an entrepreneur is what he wants to continue being, but he has not lost all sight of the legal world either. He has been a key adviser in helping Sharon Needle, another Leeds corporate lawyer, set up her own practice in the city. And for the time being it will be the Needle Partnership, as it is called, that will most likely be doing Richardson’s deals. n

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SUCCESS STORY

moo-ving ahead The cream always rises to the top, a fact that Peter Baber is reminded of as he examines the Yorkshire ice-cream sector where production is booming and flavours are toying with people’s perceptions Anyone who did geography or economics as a GCSE or A-level subject at school may well remember Hotelling’s theory about icecream salesmen on a beach. The theory, first dreamed up by the eponymous economist in 1929, has gone on to inform much of current theory about how businesses (and by implications towns) position themselves.

Roughly speaking, it first suggests two scenarios concerning the two ice-cream salesmen. In the first, the beach is evenly divided in two and each salesman is at the mid-point of each half.

In the second, one of the salesmen has moved more to the centre, and as a result is taking some of the other seller’s market share (assuming sunbathers are spread evenly across the beach).

Hotelling extrapolated from this that in an ideal scenario, both salesmen would be positioned next to each other in the middle of

the beach, because each would try to take as much of the other’s market share as possible, and as a result could only end up there.

They would also, by implication, be selling remarkably similar products.

It is worth keeping this theory in the back of your mind when you come to consider icecream production in Yorkshire. And not just on the fine sandy beaches of Scarborough and Filey, but all over the region.

This is worth considering, partly because Europe’s biggest ice-cream manufacturer is currently located in the region. R&R Ice Cream, based at Leeming Bar in Northallerton, is the result of a 2006 merger between two fast-growing enterprises – Roncadin, based in Germany but founded by an Italian family, and Richmond Foods, based in Northallerton.

In fact, the £182m deal was a canny move by Richmond’s chief executive, because by 2006 Roncadin had already been taken over by

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US-based Oaktree Capital Management. He persuaded Oaktree to buy out his operation as well, retaining him as executive chairman of the enlarged company. Since the merger the company has added to its pan-European credentials by acquiring Rolland, France’s third biggest ice-cream manufacturer.

The company now produces some of the biggest ice-cream brands in Europe, including Fab lollies and Rowntree’s Fruit Pastille lollies.

It has also brought out its own Skinny Cow range, aimed at the more health-conscious icecream aficionado- if such a person exists.

So it has certainly got the mass market sewn up – but then it is a national brand. Its other makes include Kelly’s Cornish ice-cream. It’s not just the cream of Yorkshire.

So what about other producers? In particular, in these days of increasing concern about local provenance of food, what about the artisan producers who can supposedly boast a >>

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SUCCESS STORY more direct link with the originating farm – and perhaps more authentic flavours?

Deliciouslyorkshire, a trade body set up initially with Yorkshire Forward funding to promote all that’s best in local Yorkshire produce, has 15 ice-cream businesses among its members.

And one of them, ice cream producer Yummy Yorkshire, carried off the Supreme Product of the Year award at the much-coveted Deliciouslyorkshire Awards in 2009-10. The product in question was Lou’s Liquorice Ice Cream.

The company operates out of husband-andwife team Louise and Jeremy Holmes’ 250acre dairy farm just outside Denby Dale.

Alongside milking 120 of the farm’s 200 cows to produce an ever-expanding range of ice creams, the couple also run an icecream parlour which seemed particularly well patronised when we visited – on a bright but breezy Friday afternoon outside half-term in early March.

The company’s story is a fairly common one of a farmer wanting to diversify. The Holmes family have been milking cows on this site for three generations.

“My granddad George came over here in the 1960s,” says Jeremy. “Both he and my dad always milked the cows and processed and retailed their own milk, and the milk operation is still the core business of the farm.”

But the farm had been going through the same kind of transitions that have faced a lot of small to medium sized farmers in the wake of restructuring in the dairy industry.

And in particular they had a surplus of cream.

So Jeremy, always a fan, decided ice-cream production might be something to try.

Wife Louise, meanwhile, was not so sure.

With a strong corporate background, having worked for Capita and A4e, and now with children, she was not so sure this was a good idea.

