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.''
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