GLASGOW businessman Gerry Facenna has revealed why he has kept premises in Possilpark, despite being in charge of the world’s biggest provider of disabled access vehicles.

The chairman of Allied Vehicles, said: “I was brought up in Possilpark and, to be honest, it’s the lost village. There are lot of good people there. Most are really genuine, caring about folks more than anywhere else.”

Speaking on the Go Radio Business Show with Hunter & Haughey, Mr Facenna also revealed how he views business growth: “My attitude has always been to follow my gut. People ask me about the strategy and I say, as long as we have competitors out there, there is business to go after.

“The fact we’re number one in the world gives us a lot of strength and buying power with the manufacturers.”

With distributors in Europe, Allied are in talks with a company in America. Meantime, they are enjoying a successful supply initiative for modification equipment with a firm in Mexico.

Looking to future-proof itself, the company recently looked at factories in Poland in case it had to start building for Europe from there. However, he said: “I want to try to keep as many jobs in Scotland as I can. Locally, we’ve 600 employees with probably another 2000 feeding into us. We’ll try to keep them in Scotland, if we can.

“We want to expand and throughout Covid the company’s done really well from that original panic when, you know, it was like: ‘Shut the doors! What do we do?’

“Two weeks after that we had a plan and we started opening up certain bits. Because we look after a lot of government vehicles we had to be operational for them and a lot of our businesses expanded through Covid.”

Asked what lessons he had learned from past setbacks and how these ultimately fed into the success of Allied, he said: “About 30 years ago I decided I was never going to kneel on a bank manager’s carpet again, or a VAT man’s carpet, having gone through all the hassle of that years ago!”