“I was first a bit anti the idea,” she says.

“I thought the farm was tiring enough. But Jeremy pointed out that we were tired anyway.

And I realised he couldn’t carry on by himself.”

With just £5,000 from Growing Roots, a Yorkshire Agricultural Society programme aimed at helping farmers diversify, and just short of £50,000 of their own money, they started producing in April 2007, although

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they had been experimenting with milkshakes beforehand.

And they have been expanding. Having started with a chest freezer and a pasteuriser that could only handle 10 litres at a time, the company now produces 120 litres a day, in an ever-increasing range of flavours. Louise admits she likes experimenting – but that’s one of the advantages of having a shop on site.

“I can make a wacky flavour, put it in the shop and see what happens,” she says.

Beetroot is currently on trial – a subtly sweet alternative to the sickly sweet varieties the mass market might be used to. But there have been other experiments too.

“We did a Yorkshire pudding flavour for Yorkshire Day with gravy and raspberry vinegar,” she says. “But we have also done beef and horseradish, so the cream was horseradish, which was great because you got the flavour without the kick.”

Other trials have included green pea, and English mustard and honey.

“The savoury flavours mess with the customer’s heads a little bit,” says Louise. “But they like it in the end.”

Preparation can be back-breaking work, however. The Lou’s Liquorice that won the award, for example, involves Louise and another employee personally cutting up pieces

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of Pontefract cake to put in the ice-cream.

The couple are, however, very keen to ensure they source products within the Yorkshire region, partly to keep in with the Deliciouslyorkshire mindset.

“We knew we wanted to keep something in Yorkshire,” says Jeremy. “We are very proud of where we live. Yorkshire really is the capital of food.”

Aside from the Pontefract cake, they buy all their strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries from a grower in Garforth; buy their chilli jam from another Yorkshire supplier, and their rhubarb from Oldroyds, a production facility so central to Yorkshire that since February 2010 the EU has even granted it Protected Designation of Origin status, similar to Parma ham.

The company have been expanding their brand too. Following work with FDB Design in Boston Spa, a character cow has been created, which they have christened Camilla. And a full size mascot of Camilla is being hired out for children’s parties.

But what about distribution? Following their success at the Deliciouslyorkshire awards, the brand was picked up by Asda, although only in three of its West Yorkshire branches. Jeremy says he is not particularly pleased with the way this contract has gone, and he would not necessarily be looking to continue it, although he would love to see Yummy Yorkshire in more upmarket supermarkets such as Booths or Waitrose.

They have, however, been expanding distribution through channels such as local cinemas, delicatessens and tourist attractions.

In fact, the long cold winter has helped here.

“We’ve driven a bit more over winter period,” says Louise, “and now we have won the Yorkshire Sculpture Park as well. The head chef there says he is sick of people telling him he needs us.”

Local restaurants have been quick to take some orders too, although Jeremy says this has got tougher in the current economic climate.

For the timebeing, however, it has been just him doing the selling.

“I have always said you have to sell your own product, not anyone else, because you know how to sell it,” he says. “But that could change.”

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Is this a realistic business model? After all, as we said, there are at least 15 ice-cream businesses in Yorkshire alone. One of them is Just Jenny’s, with a similar history to Yummy Yorkshire and based only a few miles away in Barkisland. Jeremy has already been competing against them for some accounts.

Gary Rogers, owner of Yorkshire Dales icecream in Bolton Abbey, says this is why local producers will eventually find their future is limited. He says they end up only competing against each other.

Yorkshire Dales is of course another rival to Yummy Yorkshire, although it has been going longer, since 1990. Although it is sited on a former dairy farm, the company buys in all its milk from a mini processor in Grassington that acts for 15 local farms.

Rogers has noticed a difference from10 years ago, when even the local agricultural shows were dominated by Italian producers.

“We have at least persuaded them that they ought to stock a product that is based on the local agriculture,” he says.

But beyond that, he says, because of the limitations of shelf space, national retailers like Asda and Tesco will only stock local brands in the regions they come from, and usually only in very basic flavours. Yorkshire Dales is currently sold in Tesco and Asda, but only across the North of England.

“South of Sheffield they start wanting to have a Midlands producer,” he says.

