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!”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here