Rise’s Campbell: in it to win it

Managing director of Scottish recruiter Rise Group spoke with DeeDee Doke about his winning formula and future plans for the firm

If Gregor Campbell harbours any disappointment about the way his career has turned out so far, perhaps it’s that he hasn’t found a way to incorporate sport into his work as a money-making venture. He loves competitive physical activity, from running to football and everything in between, and the joy he takes in its many forms is as pure as an expression of faith.

But even if recruitment is a more office-bound activity, a passion related to sport gets a regular workout: winning. “I enjoy winning against the competition,” Campbell admits. “I want to win everything.”

As the managing director of Scotland-based Rise Group, which ranked 11th in the Recruiter Catalyst Corporate Finance’s 2009 Fast 50 league of fastestgrowing UK recruitment companies, Campbell is no stranger to setting the pace a notch or two higher in the Scottish marketplace after 20 years as a recruiter.

Contact centre recruitment through Rise Jobs is a mainstay of the group’s operations, complemented by middle and senior management appointments division Rise Executive and service divisions Rise Consulting and Rise Payroll. With a couple of acquisitions (catering/hospitality recruiter Quality Link and professional services recruiter Hammond Resources) under his belt since the company’s launch in 2003, and more on the horizon, Campbell has fixed his sights from his Glasgow offices on extending Rise’s grasp further into Scotland’s recruitment market. Development of a recruitment process outsourcing business is yet another kind of expansion tool in the works (see In Focus box, overleaf). As far as looking beyond Scotland, say, for example, southwards to England, that will come later.

“Credit crunch conditions probably don’t allow you to be overly elaborate about your ambitions, I think,” he explains to Recruiter during one of several recent conversations. “Our sole ambition is to have a sustainable and valuable business that we’ve got the basis of just now.”

At the core of Rise’s operating philosophy is a serviceled business model in which consultants do not get paid commission, the aim is to speak to every candidate, ideally within 24 hours of an application for contact centre jobs (“Ten thousand people apply for a job, so 10,000 people get a call,” Campbell says) and clients’ needs are briefed throughout the team so that a client does not have to depend on the availability of a particular consultant to have their needs met. This is what Campbell and company call “the Rise model”.

“What we’re trying to do is create an environment where we share the responsibility,” explains sales director Neil Lafferty, who joined Rise in March after holding senior sales management and sales director roles within contact centres and recruitment at Hewlett Packard (Compaq), Kwik-Fit Insurance and Teletech UK/US. “So we’ll always have a handle on what clients are looking for, when they’re looking for it and when they want it. That way, nothing slips through the net.”

The goal is to offer a service that’s auditable by the client as well as the business itself. “Is it perfect? It’s pretty good,” Campbell says.

The private equity-backed Rise is proving to be an appropriate vehicle for Campbell to exercise his sales skills and analytical talents, in a structured but supportive environment, as well as allowing his ability to inspire and lead to take wing. Says Tim Evans, a director at Catalyst Corporate Finance: “I work with a high number of number of recruitment [chief executives] and owners on mergers and acquisitions strategies but on account of his natural entrepreneurialism, his strong people motivation skills, and his ability to stay focused and grounded, I rate Gregor as one of the sector’s best emerging senior-level talents.”

Even in his early years in recruitment, Campbell was admired for his ability “to open and close any meeting”, says a recruiter who worked with him back then. “He went in for the kill. He will not be caught out at any meeting. He’s naturally very sharp, very clever.”

But at that time, he also had a reputation for amassing piles of expensive parking tickets and forgetting to pay them, a habit that seemed completely at odds with his ability to quickly take control of any meeting he attended. He was, and still is, known for being direct and expecting a lot from those he works with. Ruefully, he admits having been called “a little Hitler” by a former colleague at one point. But by most accounts, he has also suffered a few hard knocks along the way, or “scars”, as Campbell calls them.

The toughest, by his own acknowledgement, was being left in the cold financially in the aftermath of the sale of a business that “I felt that I was really the driver behind. I owned nothing in it. In my naivety, I didn’t have a shareholding… and it was sold for a substantial sum”. He doesn’t name the company, but the story is almost the stuff of legend in the area, and there are those who believe Campbell did get a raw deal.

But to Campbell, the toughest hit he’s ever taken came as a double whammy last year, away from the job. “I think the hardest knock in life is when you lose both your parents, to be quite honest,” he says.

His parents introduced him to the world of business and sales. Aside from a six-week stint running a car wash enterprise with a friend as a teenager, Campbell’s first experience in the business world was helping his mother sell houses during the summer. He also spent school holidays accompanying salesmen who worked for his father, the MD of a haulage business, on client visits. “I did it for the fun of it, I enjoyed it,” he says.

“I picked up a lot from them,” Campbell says of his parents. “I thought they were pretty good role models. At the age of 45, my dad took up running and ran a marathon in three hours, 50 minutes. You don’t do that without a certain single-minded determination.”

Campbell’s own version of single-minded determination has not always gone down well. At least one Hammond Resourcing manager left the company after its acquisition by Rise to start up his own recruitment business. But Campbell’s view is that sometimes such changes are inevitable as a business evolves. He is “quite comfortable” to take tough decisions, and has walked away from unprofitable business arrangements. Probably one of his greatest strengths, he surmises, is “a degree of self belief. I think that came from my upbringing and from a number of businesses I’ve been involved in, knowing you can take your own ideas and make them work. I’m quite happy to make mistakes. The self belief comes from a wee bit of success — does that sound like blowing your own trumpet?” he asks, worried that he will come across as arrogant.

“If you look at the market, there are a lot of rabbits in the headlights just now, a lot of people thinking it’s not going to work out. You’ve got to be able to believe in yourself and in the people who work for you, and then your idea and concept to see you through,” he says.

His team of directors are believers, too. Hazel Neill, director of Rise subsidiary Quality Link, says of Campbell: “He’s a visionary. He’s a fantastic ideas man.” Sales director Lafferty also talks about Campbell’s abundance of ideas, in highly graphic terms. Campbell himself sees this contribution somewhat differently.

“The ideas are less about absolutely brand new ideas and more about just seeing an opportunity that we could approach differently,” Campbell says. “You know, there are lots of great ideas around — they’ve got to be tangible to work for you.”

Although he’s a pragmatist, Campbell has idealistic, as well as practical, ambitions for Rise “in terms of recognition, to be recognised as a standard bearer for the recruitment industry — probably the largest independent business with a Scottish base, and potentially a national presence and even a worldwide presence”.

Given some of the scars he’s earned in the past, he’s also keen “for the people who work in those businesses who have made a success, to benefit from it”. He also expects to secure a majority stake in Rise within a few years.

And then there’s his personal ambition: a few years down the line, bringing in another MD to handle the dayto- day business, while he goes for the gold — literally. “I’d like to find an Olympic sport I can compete in,” he says almost wistfully. “I’m probably doing a disservice to all those Olympians that worked so hard. It’s a pipe dream more than anything else. But if I could get some measure of success in the sporting field, I would be absolutely delighted.”

A SNAPSHOT: GREGOR CAMPBELL

Career highlights include:

  • 2004-present: Managing director and co-founder, Rise Group
  • 2000-2004: Sales director, HR Consultancy
  • 1996-1999: Managing director, Source IT
  • 1992-1996: Sales director, KFJ (sold to NRG)
  • 1989-1992: Consultant, Search Consultancy
  • 1987-1989: Sales, Rank Xerox

IN FOCUS: RISE GROUP

(a private company limited by shares)
Established: 2003
Affiliation: Part of Murray Capital, the private investment division of Murray International Holdings
Divisions: Recruitment subsidiaries Rise Executive (multi-disciplinary middle and senior management appointments), Rise Hammond (accountancy, HR, legal), Rise Jobs (contact centres), Quality Link (catering and hospitality) and services subsidiaries Rise Consulting
(consulting solutions for attraction, retention and performance development) and Rise Payroll (outsourced payroll support)
Under negotiation: Planned acquisitions of a UK recruiter with European reach and an oil/gas business.
Most recent financial statement: Year ended 31 Jan 2008
Turnover: £6.5m
Gross profit: £1.2m
Net profit: £196,579

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