Recruitment firm receives £300,000 to fund ambitious plans

Ambitious recruitment firm, NCS Construction and Retail Services has received a £300,000 investment to back their drive to become a £20m company.

The Gateshead-based business currently lists Tesco, B&Q and Argos among its clients and hopes to break the £20m turnover barrier within five years.

NCS Construction and Retail Services also operates satellite offices in Manchester and Welwyn Garden City but plans to further expand its outsourced services across the UK.

In just over six years the recruitment firm have achieved an annual turnover of £7.8m and are on track to increase this figure by a third over the next year.

Now, to support their ambitious plans NCS have turned to regional fund managers NEL for the working capital it needs.

The £300,000 investment comes from the Finance For Business North East Growth Fund which is administered by NEL Fund Managers.

NCS have expanded their current team to 24 employees to help implement their development plans, and more jobs are expected to follow as client demand increases.

Part of the investment will also be planted in new digital technologies to enable staff to record and send data from on-site locations back to a central server to be accessed by NCS clients.

The firm, which serves a number of blue-chip clients such as EDF and Balfour Beatty, was established in 2006 by experienced recruiters Paul Thompson and Scott Leonard.

The recruitment firm primarily works in the retail, construction and energy sectors, supplying staff for a variety of roles such as, merchandising, engineering services, installations and management.

NCS co-founder, Scott Leonard said: “We’ve always tried to set ourselves apart from the competition, and despite the wider economic difficulties of the last few years, we’ve succeeded by delivering on our promises for an impressive range of clients.

“Our business model is tried and tested, and the long-term relationships we’ve built with our key clients give us the confidence that we’ll be able to kick on from where we are now and build an even stronger operation that will take us past the £20m turnover barrier within five years if everything goes to plan.

“We looked carefully at how we could best realise the potential that we know the business has, and when we decided to look for outside investment, NEL came highly recommended.

“The process of bringing the money in was positive and swift, and NEL’s backing will make a major difference to the way we implement our development plans.”

The Growth Fund forms part of the wider Finance for Business North East Fund
and is managed by North East Finance.

Over a five year period, it will see £125m of investment capital injected into the region by the European Investment Bank and the European Regional Development Fund 2007-13.

NEL Fund Managers are planning to make an estimated 130 investments over the five-year period of the Growth Fund.

David Thomas, investment executive at NEL Fund Managers, said: “NCS already has an enviable client base and a track record of commercial success achieved in the toughest economic conditions, so there’s every reason to believe that they will achieve the step-change in the business that they’re now targeting.”