If you ever have a conversation with Marie Macklin, the Ayrshire-born property and finance entrepreneur, you are left in no doubt about her motivation.

Ms Macklin has enjoyed a stellar career in business after, by her own admission, finding life less than easy in her school days. But the drive which has characterised her career has been about much more than the pursuit of success for herself.

Around 15 years ago, Ms Macklin was deeply concerned when Scotch whisky giant Diageo announced plans to shut its Johnnie Walker bottling plant in Kilmarnock, putting several hundred jobs at risk. It was the latest in a series of devastating economic blows for the Ayrshire town, which had already been hit by the closure of major operations run by carpet firm Stoddard, railway engineering company Andrew Barclay Sons & Co, and Massey Ferguson, the tractor manufacturer.

Prompted by a desire to rally round her home town, Ms Macklin joined the high-profile campaign to save the Diageo plant. However, when it became clear Diageo was not going to reverse its decision, she began thinking about what could not only be done to replace the jobs destined to be lost, but create opportunities for the town’s younger generation and equip them with the skills required for the economy of tomorrow.

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Ms Macklin was also motivated to address the worrying findings of a report produced by East Ayrshire Council, which highlighted a lack of high-quality, sustainable premises to persuade businesses to locate in the area, and an absence of accelerator programmes to promote the growth of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). There was also little in the way of angel or institutional investors for businesses in the area, the report found.

Thus, the concept for Halo, a regeneration project designed to transform 28 acres of vacant industrial land into a multi-use destination – spanning a business and innovation hub and conference facilities, and plans for hundreds of sustainable homes – was born.

It has not been plain sailing. As Ms Macklin said in an interview with The Herald this week, her plans for Halo have had to overcome a lot of barriers in the last decade-and-a-half, citing “red tape, planning problems, and funding problems in relation to market-failure sites”.

However, there are numerous achievements that she and her colleagues can look back on with pride.

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The town centre site now includes a sustainable innovation and enterprise centre which hosts a broad range of major companies and entrepreneurs. PRA Group, the Nasdaq-listed US financial services firm, employs 385 people over two floors at the site, with other tenants including Anderson Strathern, Nelson Track Solutions, Shire Energy, Scottish Power, Net Zero Nation, Ayrshire Chamber of Commerce, Pertemps, XLCC, Five Star Global, Clickspur, Pexapark, and Scottish Enterprise.

All in all, Halo has played host to some 85 companies, employing 785 people, at various times, while its conference facilities have held 345 events to date.

Ms Macklin deserves enormous praise for her achievements and perseverance. She has responded to the devastation brought by the Johnnie Walker closure and, over the course of 15 years, replaced it with hope and renewal. Hundreds of much-needed jobs have been brought to Kilmarnock as companies have been encouraged to open bases in Halo. But, as Ms Macklin notes, it has not just been a case of “build it and they will come”- the services provided by the business hub have had to be meaningful and at least the equal of the quality of the sustainably built premises.

“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,” she said. “Because we have written off our towns and outlying areas for far too long.”

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Now, Halo stands at the start of a new chapter. As revealed by The Herald on Wednesday, Ms Macklin has made the “emotional” decision to take a step back from the project, and is seeking external investors to drive forward its next phase. That will involve the execution of a £95 million masterplan completed by Ms Macklin and her team, which will provide more than 200 homes, premises for light industry, and green spaces for community leisure. It is forecast the masterplan will generate £200m of gross domestic product and support 1,500 jobs.

Ms Macklin said the decision to step back was not one she reached lightly, but believes it was right for the future of the project.

“This has been a decision I have thought about for the past six months,” she told The Herald. “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.

“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.”

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It was not surprising to hear Ms Macklin say that the process of deciding to “pass on the baton” had been  “emotional”. After 15 years of hard work and no doubt struggle at various times as she worked to bring her vision to reality, it is understandable that the prospect of scaling down her involvement had given her pause for thought.

However, now she has reached the decision to seek new partners to take the project forward, she is entitled to reflect on a job well done.

Not that Ms Macklin, who was awarded a CBE for services to economic regeneration and entrepreneurship in Scotland in 2015, will be ending her association with the project. Far from it. She will now focus on franchising the HALO#Rockme initiative, for which she holds the intellectual property and trademark rights in the UK and US. A documentary and a book about her experiences are also under consideration.