Crain's Manchester Business - 11-15 January, 2010 - (Page 2)

2 NEWS Crain’s Manchester Business / January 11, 2010 What’s News FROM PAGE 1 Hotels. It will be rebranded as the Hallmark Hotel Hull and undergo a £3m refurbishment. All 60 staff will be retained. Zeus managing partner, Gary Tipper said there would be a “rigorous renovation programme”. The Manchester office of Halliwells provided legal advice on the deal and the debt funding was provided by NatWest. ■ A family-owned engineering company based in Stockport which employs 19 people has gone into administration. TDA Design Solutions Ltd, which operates from its company-owned premises in Bredbury, designed and made electro-mechanical products. Joint administrators Steven Muncaster and Stephen Clancy from the Manchester office of MCR are seeking to sell it as a going concern. The business, owned by the Booth family, posted a pre-tax loss of £17,102 on turnover of £3.9m in 2008. ■ Sandbach-based flooring firm BROTHERS TAKE AIM TO GROW SURVEYING FIRM Neil and Andrew Duckworth, the brothers who sold Manchester surveyors and auctioneers SHM Smith Hodgkinson to US-based Gordon Brothers in 2004, have announced that they are to float their new venture on the Alternative Investment Market by the end of the month. They are hoping to raise £6m for Blackburn-based Winterhill Group Plc, which will provide a single source of support services to insolvency practitioners. Part of the proceeds will be used to acquire Wakefield-based commercial debt recovery firm Legal and Receivables Ltd from founder Paul Snook, who will become an executive director. Neil Duckworth, who will be chief executive, believes that publicly-traded share capital will fund the company’s buy and build strategy more quickly and easily than private equity. EDITOR IN CHIEF Christopher Crain ccrain@crain.com EDITOR Steve Brauner sbrauner@crain.com ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Kathryn Toledano ktoledano@crain.com DEPUTY EDITOR Michael Fahy mfahy@crain.com RESEARCH DIRECTOR Angela Tattersall atattersall@crain.com DESIGN EDITOR Craig Gaymer cgaymer@crain.com COPY EDITOR Jon Dixon jdixon@crain.com REPORTERS Simon Binns sbinns@crain.com James Chapelard jchapelard@crain.com Claire Shoesmith cshoesmith@crain.com DESIGNER acarpenter@crain.com Annie Carpenter PRODUCTION/IT MANAGER donna@crain.com Donna DiBenedetto WEB MANAGER Vinay Jalla vjalla@crain.com ADVERTISING SALES CONSULTANTS Abi Agyeman aagyeman@crain.com Ziara Siddique zsiddique@crain.com Robin Wiltshire rwiltshire@crain.com ADVERTISING SERVICES EXECUTIVE Ceire Topley ctopley@crain.com CIRCULATION Sarah Bell sbell@crain.com SUBSCRIPTIONS Trish Peters tpeters@crain.com Crain’s Manchester Business ISSN 1756-056X Entire contents © 2010 by Crain Communications Ltd, unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved. City Tower, Suite 22A, Piccadilly Plaza, Manchester M1 4BD Telephone: 0161 209 5800 Andrew Duckworth, left, and Neil Duckworth ■ Advertising agency McCann Manchester said its digital arm Metro, based in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, has grown by more than 50 per cent since its launch in early 2009. McCann is listed as the area’s fifth-largest digital agency in the Crain’s Manchester Business 2010 Book of Lists based on 2008 revenues of £3.2m. McCann said it could not disclose the 2009 figure. Metro was opened at Basil Chambers on High Street to make it easier to attract digital staff who live in or near the city centre and did not want to commute to the agency’s Bonis Hall base in Prestbury. The unit now employs nearly 40 people and it has been recruiting on the back of work for clients such as London 2012, Welcome To Yorkshire and Durex. ■ Ticket sales of £1.5m covered only 16 per cent of the costs of the 2009 Manchester International Festival. Manchester City Council stumped up £2.2m of the £9.5m total spending, £1.6m came from other public funding and sponsorship accounted for £2.9m. The festival returned a surplus of £200,000 after £6.2m was spent on the artistic programme, £1.2m went on marketing and press and £1.9m on operations. ■ Viking Hellas, Viking Group’s new Athens-based airline, is to start a thrice-weekly scheduled service to Manchester from February 2. The airline will also be flying to Erbil, Sulaimaniyah and Baghdad in Iraq from Athens. ■ Transcription company d2u has launched an iPhone app which enables users to dictate notes into their phone and have them returned as a Word document. The notes are transferred to the company’s servers, typed up and returned within the hour. Bury-based d2u, headed by chief executive Daryl Leigh, claims the service could make digital recorders redundant. The app is free to download but transcription costs £1.50 per minute, so a ten-minute interview would cost £15. Flowcrete Group Ltd has parted company with its group finance director, Pam Carey. The company was sold by its co-founder Dawn Gibbins in a deal reportedly worth £30m in April 2008 to US-based RPM Group, and a spokeswoman said that this had created an overlap of finance functions between the Crewe-based firm and its parent in Ohio. As a result, Carey’s post has now been made redundant. INDEX Taking Stock Opinion/Our View Focus: Workforce Crain’s List For the Record Events, People, Gossip Page 6 Page 8 Pages 11-15 Page 14 Pages 16-17 Page 19 CORRECTIONS In the Crain’s Manchester Business 2010 Book of Lists, Homes4u should have been ranked fourth in the Residential Estate Agents list with 42 employees. To submit details of your event for inclusion in our Business Diary go to: crainsmanchesterbusiness.co.uk select Business Events and click on Submit Your Events. ● Crain’s Manchester Business has a policy of correcting errors in the next available issue. To bring them to our attention, email manchesternews@crain.com or call 0161 209 5804 If you made The List Look out for your invitation to the 2010 party BOOK OF LISTS 2010 Save the date If your company features in our 2010 edition of The Book Lists you will soon be receiving an invitation to the private A-list reception on January 21, 2010 at the Midland Hotel. http://crainsmanchesterbusiness.co.uk

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Crain's Manchester Business - 11-15 January, 2010

Crain's Manchester Business - 11-15 January, 2010