YOU can’t miss Chey Garland. Here she comes, bustling across the tearoom at Claridge’s hotel in London, an elegant pocket battleship in black trouser suit, black bob, cherry-red lipstick and an infectious smile.
“Ooh,” she says, with a touch on my arm, “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.” Then she tells me how honoured she is by the Sunday Times’s interest, how she adores reading the business section, how great the interviews are . . .
Well, flattery gets you everywhere. Short and bubbly, with brown button eyes that widen with each story she tells, Middlesbrough-born Garland is a terrific people person who has built her business with a range of skills that, she reckons, just come naturally. She organises well, loves communicating, is good at selling, and is always confident that she can find a solution to any problem.
That explains how, despite leaving school at 16, she now heads a growing empire of call centres in the Tees Valley, representing big-name clients such as Virgin Mobile and Wanadoo and posting a turnover of £28m last year, up 70% on 2003. At 48, Chey (pronounced “Shy”) Garland has become one of the great stories in northeast business — all the more so since Thursday, when she won the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year award.
In her case, let’s call it Verve Clicquot, because Garland is such a natural force of energy. Big-hearted, touchy-feely, instantly likeable, she quickly makes you forget that what’s made her successful — call- centre work — is actually the epitome of drudgery to many.
Drudgery? Never, she says, not if you make the effort. “Lots of firms give no thought at all to the environment people work in, so long as they can get a lot of staff in, that’s all they care about. That’s wrong. At the end of the day these people are my front line. They’re going to have that interaction with customers and it’s important that they feel valued.”
Garland is one of the pioneers of the new, make-it-wacky approach to motivating call-centre staff. In her state-of-the-art buildings, she has sculptures, water features, plasma screens, chill-out zones, Radio GaGa — the company’s own radio station, which is piped constantly round the buildings.
Then there are the theme events, the Heaven and Hell days (good workers get a massage, the bosses get put in the stocks). It’s easy to mock, but her firm, Garlands, is booming and employs nearly 3,000 people in five offices on three sites, including a prestigious base in Hartlepool’s revamped marina, and another in Middlesbrough. In an area that has long been an employment blackspot, Garland is a local heroine.
She has done it, she says, because she has a drive to prove herself and she likes people. Born to working-class parents, she also has relentless faith in anyone’s ability to carve out something fresh for themselves.
“You know, as a region we’ve had to reinvent ourselves,” she says. “It used to be iron ore, then steel, then chemicals. Now one of my biggest joys is watching some of the middle-aged guys come in who used to bash metal and they’re terrified, more by the computers than anything else. But when it comes to common sense, they’re unbeatable, and they do really well.”
She gives my knee a squeeze for emphasis. Garland is an incorrigible enthusiast — even raving about her firm’s sound system she can sweep you along.
Yet when she started out on her own in business, it was only because the roofing firm she had joined after school looked unlikely to accommodate her ambitions. “Working-class kids didn’t get those breaks then,” she says.
But she had diligently learnt its back-office skills, and knew debt recovery was tricky, so she set up her own operation, working for clients out of a rented attic. And after hiring staff and building it into a sophisticated credit-control business, she diversified into outsourcing.
“We had become very slick at talking to customers for clients, and I had managed to get some medium-sized companies to give me their entire sales ledger to manage. In 1996 I was working with a firm that was acquired by one of the big mobile-phone companies. I noticed they had to migrate people onto their billing systems and so on, and I persuaded them to give me an opportunity for 20 people for 12 weeks handling overflow customer-service calls.”
She was lucky, of course, to hit the ground running just as the call-centre industry was taking off. But others who work with her say she has also been an inspirational boss.
“She’s hands-on, she’s passionate about what we do, and she’s a very motivational person,” says Jim Bainbridge, now a Garlands director, whom she hired to oversee the call-centre start-up. “She has made it a very positive place to work.”
Garlands’ clients say the passion is palpable. “Chey has a unique style,” says Andrew Ralston at Virgin Mobile, which uses 150 Garlands staff.
“You really feel she rolls up her sleeves and gets stuck in. The welfare of people is important to us and we felt that here was a woman who absolutely cared about her business and her staff.”
Garland is not sure where she got the management knack — probably just from her childhood. Her early family life in Middlesbrough was turbulent, and she held things together at home for two younger siblings.
“My dad was a bit of a ladies’ man,” she nods. “He worked as a fruiterer but was a handful, feisty. I’ve got some of that from him.” Her mother, a waitress, later remarried and moved south. “She used to manage the Dog and Duck in Soho, do you know it?” she grins.
