Ron Marshall meets a mobile-phone dealer who is going places.

RICHARD Emanuel at 26, walks tall these days. At 6ft 4in he could

hardly do otherwise, but his business stature grew legs last week when

his mobile phone company won the Cellnet British Dealership of the Year

award at a ceremony in London.

The prize, a Range Rover presumably with car phone as standard, was

less important, he claims, than the heightened industry profile for a

company that began life just three years ago.

Mind you, if you have driven behind buses, watched TV commercials, or

read newspaper adverts in the past few months you could hardly have

missed his company name -- DX Mobile Phone Centres. D stands for

determination and X is for . . . well, excellence. A day spent in his

slipstream could easily persuade you to make that Dynamic Executive. He

is, unashamedly, an offshoot of the get-up-and-go American-style

whizz-kid manuals and management trainer videos.

From the age of 17, a product of Hutchesons' Grammar, he absorbed the

collective business wisdom of such as Mark McCormack, John Harvey Jones,

and Victor Kyam, and after working in sales for a communications firm he

set up on his own in a Govan work unit of 200 sq.ft, having saved #1300

and arranged an overdraft of #3000 with his branch of the Bank of

Scotland. That was in January, 1991.

''I did cold-calling to businesses, gradually built up a clientele,

and in my first year turned over #90,000,'' Richard recalls. ''Now, from

these premises (in the Claremont Centre at Glasgow's Kinning Park) we

operate branches in Glasgow, Stirling, East Kilbride, Edinburgh, and

Paisley, with Newcastle and Manchester likely to be opened by late

summer.

''Our turnover in the year to September 1994 won't be far short of #5m

and we employ 46 people.''

It would be pushing it to suggest there is a quasi-religious feel to

the place, but Emanuel and his two co-directors, Chris Gorman (sales and

marketing) and John Whyte (operations), certainly try to instil a

''feel-good'' atmosphere among staff who cover sales, repairs, accounts,

phone hire, and line connections.

''I am interested in people's personal development,'' says Richard.

''Most folk use only 10 to 15% of their potential. I try to encourage

them to raise that percentage.''

One of the company's great totems is customer care: selling a phone is

only the beginning. Repairs, upgrading, and replacing batteries

(although re-chargeable, they last between one and two years) and

accessories are as important as the initial sale.

In any case, the profit from the phone itself is modest. At least as

significant is a share of the connection charges to Cellnet, who are

major backers of DX. They also have a free advice line for phone users,

whether DX-purchased or not.

Richard Emanuel tries to play down the number of hours he works in a

week (''It's old hat hearing about the managing director's 100 hours a

week -- it does happen to be true in my case''), but one of his zippy

business aphorisims underlined his philosophy: ''The only time success

comes before work is in the dictionary.''

One of his major business aims is to become a nationally recognised

company, and by national he means British. ''Not London, though,'' he

points out. ''There is already a mature market there and they are a year

to 18 months ahead of Scotland with some very established players in the

game.''