He adds that looking for tourist attractions and restaurants is also all very well, but there is only a limited number of those to go around, and with so many products all boasting the same provenance, the only factor you can compete on is price – something he doesn’t want to countenance.

You might wonder, then, why someone with a relatively jaded opinion of local production has kept at it for 20 years. Rogers says its partly because it is still “better than farming”, but also because he has invested money in a fleet of vans that can carry the Yorkshire Dales brand further, at least in the summer.

The vans visit 300 events a year. The higher margins they generate mean there’s less worry in the winter months – and more chance to invest. He is currently updating his main Bolton Abbey site with a New England themed ice

SUCCESS STORY

I can make a wacky flavour, put it in the shop and see what happens. We did a Yorkshire pudding flavour for Yorkshire Day with gravy and raspberry vinegar

cream parlour complete with authentic Amish playground.

“If you were to sell ice-cream into Castle Howard, say, and get £10 for it; with the same amount of ice-cream in cones you could probably get £100 for it,” he says.

The Holmes have also seen the advantages of expanding the retail operation.

“Someone said, ‘You will never get rich unless you are selling it on a cone’,” says Louise.

“That is where you make your best margin.”

But what aspirations do such producers have?

Would they not welcome outside investment?

Rogers says he certainly doesn’t have the capacity or resources to make Yorkshire Dales a national brand, and he doesn’t think it

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would work particularly well, anyway.

“I don’t think we have the right name for that,” he says.

The Holmes, however, would be more interested in outside investment – as long, as they could retain an interest in the company.

They claim that is what has happened with Ben & Jerry’s – although in fact since they sold out to Unilever, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield no longer have a seat on Ben & Jerry’s board.

But there are always possibilities. After all, way back in 1985 Jonathan Ropner, another Yorkshire farmer, bought local ice cream producer Cardosi. That grew into Richmond Foods, or R&R, as we know it today. n

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ENTREPRENEUR

THE MEAL DEAL Dan Curtis is a man with a particularly direct way of running a company. His high standards have allowed his school catering company to became a particular success.

Peter Baber reports Dan Curtis is chief executive of Dolce, a York-based contractor that focuses mainly on providing meals for primary school children.

The company has won success in recent months from the introduction of an IT system that, uniquely in the country, allows parents to pay for their children’s meals by direct debit.

Curtis says such cashless systems can make a big difference in a low-margin industry like school catering, and where many schools still expect the dinner ladies to take care of cash collection themselves.

“You can get a 4% increase in revenue just by stopping the money dribbling through the cracks,” he says. “For a lot of companies, that 4% would be their profit margin.”

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The IT system, created by Curtis’ son Dougal, is also designed to make dinner time an enjoyable experience for the children. When they come into their classroom each morning, those children who have signed up to the scheme tap their names into a personalised pre-order screen which comes up with a list of the day’s choices. What each child chooses is then fed to the kitchen by internet for a production list so the cook knows exactly what to cook. If only three children have chosen one of the options, for example, then the computer will produce the recipe for that option tailored to make three portions. That means the cook can avoid waste without having to do complicated calculations. >>

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ENTREPRENEUR “Cooks aren’t there for their numeracy skills,” says Curtis.

Furthermore, when the child comes to the counter to collect the meal, they tap their name in again so the dinner lady can see it on her screen.

“The child is instantly recognised, which is nice for the child,” says Curtis. “The cook can say, ‘I made that piece for you’. The child is not going to get to the hotplate and be faced with what everybody else didn’t want.”

Such improvements in recent months have led to a large uptake in the number of children opting for school dinners in the areas Dolce covers. In some cases that has even meant Dolce has been able to offer school meals without having to rely on a subsidy – something of a holy grail for caterers.

Curtis insists that as far as possible the meals that are cooked are healthy and of restaurant-standard, too. That, he says, was the main reason he set up the business after he thought standards were dropping, thanks in part to the onset of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT).

“It got down to the stage where a fish finger was being offered for 2p,” he says. “At that price it will be mostly glue and rusk. I thought there has to be a better way.”

But if this makes you think that Curtis must be an ardent admirer of Jamie Oliver, you would be wrong. Curtis says everbody’s favourite Essex boy TV chef did nobody any favours.

