Garland sees off stiff challenge to secure top firm spot
Mar 7 2008 by Iain Laing, The Journal
ENTREPRENEUR Chey Garland last night picked up the award for Company of the Year in the Tees Valley heat of the North East Business Awards 2007.
Her huge and constantly growing call centre company beat stiff competition from the Onyx Group and PD Ports to land the coveted prize in the awards organised by The Journal and its Teesside sister paper the Evening Gazette.
The award caps a fantastic year for CJ Garland & Co, the business she started in 1980 with £600 savings working from the attic of her terraced Middlesbrough house, is now the UK’s biggest outsourced contact centre operator with an annual turnover of around £50m.
Over the last 12 months the company, which already has more than 3,000 workers in eight centres on Teesside has built a contact centre in South Shields which will employ 1,000 staff and another in South Africa for 500 staff. And Garland shows no sign of slowing down with plans to create hundreds more jobs in the next couple of years.
Indeed it was also a special night for Chey’s sister Tania Garland who took the stage to collect the Services Award for her Middlesbrough public relations and branding firm Cool Blue Communications.
The worthy runners-up for Company of the Year also had a strong year. Teesport operator PD Ports saw its business speed ahead although the most momentous event of the last year – winning permission to build a huge deepwater terminal, came after the entries closed.
Middlesbrough-based Onyx Group bought a Scottish company which will take its sales to £12m and is pushing its business into the Middle East.
The second of three sub-regional heats in the region’s biggest and best business awards were held last night in Teesside University’s Olympia Building.
Newcastle International Airport won the Tyneside and Northumberland Company of the Year Award last week and the finals of the Durham and Wearside heat will be held next Thursday. The winners of the heats of the competition will go on to the grand final in May.
PAGE TWO: The other Teesside winners of the North East Business Awards.
