Entrepreneur Ian Gillespie active on expansion trail
Dec 22 2010 by John Hill, The Journal
COMMUNICATIONS entrepreneur Ian Gillespie, who once ran a telecoms business with annual revenues of £100m, is back on the expansion trail doubling the workforce at his latest venture in the last few months.
Gillespie took Cramlington’s Fone Logistics to peak turnover of £100m ten years after starting it up in 1996, but sold the majority of the business to expanding North West Plc Daisy Group in the summer.
The sale allowed him to concentrate on business telecoms provider Activ Telecom which purchased Fone Logistics’ business-to-business work with the 3 network just before the deal. Activ has since doubled staff numbers and relocated from Cramlington to the Balliol Business Park in Longbenton.
He said: “We moved to Balliol because we had a little unit in Cramlington and we had the opportunity to get a little more space so we could grow the business a bit.
“We’ve got 23 people at the moment, which is double what we had around six months ago. We’re always looking for good sales people and they’re hard to find. I would think we’ll probably grow to 30 to 33 by this time next year.”
Gillespie, a runner-up in The Journal North East Business Executive of the Year in 2007, developed Fone Logistics into one of the North East’s fastest-growing firms before selling two-thirds of his share in 2006.
He took a more active role again in 2009 as part of a shake-up that followed a drop in turnover to around £50m.