“The numbers taking school dinners have declined,” he says. “Jamie Oliver would probably say they have declined justifiably, but he should have asked the local authority why they were wanting turkey twizzlers rather than pure fibre meat. Up north, nobody paid much attention to him anyway.”

In fact, in the wake of Jamie Oliver’s intervention, Dolce went down the road of trying to prove its credentials to parents – a policy that Curtis now thinks was misguided and nearly sunk the company. It was only when he appointed a marketing director who carried out school gate surveys that he realised just how far removed from reality the likes of Oliver and other health campaigners were.

“These surveys showed that most parents had already accepted that school meals were clean, honest and decent,” he says.

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Crucially, by trying to remedy a situation that didn’t actually exist he says he lost sight of who the customer was – the child, not the parent.

“I had forgotten that society had moved on and parents are deferential to their children,” he says.

Such a wrong turn couldn’t have come at a worse time, because the onset of the recession meant fewer parents were paying for their children’s school dinners anyway. Curtis realised that he would have to put prices up.

“And if I was going to do that, we would have to be more customer focused because I had been focusing on the wrong customer,” he says. “So Chicken Cacciatore went back to being Italian Chicken Casserole, and I gave more leeway to individual managers. To my surprise, everybody took the price increases, the numbers kept creeping up, and that was the big turnaround. I realised that failing to do your market research and instead going by what you believe to be right isn’t necessarily a good thing to do.”

Now, thanks also in part to a fair bit of slimming down staff at head office in York, the £5m company, which still has 500 on its payroll, is on an even keel again. The balance sheet, which had gone more than £300,000 into the red, is now debt-free.

“It’s a harder market,” he says, “but I see us doubling our turnover in the next three years.”

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Still, such an experience of finding his presumptions proved wrong certainly hasn’t stopped Curtis remaining forthright on other issues, particularly about the standards he comes across on the client side at local authorities.

Curtis may have been motivated by disgust at what was happening with CCT, for example, but he has no argument with the principle of CCT itself.

“CCT was perfect,” he says, “but only if people specified what they wanted. They didn’t; they just had this idea that cheapest is best. Contractors just gave them what they asked for. After Jamie Oliver started spouting forth everyone talked about nasty contractors, but it wasn’t the contractors; we were delivering what we were asked for. It didn’t say that the food had to taste nice. It just said: ‘Show us the menus and let’s hope its cheap’.”

He is ready with plenty of examples. The city authority that said Dolce’s bid didn’t have the necessary quality because Curtis didn’t include an endless list of consultants he was going to use, as the winning bid had done. The official who approached him about the cashless system, but then neglected to inform him when the prequalification stage for her contract was expiring. And the official at a council Dolce hadn’t worked for before who absolutely refused to see him to discuss even the contents of a likely tender. He denies that

SPRING 11

ENTREPRENEUR

I got fed up working within a local authority. The commercial ethos disintegrates into financial bickering

this last case has anything to do with avoiding cronyism.

“They do have a requirement to consult the marketplace,” he says. “I wasn’t asking for a contract, and I accepted I might not get it.”

It may or may not surprise you to discover that Curtis has developed these views after working in a local authority himself. He took a job running schools catering and cleaning in Dumfries and Galloway after many years working in the private sector in the industry.

He worked there for four years before the private sector beckoned him back.

“I got fed up working within a local authority,” he says. “The commercial ethos disintegrates into financial bickering, whereas with a commercial organisation everything originates at the board. And you can never go bust, so not matter how inefficient local authority services are – and some of them are hugely inefficient.”

He thinks such an anti-commercial world view

still persists within the public sector, and masks some inequalities, particularly when it comes to the recent rash of equal pay claims dating back more than a decade.

“It’s a fundamental injustice,” he says. “I am all for good pay, and we always pay above everyone else, so we are not attracting people who just accept the lowest wage. But I’ve heard that the cost per hour for a catering authority worker is now £13.50, whereas at the Dog & Duck it’s probably minimum wage.”

He believes many in the local authority sector have “engrandised themselves” and the results, in these chastened times, are only too plain to see.

He says: “I have been to see a cascade of schools who have been told that if they continue with the local authority caterer they will have to find money out of teaching budgets to pay for subsidy. Needless to say, they all want me to do their catering.”