So, from an early age, Garland, christened Cheyenne, got used to running things. “And as my younger sister was brighter and prettier, I think I always had something to prove.”
That sister, Tanya Garland, now heads her own brand communication firm, Cool Blue, and cites Chey as her “lifelong inspiration”. She says Chey’s achievement is all the greater as she has done it on her own, bolstered only by self-belief.
“Chey never had much support early on,” says Tanya, “but she’s single-minded, and she’s fearless. She has taken some big risks in business, but she trusts her instincts and her instincts are very good.”
Those risks include plunging into new sectors and providing constant investment in new sites for her businesses. In fact, Chey admits she is something of a building addict. “I find the building projects very exciting. I just like it, the interiors, how things look, because ultimately that makes a statement about how you value your people.”
But isn’t call-centre work now moving abroad? “People talk about that, but only 3% of UK customers who phone call centres are answered abroad. That means 97% of UK customers are being looked after by UK call centres. And firms know that it costs eight times as much to win a new customer as to keep one. So it’s important to make sure that their questions are answered correctly first time, and that the technology works.”
Is she implying that overseas call centres can’t do as good a job? She ducks that one, preferring to stress it is a growing market, with the promise of extra bonuses to come, such as when the government outsources more work to the regions.
Is she bidding for it? She takes a sip of the water in front of her before bursting into nervous laughter. “I’m trying to!” Will she expand beyond Teesside? “We have looked further north but I don’t really want to tell you where, I don’t want competitors to know.”
Clients suggest she will have to, as rapid expansion and the demands for better-qualified staff make recruitment tougher. She also has to be careful not to allow her profile to get in the way. Garlands succeeds because it is a “white label” operation, in effect taking on the characteristics of each client. If it becomes too well known, clients can get restless.
Be careful not to outshine them? “Absolutely,” she agrees, “but I don’t think we are by a long shot!” Beneath the nowt-flash banter and the enthusiast’s giggling, you can sense a keen business brain at work. Like many entrepreneurs, she keeps a lot to herself, and expects the same commitment from others that she gives herself. “Attitude”, she says, is what she looks for first in recruits.
She also expects resilience. She has spent the past year suffering from an adverse reaction to steroids prescribed for a back condition. “I just swelled up,” she says, before adding that she has tracked down a doctor who can sort it out. Another who works with her says that, considering what she’s been through medically, it’s amazing how much she has achieved in the past 12 months.
But business is not everything to her. Married twice — her second husband, Ian Swain, a retired regional newspaper director, is now a non-exec at Garlands — with 11-year-old twins, she says her greatest pleasure is just to get back from the office and have supper on a tray in front of the television with her family. “I quite like being at home,” she says. Then she laughs as if her hesitancy is a bit of a giveaway. Quite a lady.
CHEY GARLAND’S WORKING DAY
THE founder of Garlands Call Centres wakes at her home in Kirkby-in-Cleveland at 6.40am. "Shower, hair and make-up," says Chey Garland, "then I share with Ian, my husband, getting the kids ready for school." She is driven into work before 9am. "I started getting driven in over winter because I don’t like night driving and now it works really well for me. I’m non-stop on the phone."
She keeps offices at each of Garlands’ three sites. She will talk to clients about their business plans, oversee existing work and pitch for potential business, as well as planning new office developments. She gets home at 7pm.
"I’m very lucky," she says. "I’ve got a housekeeper and she’s very organised. I see the kids for a couple of hours before they go to bed. We don’t go out much — weekends are for them."
VITAL STATISTICS
Born: March 3, 1957
Marital status: married twice, two children
School: Middlesbrough High
First job: office junior, Roofing Nationwide
Salary: £135,000
Home: Kirkby-in-Cleveland
Car: blue Mercedes CL500
Favourite book: The Emperor series, by Conn Iggulden
Favourite music: jazz funk, Michael Bublé
Favourite film: Dr Zhivago
Favourite gadget: bottle opener
Last holiday: Barbados
Interests: restoring old walled garden at home
WORKING SPACE
CHEY GARLAND keeps a main office on the first floor of Garlands’ prestige headquarters in Hartlepool marina. The modern building is four floors high, built of brick with wide windows and balconies overlooking the water. Garland’s room is furnished with light oak Scandinavian furniture. She has a desk, a meeting table, and low, two-drawer filing cabinets. "I’ve had it for 20 years. It cost me the earth when I bought it," she says.
"I also have Radio GaGa piped in, and I have a nice Bose music system as well."
The walls are decorated with pastel abstracts and photos of her children. One wall is painted black. A designer light hangs over her desk.
"But I have offices in our other sites and I can’t say which is my favourite, because I might annoy staff if I do."
