Calling home; Paying the staff well and turning down cheapskate

Is Pearse Flynn crazy? It is a question that has probably been asked a lot of the ebullient 40-year old Irishman recently.

"There are two things where people have said to me 'what the hell are you doing?'," Flynn confesses. "Call centres being one and Livingston FC the other."

To have bought into the call-centre business just at a time when much of the world thinks going to hell in a bucket or at least offshore to India is one thing. To add to that involvement in a consortium that is taking over a bust club, given the current state of Scottish football, raises serious questions over his sanity.

When I interviewed Flynn at the Callpoint building near Charing Cross in Glasgow he had been fielding calls and finalising a public statement about his involvement in the Lionheart consortium (which emerged last week as the preferred bidder to take over Livingston Football Club). He is wearing a smart suit, but with the no-tie, open- necked style of the gadget-toting technology entrepreneur.

Flynn is unrepentant and insists he is quite sane. Of his involvement in the call centre business he says: "My view is that I'm buying when the tide's gone out."

He and business partner Jim Park took over the running of Callpoint Europe in January this year in a deal understood to have been worth (pounds) 700,000. "My biggest problem is to try and change the perception of call centres," he says.

In a typically brash Flynnism when he did a presentation to the Entrepreneurial Exchange conference at Gleneagles on Thursday, Flynn called the last part of his talk, in which he covered his new call centre experience, Cowboys And Indians: "The people that have set the perception of call centres have caused me more problems than the Indians ever will."

Flynn says that the call-centre business has such a poor reputation that parents in Livingston are using it as a spectre to encourage their children to work: "If you don't work hard at school you'll end up working in the Sky call centre."

But, if that attitude can be changed, Flynn passionately believes the sector not only has a present but a very good future as well. "There is more business right now than I can get quality people for," he says.

Flynn is hyper-critical of much of the way the industry is organised: "The wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead."

"Trying to stay where you are by pouring more people in the top than are leaking out the bottom is ridiculous." This means, he says, that his competitors in the industry are constantly having to pay for recruiting and training more people because of the high turnover of staff.

A different business model and more support from government, particularly in taking the risk out of long leases for premises in a business with short contracts, will help to turn the sector around, he believes. He points out that that America is already starting to fight against the threat of losing jobs to the Indian sub-continent by excluding from government tenders any company that is offshoring jobs. Similar measures should be taken here, he argues.

But he believes the tide on the issue is already turning. He says that the question his call-centre staff, who are based in Bath Street in Glasgow, are most often asked is 'Are you in India?'

"I would really like more government help for our industry but only if we earn it in the way we treat people," he says.

Flynn says he is operating a different model for call centres. He pays his employees more than his competitors and charges clients an extra 5%. His way means more staff are retained and he only needs to pay for one round of training, rather than having to continually train new staff because of the constant turnover.

In another approach that will further anger his competitors Flynn is recruiting by actively trying to poach the best staff from his rivals.

He claims this approach is working and says Callpoint, which lost (pounds) 1.5m last year, is now profitable and cash-positive.

"I have had the great experience of telling some customers to get lost - we could not pay people properly and make any money at the rates they were being charged.

"In my view call-centres are the shipyards of our time," Flynn says. "If we give up on them where are we going to get the industries to employ people?"

"When we start talking to customers, we show them how we treat people and how we retain people and we say that's why we're 5% more expensive than the other guys." Flynn and Park believe their approach to the sector will be successful and predict that they will grow by 600 to reach 1000 staff over the year.

But despite his insistence on the importance of paying and treating his staff properly he stresses that he is willing to take the tough decisions. "I'm not a fluffy person, you have to crack a few heads" is how he puts it.

Flynn is aware of the irony of his involvement in the industry considering in previous incarnations he sold the very IP technology that allows call centres to be based offshore.