Scottish entrepreneur Marie Macklin has made the “emotional” decision to step back from her award-winning Halo business hub in her hometown of Kilmarnock, as she looks to raise capital for the next phase of its development.

Ms Macklin developed the Halo project on a site vacated by Diageo following its controversial decision to shut down its Johnnie Walker bottling plant 15 years ago. The finance and property development guru was heavily involved in the campaign to save the plant and hundreds of jobs, but switched her attention to plans to regenerate the site when it became clear the Scotch whisky giant would not be changing its mind.

Ms Macklin negotiated the purchase of the town-centre site over several years and began the gradual process of creating Halo. Today, the 28-acre site includes a sustainable innovation and enterprise centre, with a £95 million masterplan in place to provide more than 200 homes, premises for light industry, and green spaces for community leisure which is forecast to create £200 million of GDP and support 1,500 jobs.

Now Ms Macklin is seeking to pass the project on to new investors.

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She told The Herald: “We have taken it to this stage, and we want to take the capital from that and look now into the next stage, and that is driving entrepreneurship… to create that new economy for our young people. Because for me, it was always about our young folk.

“We could basically sell out what the rest of the masterplan is and take our money [but] that is not what I want to do. I want to now go on to phase two [and] bring in plc to escalate the next phase, which is the sustainable housing phase that we have done all the hard work on over 15 years and got the masterplan in play [and] created the enterprise and innovation hub. [We now want to] take capital out of that site and reinvest it back into the local economy by setting up a community fund for our young people, to help them drive education and entrepreneurship.”

Part of that will involve bringing in growing businesses under the auspices of the new Halo Rockme brand, where they will undertake a 12-month programme and pitch for investment on completion.

Asked if talks had begun over the sale of Halo, Ms Macklin said: “This has been a decision I have thought about for the past six months. And I thought what more can I do to drive this forward really quickly? The next stage is now actively working with our agents and speaking to potential investors or end users.

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“We will be very stringent – we will only work with people of a like mind. We are not in any rush. We do not need to do this by tomorrow, so will sit down with people of a like mind, look at what they are offering [and whether they] are the right fit to drive forward with what we want to achieve.

“We can now open that door to other entrepreneurs, other plc businesses, because we have done the hard work. My team have been the pioneers who went into this no man’s land and created that opportunity. We now have folk knocking on the door who want to be involved that would not have been involved before because it was too high a risk.”

Ms Macklin added: "For me personally it has been a very emotional journey. This is a big decision. It is the right decision. It is about me leaving that legacy. That legacy is there to see just now but what we are now going to do will achieve a bigger legacy and help drive forward a new opportunity for young people under the age of 25."

Ms Macklin, who was brought up in Kilmarnock, said a key ambition of Halo had been to create opportunities for young people in a town which had been badly affected by the closure of several major businesses, including carpet firm Stoddard, railway engineering company Andrew Barclay Sons & Co, and Massey Ferguson tractors. She was keen to stem the decline of the town’s population which was steeper than the Scottish national average, according to an economic report published by East Ayrshire Council at the time of the Johnnie Walker closure.

The report highlighted a lack of high-quality, sustainable premises to persuade businesses to locate in the area, as well as an absence of any accelerator programmes to promote the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It found there were no account management facilities from government agencies for SMEs with under 10 employees, no network of angel or institutional investors, and insufficient conference facilities in the area, Ms Macklin said.

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However, 15 years on, Halo in Kilmarnock is home to PRA Group, the Nasdaq-listed US financial services firm which employs 385 people over two floors at the site, as well as a raft of other tenants  including Anderson Strathern, Nelson Track Solutions , Shire Energy, Scottish Power, Net Zero Nation, Ayrshire Chamber, Pertemps, XLCC, Five Star Global, Clickspur, Pexapark, and Scottish Enterprise.

Overall, the company has hosted around 85 companies, employing 785 people, on a range of packages since its inception.

Other features include the Halo Rockme café and the 15,000 square foot Halo Rockme conference space, which has attracted 345 events to date.

“It’s not a case of if you build, people will come,” Ms Macklin said. “It is a case of, if you offer a full package of measures, on sustainability, on entrepreneurship, driving it through the schools, people will come. Because we have written off our towns and outlying areas for far too long."

Ms Macklin noted: “We had a mass exit going out of Kilmarnock over and above the manufacturing decline. And 5% of the workforce at Diageo [in Kilmarnock] were unskilled. So it was obvious to me when I read the report that, obviously, something drastic had to change. And what we have set out to do is try and flip that and create an economy built around the sustainability measures."

Ms Macklin will now devote her time to franchising the HALO#Rockme initiative, for which she holds the intellectual property and trademark rights, in the UK and the US.

She is also exploring the possibility of making documentaries and writing a book, which promises to be “frank, informative, stimulating and hard-hitting about her life in business, about regeneration, market failure, economic reform, and how she leads from the heart and love of music”.

Ms Macklin is proud of what has been accomplished at Halo, but conceded it should not have taken 15 years to get to this stage, citing the impact of “red tape, planning problems, and funding problems in relation to market-failure sites”.

She said: “As I sit here today, it is still the same, and I now think I have got the opportunity to come out and write the book, do the documentary.”