Although he doesn’t necessarily welcome the

79

coalition’s plans for free schools – and thanks to a harsh experience at boarding school, will have nothing to do with private schools – he hopes for a future where schools will have much more control over their budgets.

“They should be able to pick a contractor and decide if they like them,” he says, “and not have to go through a central contract. Where is the relevance in local authorities now?”

Fortunately, there was one part of the country which, while not perfect, was more in accord with his way of thinking, and that is one of the reasons why Dolce is based in York.

“In Yorkshire you didn’t blame anybody,” he says. “You just got on with it. I was at a secondary school in Grassington and told the dinner ladies there that I would have to cut some hours in this kitchen because they were losing money. ‘Not making a profit?’ they said.

‘That can’t be right.’ I thought I was going to get the ‘Oh I see, you want to sack some of us so you can have a bigger company car’ type of comment. But no. They sat down there and then and started working out how they might cut back in an effective way. My area manager was still getting calls from them at 6pm. You wouldn’t have found that anywhere else.”

The company car comment would, in fact, be well wide of the mark. When Curtis’s marriage collapsed some years ago, he spent four years running Dolce while living in a caravan – and not a large static home either – an Ace Diplomat tourer, located in a caravan site near Knaresborough. He says his upbringing in rural Kenya prepared him for that.

“You should see where my grandparents had to live when they first went to East Africa,” he says. “It was much harsher.”

The Kenyan experience, he admits, has made him something of an “interloper” on the British business scene.

“I personally don’t take a lot of salary or possessions,” he says. “I still have a net worth of zero. Janis Joplin said that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. What she meant was having no possessions left to lose. You can lose your marbles and that’s not so good. But I haven’t done that.”

He does, however, appear to have freedom to lead his company in an unusual, albeit successful, way. n

BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

BIT OF A CHAT

SPRING 11

>> Snooty paws

with Frank Tock >> Mr Visible Apparently David Salkeld, chief executive of Symington’s, was once approached by the production team behind one of those reality TV shows where the boss returns to the factory floor, to see if he wanted to take part. I do enjoy such programmes, including the one where the advertising manager appeared not to realise that a fax machine needed to be powered by electricity, and the one where the local authority chief executive had clearly never been inside a council house before. But I can think of no person less suitable for such a programme than Mr Salkeld. Why? Because Mr Salkeld is so clearly known by everyone on the Symington’s factory floor. I have, it is fair to say, been taken on factory tours by managing directors and chief executives where I began to wonder if the workers had any idea who the person invading their space was, but as soon as we stepped out in Beeston Mr Salkeld was greeted by everyone we passed. Returning to the factory floor would be no problem for him.

>> Corking idea Watch out for people suddenly taking up an interest in obscure sports over the next few months. Yet another survey, this time from Deloitte, claims a third of UK businesses are aiming to introduce more flexible working arrangements to let workers watch the Olympic and Paralympic Games. I can just see the request now.

“Sorry boss, can’t make the meeting, got to see the high calibre shooting semi final.” Which of course is comfortably viewed from an armchair in your local.

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

A survey by Maris Interiors suggests 85% of UK workers would take a pay cut if they could bring their dog in to work. I only hope none of those people are trying to pitch for business down south. An acquaintance of mine, who works for a boss who absolutely insists on having Rover in the office with him, was doing just that some months ago. He could tell that the southerner at the other end doubted much of what he said, but he was slowly bringing him around. Then the office doorbell went, and said dog immediately barked. The southerner immediately slammed down the phone, infuriated with these northern types who pretend they have real businesses when they are calling from a back bedroom.

>> Friends in froggy places Praise be. A newly discovered species of frog has been named after Deloitte in honour of the accountancy firm’s work with the Yorkshire-based charity the United Bank of Carbon in preserving a rainforest in Tanzania.

Nectophrynoides deloittei was discovered in the Rubeho Forest in 2005.

We can’t vouch for its accounting skills, but it will no doubt be a reminder to both Deloitte staff and clients that their goal as company advisers is to turn such creatures into handsome princes with just a kiss.

>> Jon Kettley is a weatherman

>> True hero I am pleased finally to see someone doing something for charity where they admit they are not the star attraction. No, this is not some TV celeb who has suddenly had an attack of overexposure shame. It’s Henry Nicholson, a manager in the forensics team in Grant Thornton’s Leeds office. He is taking part in the gruelling Marathon des Sables across the Sahara this year. And yet he is keen to heap more praise on his running partner Michael Milnes, who is taking part in the six-day, 155-mile race despite being born with a club foot. Good luck to both of them.

80

Congratulations to everyone’s favourite Haligonian, former BBC Weatherman John Kettley, who has given his backing to weatherbrokers.com which has launched a new policy to help UK companies insure against the effects of unseasonable weather.

As the company’s senior risk meteorologist Jim Dale says: “Estimates of lost UK revenue due to snow and ice back in December 2010 were between £2bn and £3bn. These kinds of figures represent a colossal amount of lost business.”

We can only hope Mr Kettley is aware that this Jim Dale is the same Jim Dale who, two months earlier, was pointing out that you couldn’t claim the cold winter was bad for all businesses, because actually indoor shopping centres and firms selling winter clothing and comfort food did rather well out of it!

SPRING 11

COMPANY PROFILE

Government cutbacks are likely to have an indirect impact on small businesses as the availability of free advice disappears. Does your bank offer Business Managers who will get to know your business and help put you in touch with the advice you need to succeed?

FINDING THE RIGHT SUPPORT FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS

S

mall businesses are at the forefront of everyone’s minds as they will be one of the engines of growth that leads the UK economic recovery.

Small businesses tell us that to meet those growth ambitions they are going to need some help and support, particularly in the areas of access to finance, export advice and marketing. There are other areas that are keeping small business owners awake at night too – red tape, the burden of employing people, cash flow issues, skills shortages and taxes.

So with the gradual closedown of Business Links and the RDA’s who is going to help those SME’s, who are going to point them in the right direction.

The answer is the Private Sector of course and that includes many professional services firms and individuals. From mentors to coaches, from accountants to business consultants, from individuals who claim to be small business experts to large companies whose sole purpose is to help people start up or grow their businesses. Watch out small business owners you are suddenly going to be bombarded with offers of support and advice – but you will have to pay for these services, so you should check out the quality and value for money being offered.

Some small business owners will undoubtedly turn to their bank for that advice or simply for guidance about where to go and whom to listen to. Gary Lumby, Director of Small Business Banking for Yorkshire and Clydesdale Bank, realises that it is part of his Small Business Relationship Managers’ roles to have a good grasp of what is available in the market to help customers.

Gary says, ‘Of course we are open for business as far as lending is concerned but we want our customers to have access to the right advice to make them more certain of success. That is why we have been working closely with Business Links,

Gary Lumby: Director of Small Business Banking at Yorkshire and Clydesdale Banks

OF COURSE WE ARE OPEN FOR BUSINESS AS FAR AS LENDING IS CONCERNED BUT WE WANT OUR CUSTOMERS TO HAVE ACCESS TO THE RIGHT ADVICE TO MAKE THEM MORE CERTAIN OF SUCCESS Chambers of Commerce and the Forum of Private Business, to name a few of the organisations who we have been directing our customers towards.’

Gary goes on to say, ‘On the February 14th we launched our new small business proposition offering Free Day-to-Day Banking to Start Ups (24mths) and Switchers(18mths) who open accounts with ourselves. But more than this, we

are also offering a great range of added value services – from free use of meeting rooms to invitations to networking events .We feel that we have put together a small business proposition that is really attractive.’

As part of that offer Yorkshire and Clydesdale Bank small business managers are expected to spend time in customers’ businesses to really understand what it is like to run a small business from an owner’s perspective. That should mean they will be able to empathise with their customers and offer better solutions to their needs. It is early days but results so far have been encouraging.

Gary says, ‘Customer feedback has been very positive and they really appreciate their manager giving up a whole day to spend with them in their business and feel they and their businesses are better understood at the end of it. And of course, our managers really benefit from the experience’ The Banks also introduce customers to those other service providers who can give them that much needed specialist support such as tax, accountancy or legal services. By working as part of a wider team, business bankers aim to make sure that customers have a better chance of success and get the best advice available.

At a time when so much depends of the health and wellbeing of our small business community, Gary Lumby states, ‘Yorkshire and Clydesdale Bank are determined to be a champion for the small business owners and directors who are going to be the drivers for economic recovery and they can be assured of our help and support.’

More information is available by calling 0800 032 3971 or online at: www.ybonline.co.uk/smallbusiness

81

BUSINESS QUARTER |SPRING 11

EVENTS DIARY

SPRING 11

BQ’s business events diary gives you lots of time to forward-plan. If you wish to add your event to the list send it to: editor@bq-magazine.co.uk

APRIL

12 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Business Lunch. Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

1 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Business Lunch. Beiderbecke’s Hotel, Scarborough, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

17 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Construction Lunch. Cedar Court Hotel, Bradford, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

5 The Met Club Twitter Seminar. Crown Hotel, Harrogate, 8.30am-10.30am. For more details ring 01423 525622.

18 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Yo Yo Restaurant, Bradford, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622.

6 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Business Lunch. National Centre for Early Music, York, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

20 The Met Club Ladies’ Lunch. Mint Hotel, Leeds, 12.00-2.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622.

6 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Mint Hotel, Leeds, 5.307.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622.

24 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Networking Breakfast. Grange Hotel and Restaurants, York, 7.30-9.00am. For details visit www.yourchamber. org.uk

7 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Networking Breakfast. Leeds United Football Club, 7.30-9.30am. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 7 Leeds Media Wine Tasting. Swanky Club, Leeds, 6.00-8.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 11 Y11 – Welcome to Yorkshire will be showcasing tourism achievements so far and what initiatives lie in store this year. Grand Theatre and Opera House, Leeds.

For more details visit www.yorkshire.com/Y11 11 The Met Club Sustainable Energy Seminar. Brasserie Blanc, Leeds, 8.30am10.30am. For more details ring 01423 525622.

14 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Networking Breakfast. Bar Convent Trust & Enterprises, York, 7.30-9.00am. For details visit www. yourchamber.org.uk

25 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Ladies’ Networking Lunch. Hotel Metropole, Leeds, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 27 Bradford Chamber Cereal Networking. Great Victoria Hotel, Bradford, 7.309.30am. For details ring 01274 354750.

JUNE 1 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Business Lunch. Sandburn Hall, York, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 2 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Networking Breakfast. Leeds United Football Club, 7.30-9.30am. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

14 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Cedar Court Grand, York, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring.

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

19 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Networking Evening. Fenwick, York, 6.00-8.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

3 The Met Club Business Lunch. Mint Hotel, Leeds, 12.00-2.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622.

MAY

7 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Property Forum. DLA Piper, Leeds, 5.00-7.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

4 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Business Lunch. Marriott Hotel, York, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

8 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Mint Hotel, Leeds, 5.307.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622.

5 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Networking Breakfast. Leeds United Football Club, 7.30-9.30am. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

9 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Construction Lunch. Royal York Hotel, York, 12.00-2.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk

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

10 Yorkshire International Business Convention. This year’s keynote speaker is world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Other speakers include Andrew Strauss, captain of the Ashes-winning England cricket team, former All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick, property investor Caroline Marsh and former Arup chairman Terry Hill. Harrogate International Centre and Bridlington Spa. For more details visit www.yibc.biz

10 The Met Club Employment Law Seminar. Brasserie Blanc, Leeds, 8.0010.00am. For more details ring 01423 525622.

10 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Business Lunch with Michael O’Leary. Leeds United Football Club, 11.30am-2.00pm. For details visit www. yourchamber.org.uk 11 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Golf Day. Moor Allerton Golf Club, 11.00am-9.00pm. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk 11 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Mint Hotel, Leeds, 5.307.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622.

12 The Met Club Linked In Seminar. Crown Hotel, Harrogate, 8.30am-10.30am.

For more details ring 01423 525622.

BUSINESS QUARTER | SPRING 11

16 The Met Club – Yorkshire’s own networking club. Cedar Court Grand, York, 5.30-7.30pm. For more details ring 01423 525622.

23 Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber Networking Breakfast. Piccolino, York, 7.30-9.00am. For details visit www.yourchamber.org.uk Please check with the 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 know of them.

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