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Significant investment at Gateshead educational recruiters

A specialist educational recruitment agency based in Gateshead has landed £70k investment from the Finance For Business North East Growth Fund.

STC Consortium was set up in 2002 by former teacher Susan Moore, and has previously focused on supplying teachers to the domestic market.

Over the last year, the Gateshead-based firm has been working towards meeting a growing need for English-speaking teachers in South East Asia, and has undertaken two business development and networking missions to Malaysia with the help of UKTI.

These trips enabled STC to build up a network of contacts amongst multi-national corporations, universities, schools and educational decision makers, many of which were looking for a supplier of educational staff for positions right around the world.

To take advantage of these opportunities, the STC management team knew improvements would be required to the firm’s operational and IT infrastructure, and so worked with long-time advisors Baker Tilly to identify the optimum source of outside capital for making this happen.

The investment from the Finance For Business North East Growth Fund, which is administered by regional fund management firm NEL Fund Managers, is being used to introduce the more robust systems needed to help the STC team manage the increase in data that is coming into the firm’s headquarters from around the world.

STC currently employs seven people, but is expecting to grow that number organically as new contracts are fulfilled and incremental business development opportunities arise.

Susan Moore says: “We’ve been trading successfully for more than a decade, but when we took a strategic look at the future direction of the business, it became clear that the international market offered inviting commercial opportunities if we put the infrastructure in place that we needed to address them.

“Working with UKTI and making the effort to visit South East Asia twice has put us ahead of the game – we’re the only firm of our type with an agent on the ground in Malaysia, and the high level contacts that we made during our visits to the country are now actively seeking us out with their business requirements.

“The staff we supply come from both the UK and elsewhere, and we’ve got a substantial forward order book that we can now begin to fulfil thanks to the improved infrastructure and systems that we’ve put in place.

“The structured approach that we’re taking will help us create and sustain new jobs in the North East while maintaining the quality of service that has always been the basis of our success.

“The NEL team believed in us, and truly understood what we were looking to do, which in turn gave us greater confidence in the commercial viability of our plans, and we’re now in great shape to capitalise on all the groundwork we’ve done over the last year.”

Jane Siddle, investment executive at NEL Fund Managers, adds: “STC Consortium have firmly grasped a business opportunity that looks set to change the face of the business, and their commitment and proactivity has helped them establish a leading position in a potentially hugely lucrative marketplace.”

Clare Cowie, executive at Baker Tilly, says: “We have been working closely with STC Consortium to develop its overseas expansion strategy and secure the required funding package. With the funding successfully secured, we look forward to continuing to assist the company in the next phases of its global expansion.”

Aimed at regional businesses which are at a development and growth stage, the Growth Fund forms part of the wider Finance for Business North East Fund.

Managed by North East Finance, it will see £125m of investment capital injected into the region by the European Investment Bank and the European Regional Development Fund 2007-13 over a five year period.

NEL is looking to make around 130 investments over the five-year life span of the Growth Fund, and is actively looking to speak to ambitious north east companies with robust business plans.

For more information about NEL’s investment criteria, visithttp://www.nel.co.uk/ or contact the investment team on 0845 111 1850.

The ERDF 2007-13 programme is bringing over £300m into North East England to support innovation, enterprise and business support. It will help create and safeguard 28,000 new jobs, start 3,000 new businesses and increase the region’s productivity by £1.1bn per annum.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .