Alex Turner meets MARK PARISH, MD of GPW Recruitment

A SLIGHT astigmatism, caused by a sports injury, prevented Mark Parish from fulfilling his dream of becoming a fighter pilot, so instead he focused on becoming a top gun in recruitment.

Fourteen years after leaving university and joining St Helens-based GPW Recruitment as a trainee, he is plotting for its turnover to soar from £20m to £200m by 2020.

“Our plan to get to £200m is a 10-year plan,” said Parish. “We still have nine years left. Can we achieve that? I think that’s a realistic forecast to work with.”

He says that, although the company is already in the top 1% of the country’s 15,000 agencies based on turnover, GPW’s growth can be swift and significant.

“It’s a £25bn industry and we are doing £20m,” he said. “We are only just scratching the surface.”

The recession put the brakes on the company’s growth – it added nearly £5m turnover in the year to October, 2008, to take it above £21m before the jobs market ground to a halt – but GPW remained profitable despite the downturn.

Parish said: “In the last two years, with the recession we have plateaued, while a lot of companies have gone backwards.

“We have performed very well indeed, but I think that’s only because we have put the time and effort in. We have had a good couple of years, but it’s been a hard slog.

“Things have started to recover across the board, and we are starting to do really well again.

“In 2007-08, our consultants had a ratio of 10 calls to one sale. At its worst, to get a deal it got to about 100 calls.

“The economy is recovering and the ratio is getting better. It’s back down to about 20 calls for each success.

“The harder you work and the more focus you have, the more you will get out of it.

“If the consultants keep it up with the pace and the attitude that they have, they will rocket ahead.”

Parish, who admits to sometimes working “excessive hours”, was quickly bitten by the recruitment bug when he chose to join GPW Recruitment after graduating with a degree in business studies from Liverpool John Moores University.

He had worked for Boots for five years through university, and had also completed a year in industry with Marks & Spencer as part of his degree course, which saw him take responsibility for up to 150 staff.

But even those experiences didn’t prepare him for the hothouse environment of recruitment: “When I first started, I thought I had worked hard before, but, after the first two weeks in this industry, I was shattered,” he said. “But I enjoyed it, which made it worthwhile.

“Within two weeks, I was making a substantial amount of money for the business. Within a couple of months, I had won a huge contract worth £2m. The rest is history.”

He added: “There were five of us when I worked in the business. It was at that point I realised I was good at what I did and I saw the potential to grow.

“Within 12 months, I was taking responsibility for other people in the business. I took on my first official management title a couple of years on.

“I am always of the opinion that you need to earn your stripes.”

Although Parish has known only one place of employment for 14 years, he has no regrets about shunning offers from other recruitment companies earlier in his career.

“When you know what you are doing and you have the right strategy, there’s no need to go elsewhere,” he said.

“It’s not all about the money. It’s about the success and being proud of what we are achieving.

“We have got a great reputation in the marketplace.”

GPW has three core divisions – technical and design, manufacturing and engineering, and construction – while it is looking to develop its office personnel division, which he says “has the potential to be the biggest in our company”.

Parish became managing director two years ago when Graham Worsley, son of the founder Gilbert Peter Worsley, became chairman after nearly 20 years running the company.

“I am very hands on, there’s nothing I won’t do,” he said. “I will roll my sleeves up and help them out. We create a culture of teamwork.

“If you can show that to your staff, they will have respect for you. We are all like that.”

He acknowledges that it is “difficult” to avoid getting dragged into the day-to-day operations of the business, but accepts it as a necessary response to the tough conditions of the last couple of years.

“I do struggle with that because of the size we are,” he said. “I deal with that by doing more hours.

“Put simply, that means some of my private life gets lost in translation sometimes.

“I just put whatever hours in I need to get things moving. You don’t get anywhere without hard work.

“I don’t struggle to differentiate between working in the business and on the business. It’s just about time.

“We are in a position to recruit extra people, and when we do that I will create more time for me and other staff. It has been all hands-on deck.”

Working long hours is sustainable for Parish while the successes keep on coming.

That was the case when GPW gained membership to the Engineering Construction Industry Association – an achievement which Parish ranks as his proudest. It put GPW into a very select group of about 15 agencies and enabled it to seek lucrative contracts.

He said: “I handled that project myself. It was very political and I had to lobby a lot of people. It allowed us to gain access to a big project and opened us up to the nuclear sector, which is going to go boom over the next few years.

“It’s a very detailed and complicated process. I had a window of four weeks to complete it, to secure a contract worth £2m for us.

“I worked 24/7 on it, we achieved it and won the project.

“We achieved what we achieved because we are good at what we do. It’s going to be huge for us going forward.”

Parish is a big fan of business bible How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, and says he reads it “every two or three months”.

He said: “It’s a really interesting book and it gives you all of the tools to communicate with people.

“It’s made me a much, much better manager as a result.

“I’m down to earth but very ambitious. I am aware of my own limitations, I do learn from my mistakes.”

His ambitions, for himself and for GPW, don’t include a change of location any time soon.

Parish, who is working just one mile from where he went to school at Cowley High, has lost his adolescent indifference to St Helens and is now keen to extol the virtues of his home town.

He said: “When I went to university, I always said I would never stay in St Helens, but I am quite passionate about the town now.

“I am very proud GPW is a local company, I’m proud of our town.

“It would be nice to be recognised as a St Helens-based company that has really achieved something.

“I have got such pride in what we do as a company.

“It’s not me, it’s the staff, they are doing the hard work. It’s about having pride in what you have got around you.

“I would like us to achieve the goals we have set out for the staff, so they feel the benefits as well.”